BloomKlein's DOG (Dept. of Graduation)

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Here's a letter from a colleague at Murry Bergtraum High School:

Dear Editors of the New York Times,

re: No Gains by New York Students ... -- NYT 10/14/09 -- I know this is too long but the Times should be immune to sound bites. Your education reporters should really get real and start to address reality and not just what the Bloomberg machine shovels out to them (in spite of the prodigious and corrupting power of his advertising monies).

It is not surprising that a serious, longitudinal observer like Diane Ravitch indicts the Bloom-Kleinberg's cynical and self-serving educational policy (if you keep changing the guidelines you can't be judged on your guidelines) with a pithy and accurate statement like "What this amounts to is a fraud."

Under the watch of these two, the Department of Education (DOE) has morphed into the Department of Graduation (DOG). As always with political entities the emphasis falls on the last word in the departmental aim: Graduation trumps Education. The Bloom-Kleinberg mob have altered their original lip-service concerns about the education of our students into a more statistically convenient focus upon the graduation of students. They have very little concern about the education of our students if it gets int he way of the graduation rate of students. They don't really care about educating; they mostly care about graduating.

Let's face facts. If we are talking about college bound students with a hope of graduating within 4-6 years, only about 30% of them make it. The "it" here being the track toward a reasonable stability in their life styles and/or upward mobility. So it doesn't really matter if the high school graduation rate is 90%, 70%, or 50%, because only about 30% will make it through college anyway. The current mania about graduation rates is a result of NAFTA and the "global economy." We no longer have abundant unskilled and marginally skilled jobs to employ enough of the roughly 70% of society who cannot cut it and get through college. There simply are no jobs for about 40% to 50% of high school graduates other than those in the food service and retail industries. It's all about the politics of denial.

High School as presently constituted and funded is totally inadequate and unprepared to address these issues.

Allow me re-phrase Ms. Ravitch according to my take on the situation: What all of this bogus focus on graduation rates amounts to is a defrauding of the middle class and a power grab by the entitled oligarchs in allocating scare resources to the advantage of their entitled spawn.

The oligarchs gravitate toward the limited space in charter schools, or more traditionally (like Mayor Bllomberg, and ironically, Al Sharpton as well) isolate their spawn from the "riff-raff" in private schools.

However anyone cares to slice it we are engaged in class warfare for scant and diminishing resources.

Basically under the likes of a Bloom-Kleinberg DOG (Departmant of GRADUATION, in case you have forgotten the sole focus), we slap a sham sheep-skin (dumbed so down to insure that all can leap a hurdle set so low as to be almost ground level) into the hands of an untutored neophyte and pretend that it is his/her fault if he/she can't make it the Social Darwinian Jungle out there. How short-term cynical and politically self-serving is that?

Remember, many of you, so many, voted for this ticket once or twice; but need we deny our own self interests a third time before the cock crows?

In the words of Diane Ravitch, "What this amounts to is a fraud."

So many frauds in so many ways. Ineptitude attempts to hide its mistakes by constantly altering its stated conceits.

-- Wil Hallgren

Wil Hallgren is an English teacher and Poet.

School "Progress" Reports: An Excuse to Wreak Havoc

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Here are some interesting numbers I was able to crunch out of the Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein's school "progress" reports for NYC schools:

80% of the schools that got an F or D on the progress report were rated "profecient" or better on the quality review.

37% of the schools rated unsatisfactory in the quality reviews got an A or B on the progress report.

10.5% of “proficient” or better schools got an F or D.

This only highlights the unreliable nature of using "improvement in test scores" as the sole measure of a school's performance. With the mayor threatening to fire principals and breakup schools over this it shows just how loose and free-wheeling these guys are.

And what of the children of the failing schools who are doing well? It can only diminish their accomplishments. Where are they going to go when there's no room at the inn? Our school is already at 130% capacity.

The UFT needs to fight the breakup of any more schools. Maybe it's Bloomberg's excuse to wreak more havoc (ala The Shock Doctrine of culture change, brilliantly illustrated in the book of the same name by Naomi Klein- I hope no relation to you know who.). After all, too many of our kids' parents are oblivous. All we have are pundits and the few good parent organizations out there fighting.

A Primer on Mayoral Control of NYC Schools– Where Dictatorship Trumps Democracy

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In NYC it has been a corporate-style takeover; with wiping the slate clean (of personnel they could fire) and starting from scratch. It was recless without regard for human relations, insitutuional memory and professional communities long in place. If you were part of the past system you had nothing to offer and needed to be expunged. This is Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klien's "Zero Year".

Chancellor Joel Klein also used public relations techniques with those he couldn’t outright dismiss. He visited our school, Murry Bergtraum High School, shortly after regime change in 2001 with a “town hall meeting”. It was run Bush-style, no questions taking by the Chancellor; one-way communications. Then they broke up the meeting into focus groups of parents and teachers. In these breakout sessions DOE underlings listened and took notes like they were interested in what we had to say. Nothing ever came of our comments; no analysis or reporting back. It’s like they took our feedback, and with our backs turned, chucked it into the garbage.

Things have been run that way ever since. Principals now look over their shoulders in fear, as managers do in the corporate world, for who is going to get the axe next. Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Klein have a mechanistic and reductionist view of education. That is, you can micromanage and script teachers, whose measure of success can totally be assessed by the standardized test scores of their students. There has been mass demoralization of educators, while parental involvement in activities in our school has plummeted.

Such management style comes from the Theory X view of human motivation you will find in the organizational theory literature. In the early 20th century a social scientist named Taylor developed a theory premised on the belief that workers were basically lazy and stupid. They responded only to external motivations- rewards or punishments. Hence we have the mayor’s “merit pay” for teachers and “accountability” for students that makes learning not fun but serious business, supporting the “feel bad” education environment. Why else would Klein recruit the likes of Jack Welch, the former CEO of General Electric, who boasted of creating a climate of fear for his employees, to set the standard of leadership for the DOE’s principals' institute? Mayor Bloomberg demonstrated just how committed he was to an openness to ideas by creating the Panel for Educational Policy, only to fire some of them when they were going to rule against his anti-social promotion scheme. That’s the kind of bureaucracy management we used to see in the old Soviet Union and dovetails with the poisonous pedagogy of the No Child Left Behind Act. At least with the old Board of Education, there were some members you could reach and convince to advocate for your school or a special program you were involved in. They didn't view veteran teachers a pariahs but conveyers of experience and institutional memory. Now there’s an unaccountable corporate bureaucracy in the DOE, wanting to implement the Zero Year.

On the other side of the spectrum Theory Y states that people have an inherent tendency for growth and creativity. This theory came out of the humanist school of psychology. It’s the premise this teacher operates on in his class. Democracy is taught as a value in and of itself; that the exercise of freedom allows one to create meaning and engage in and shape societal change as a natural right. The primary accountability is to oneself, premised on the view of Socrates that, “The unexamined life is not worth living.”

Only an educational system true to the ideals of democracy, where individuals take responsibility for their freedom; to learn what they will and how they will, with the guidance of a teacher who has only the student’s interest in mind, not a salary increase, can serve a free society. Such a system will put the students, teachers, parents and local administrators as equal partners in the driver’s seat with the standards of success to be determined by and for the these stakeholders.

Albert Einstein, a charter member of the American Federation of Teachers, said, “It’s the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.” Einstein had the audacity to consider that the motivation for learning could be intrinsic and that teachers should become expert at nudging it and creating opportunities for such joy to come alive and grow. Our educational systems must become democratic and not remain bureaucratic to nurture such joy. Corporate dictatorial bureaucracy is to joy of learning as a straight jacket is to dance. Bloomberg's experiement is a failure, it's time for something different.

John Elfrank-Dana
UFT Chapter Leader
Murry Bergtraum High School
http://www.elfrank.com/