Teachers Talk Back

SUPER SAD STORY: NOT THE NOVEL

2012-01-03T13:45:00.000-08:00

It's 8:30 AM in a middle school classroom on in the South Bronx, about 5 blocks from where I spent my teenage years. "R", a 2nd year TFA and I are in her classroom talking about her plans for the next period. We expect the kids to come up any second and get started. Suddenly, two kids push open the doors panting, trying to catch their breath. "R" and I, figuring they were just being normal unruly 13 year olds, ask why they were running. They tell us of the shooting half a block away where kids congregate before they enter the school. Then they sit and a couple of minutes later the class begins. After class "R" tells me how scared she was and how her heart was racing uncontrollably for the entire class while she is amazed at her kids calmness after the fact.
"R" is from upper middle class suburban South Florida.
“I don’t think of my students as kids. I have to remind myself everyday that they are only 12 and 13. They seem to me to be 15, 16, or maybe even 17. They keep telling me they are from the “ghetto,” the “South Side.” I am realizing more and more that they have seen more in their short lives than I have seen in twice as long and in a million more places." (M in Philly)

“One morning in the second month of school a fifth-grade girl is outside my classroom crying with family members: her big brother was shot by the police a few hours before. I was just out of “Institute” and I had no bag of tricks. How did I know what to do?” (J)

As
teachers (trainers) we care about "R", "M", and "J" and their kids. The TFAs I, Barbara Veltri (author of "Learning on Other People's Kids: Becoming a Teach For America Teacher"), and other teacher trainers work with are our kids. Their students are like our grandkids. We care about them all.
Theirs are human stories that need telling. They are faced with poor working conditions that need fixing. They are being sent to "save" poor kids from bad situations but they, themselves, face school based realities that TFA never properly trains them to face. Often their schools are chaotic, old buildings led by bad supervisors and fearful teachers. They are misused, misplaced, and are under inappropriate pressures. They don't need saving. They need proper training and supervision.
They (in places like NYC) also live above their means and are dependent on TFA stipends. They commute long distances and have little time for life.
Most of them are nice upper middle class suburban white kids with no bicultural literacy. They don't speak street. TFA's diversity training is a series of talking heads. They are given TFA mantras instead of real solutions. They, and the world, are told they are the solution to the problems facing education. TFA propaganda is all people see. TFA is the Emperor with no clothes.
"And it’s summer school. So, here we were overdressed, getting on yellow school busses and going into these neighborhoods where the kids were barely dressed. How odd did we look? We had no idea what we were doing. We couldn’t even connect to parents because we looked like.… They must have thought we were dumb. You know, what are you doing wearing nylons in the middle of the summer in Houston? They [TFA] put us in a bad position to begin with. We looked like little kids trying to play dress up. Really, we looked like we were out of our element." (Nan)

We need to say, "Uhhhh.. Your highness...excuse me, but!"
They are told fairy tales about their superiority. They are told to think like a "corps" member. They are sent into the trenches more like the gallant soldiers at Gallipoli than novice teachers. They are given empty slogans, not practical wisdom. They are forced into school committee work, TFA propaganda meetings, and graduate courses they have to take before they have their feet firmly planted in teaching. They have little time to properly plan, create, grade, and do all the social work teaching necessitates. Like those gallant Australians, they were recruited under false pretenses, are under heavy fire, overexposed, and overextended.
TFA mostly takes successful young college grads with no experience, and most often no desire to teach long term, who learned to succeed in their middle class suburban public or private schools. They followed the rules. They listened to authorities and practiced what their tutors gave them to do on their APs SATs. They are what we like to call our best and brightest. However, most lack the practical wisdom or street smarts to have a good chance of success where they are placed. They are taught by TFA to do exactly what they have done in their old environments. Follow. Stay in line. And specifically, to think like a corps member. Be formulaic. Do not be like those older teachers: wise, creative, independent, and spontaneous. They are taught to tell not ask. Their packaged lesson plans are "fool proof"...teacher proof.
Barbara and I propose a film to expose the public and policy makers to another inconvenient truth, this time behind TFA and it's inadequate version of teacher training.
The purpose of this film is not simply to shed light on the underside of TFA in real schools but to face real questions in education.
One of the biggest questions is teacher education and training. Teaching must be treated as a worthy profession as it is in Finland to develop an equitable education system.
This film is about how poorly we are doing in providing the kind of teaching professionals who are in teaching as a career, not a "community service project".
The purpose of this film is to show the dichotomies between TFA trained teaching and successful teaching. It is to show the error in the thought that teachers are made, not born: that any smart person can teach. Talented teachers can be better trained to be great. Untalented teachers can be trained to be mediocre or merely competent at best.
The purpose is to show how the concepts of Frederick Winslow Taylor's "Scientific Management" of the early 20th century are being used again in the 21st in a modern version of corporate control over labor. Now as then, rich and powerful leaders go to private schools and are taught by powerfully creative teachers, while the millions of poor toiling (future) workers are taught by step-by-step automatons who pass down and enforce the menial skills "needed" by the "unthinking" masses.
Its purpose is to see behind the banners and posters hung in schools. It is to see another dichotomy. Poor kids are being told they are being taught to be future leaders. The reality is that how they are being taught does no such thing.
Ultimately it is about how well we can educate all of our kids, regardless of their socioeconomic strata, if we stop following.

Please support us.

BERNIE #6: I Might Be Wrong, But…

2011-11-27T07:46:00.000-08:00

I tell my students, if you are going to lie, (and of course, you shouldn’t), never lie to people who know you are lying. In other words, if I am looking at you talking and I ask you if you are talking, don’t tell me you aren’t talking. I know you are talking – I see you! This is analogous to the DOE’s treatment of ATR’s. Their treatment of ATR’s is discriminatory, dehumanizing, unprofessional and impractical. There- somebody’s said it!
The DOE demands professionalism of its teachers, and that’s not a problem. The problem is that when you ask someone to be a professional, you need to do the other part of that equation- the part where you treat the person as a professional. No professional treatment I know of embraces or espouses discrimination, lack of professionalism and impracticality.
From the very beginning of Mayor Bloomberg’s “reign”, he has treated teachers in general, and ATR’s specifically, with disrespect. At NO time did he ever meet with teachers, the people he was going to lead, (like many, if not most CEO’s do in the “business model”), -not the UFT or their representatives- the teachers- the people he has vilified and demonized, the people whose work ethics he has questioned, the people he has called failures and has used the word inept to describe them- those people. At no time did he even attempt to access their knowledge – if he had, he would have know long before his statistics in 2011 informed of the fact that college is NOT for everybody, that while the opportunity and the option and the access to attend college needs to be available to everyone, not everyone should go or needs to go to college. Even in the world we live in today, we still need computer technicians, auto mechanics, pilots, etc. (Although I guess it’s a lot easier to vilify and dehumanize people when you don’t talk to them so you don’t have to see them as people).
Many of the ATR’s are people with over two decades of teaching experience and they are in their late forties and older. They are the only people being shuttled and shuffled back and forth from “pillar to post” on a weekly basis, with little or no concern for their ability to get to the site to which they are being sent or that person’s individual circumstance. (I would think that since they are ATR’s through no fault of their own, and since the DOE has taken it on as its responsibility to close schools and thereby create these hardships, it would only be logical that some such consideration be afforded to the people they have inconvenienced and taken out of their jobs).
For example, suppose the school to which you use public transportation. Every week you are assigned to a different school. What if it takes you two or three fares and two hours to get to your site? You didn’t pick this site, but the cost of traveling to it is being imposed upon you. What if instead of leaving your house at 6:30 AM like you usually do, now you have to leave at 5AM or 5:30 AM. What if you have children to get ready for school or take the school? Did anyone think of that? Did anybody care? Are you getting the picture? Are you seeing how this is an arbitrary and capricious decision, made with little or no humanity or concern for others? Clearly, this behavior on the part of the DOE is unprofessional, dehumanizing, discriminatory and impractical. In fact, since many of the ATR’s are not only older, more experienced and make the most money, they are minorities as well, the discrimination exists on two fronts!
Since we live in the technological age, (and the mayor spent millions, and maybe billions to computerize the DOE), how hard would it be to assign all those who live in Manhattan to Manhattan schools, those who live in Queens to Queens schools, etc. The mayor will tell you that the ATR plan is a good one, that it limits the sites to which you can be assigned only to schools in the district in which you originally worked. Unfortunately, this is not true. I spent my career in district 8 In the Bronx, but of the 10 or 11 schools to which I’ve been assigned, only two have been in my former district
Since we live in the technological age and we are supposedly following the business model, which presumably is designed to be both practical and cost efficient, wouldn’t it make a lot of sense to do the following? Since there are so many school buildings with four or five or even eight schools in one place, wouldn’t it make sense to assign ATR’s to one building and simply rotate them between the schools in that building on a weekly basis as needed? While you’d still be moved from one school to another, you’d have a better chance of developing some sort of consistency as it pertains to recognition as a member of the building’s community. While you, (and the mayor), may not like this plan, one thing is indubitably certain- their current plan is not working! Anyone you talk to, from taxi drivers to students who walk the halls and do not attend classes, will tell you that the way ATR’s are being used makes no sense. (In fact, it seems like the only people who don’t understand this are the folks at the DOE- the people who are supposed to know!).

Like lying to people who already know you are lying, the DOE claims this system will help ATR’s to find permanent employment and thereby help schools, but the truth of the matter is no one hires anyone he/she has just met for a week, who he/she has never had the opportunity to see teach a lesson or sit down to speak with. Under the current system, by the time you get your bearings about where everything is in the building you are in, or get a key to the bathroom, you are moved to another school. Not only is this inconsiderate of and disrespectful to people who have given one-fourth or one-third of their lives to the teaching profession, it is in no way pedagogically sound. In no way does it provide the consistency that students require in order to succeed.

I teach students not to criticize a situation unless they can provide a solution or an alternative to the issue, so here is mine. What the DOE is saying to the public about the treatment of ATR’s sounds good, but it’s saying one thing and doing something completely different. There is no question that the actions of the DOE are purposefully designed to harass, humiliate, debase, dehumanize and annoy ATR’s. The mayor and his chancellors would deny this, but if you look at how they are being treated, it is crystal clear that their treatment is unprofessional. It is clear that with the technology the DOE has on hand a much more human and practical program could have been devised -if the intention was to treat ATR’s as teachers, experienced professionals with much to offer. Given this did not occur, the only logical conclusion is that the latter solution was never intended. When you move people like cattle form one place to another, you take the human element out of the equation. You dehumanize them; they become little more than things to be placed, like so many Lego blocks, instead of thinking, rational experienced educators. To treat them in this way cannot be an accident – it has to be deliberate, planned, intended. It has to be something you designed for a specific purpose, something you set out to do, as opposed to something that just happened to occur. Whether it was to break the union or to just get rid of people who knew what life was like B.B. 9before Bloomberg) so no one could question or challenge him, it is obvious that the plan was to eliminate those who have fallen into the ATR category.

There is no defense fore dehumanization. The mayor and others argue that what is being done is not only not dehumanization, but that it is being done for the “greater good”. What greater good? A 20% college acceptance rate – a rate lower than many of the schools the DOE closed and labeled as failing? The graduation of thousands of students who cannot read or write on a college level despite the fact they received 80’s and 90’s in their classes, in schools created and evaluated by the mayor or by and through his vision, a rating system that rated top schools like Bronx Science and Stuyvesant with F’s and rated others with A’s that were closed by him three or four years later, ratings that changed all the rules to tilt the scales in his favor, and still failed to win him the game? The closing of schools the mayor and his administration opened in order to replace the dropout mills, which were eventually closed by the same mayor who created them and claimed they were the answers and they had the answers to turn things around? What greater good? The principal’s institutes that “created” principals who were CEO’s and managers, but NOT educators, who could neither improve or enhance the education and/or the quality of those assistant principals who worked for them, nor improve or enhance the quality of the skills of those teachers who were sent to work in their schools? How was this a cogent, viable, responsible, professional, logical approach to the problems we are facing in education today? Let ask a question? Would any firm on Wall Street hire a fireman who knew nothing about investment banking or derivatives to serve as its CEO? Would you? Do they have a CEO institute for General Electric? Morgan Stanley? Chase? Citibank? Exxon? The aforementioned businesses are Fortune 500 companies and all of them, I presume, use the business model, so the question is, if we are following the business model, why are we doing it differently? If we are not using the business model, that’s okay, but then we need to stop saying it’s the business model!

Like I tell my students, if you’re going to lie, never lie to people who know you are lying. I’d pass this piece of advice on to the mayor and those who, like him, keep trying to tell us that we see what we see. I see a system that seeks to separate, not unite, that seeks to provide grades, to emphasize tests rather than to teach skills such as thinking and writing I see a system that can’t possibly work because the people who can make it work are being disenfranchised, dehumanized. Discriminated against and treated unprofessionally. I see a system that discriminates not only against age, experience and maturity, but also against students who are in the lowest third. I see a system that says that everybody is the same- that they all HAVE to attend college, when the reality is that one-size does not now, nor has it ever- fit all. (See Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and high school dropout Sam Walton!).

Maybe I’m wrong, but this is no way to operate or correct an educational system. When you are dealing with lives, you need to be sure; your plan has to work. It is clear, even by its own statistics, that what the DOE is doing simply isn’t working. You can spin it, “byte” it or flat out lie- but that won’t make it work
Part of who I am and who I became as a teacher, was nurtured and developed by my parents, brother, (a teacher), my colleagues and my supervisors. All of them contributed, each and every one of them added something to the mix.

If I were a betting I’d bet a lot of money that people who had done this job for twenty years or more, people who had had success with thousands of students and thousands of graduates, just might know something. If I was betting, and I wanted to win, I’d ask them. Maybe they couldn’t all help me, but somewhere in that group there are centuries of knowledge and I’d want to tap into and utilize that knowledge.

But then, that’s just me.

Bernie....#5

2011-11-11T11:24:00.001-08:00

The current trend in education is not living up to its “hype”. The rhetoric is powerful, and it sounds good, especially in sound bytes, but like the phone commercial says on television, “It makes sense if you don’t think about it.” Think about it. In New York City, the graduation rate is “higher than it’s ever been”, but the dropout rate for the first year in college at CUNY schools compared to the high school graduation rates are higher than they’ve ever been , too. Advocates for the reform of public education, specifically in New York City with people like Joel Klein and Dennis Walcott, owe their foundations for success to the very system they claim is irreparably broken. That’s funny because it worked pretty damned well for them WITH LIFO, with tenure, with seniority, with appreciation for what experience can add to the educational arena, with no charter schools or four to eight schools jammed into one building.
Look at the idea of charter schools. Ignore the fact that for one dollar they can “hijack” space in already space challenged venues, ignore the fact they can choose only the best and the brightest, ignore the fact that although they are public schools, they receive greater funding and have access to better resources than other schools. Look instead at the number of students they turn away. The purpose of public school is, after all, to include, not exclude, to provide access to education, not to limit that access. Here’s something else to think about. If, as the experts claim, charter schools have the “formula” for educational success, we would all best be served by those schools “saving” the students who are the most challenged educationally: the lowest third, the ELL students and the special needs students. Why are the charter schools accepting only those students who would probably be successful with mediocre teachers or no teachers at all?
Why are students chosen by lottery, where there are so very few winners and so many “losers”? Here’s another thing to consider. If, as the educational reformers claim, education is at a higher level today than it has ever been, why are AP classes, honors classes and challenging classes such as trigonometry, calculus, physics, (and in some cases, foreign languages) form this reform’s “educational plate”? When I attended a New York City high school in the 70’s, those classes existed, and in 2009, when the school I had worked at for 35 years was closed for being a “failing school” in its final year, (and had throughout the thirty five years), offered these types of classes. Let me get this right. My school was bad, so it was closed, but it had these classes. Newer, smaller schools are better, but they lack these courses. The rhetoric says closing bad/failing schools says money and suggests that simply by closing a failing school failure will disappear. Sounds good, but the fact is the only way to get rid of failure is to identify the cause of failure and come up with a plan to address it.
As a basketball coach, when I realized my team wasn’t going to score a lot of points, I taught my players to play tough defense which required their opponents to work harder and use more time on the clock. That plan, along with working hard to limit the number of rebounds of the opposing team, limited the number of times the opposing team touched the ball, which in turn, limited the number of points scored by the opposing team. I didn’t “close” my team or shut it down. I identified the problem, created a plan to address it and executed that plan. It is important to note here that while the plan was a good plan, in order for it to work, the players had to “buy into it.”
Closing schools isn’t a plan, getting rid of teachers with seniority or getting rid of tenure, is not a plan, creating a cookie cutter, one-size fits all system in which college is the only option, then not funding that system adequately, is not a plan. Plating with statistics you spout and using “rubrics” even mathematics cannot figure out in order to obfuscate examination and analysis, is not a plan. Treating the education of children as if they were nuts or blueberries on a conveyor belt is not a plan. Ignoring the knowledge, wisdom and success of proven educators and listening instead to business people, theorists and educrats, is not a plan. I have spent thirty-five years teaching English and I dare say, I have won more than I have lost. I wasn’t perfect, the system wasn’t perfect, but people graduated, people learned and people graduated. Students I taught became teachers, doctors, college admission officers, lawyers, Wall Street workers, professional athletes, assistant principals, consultants to the DOE, surgeons, West Point graduates, service men or women, civil servants, responsible members of society and parents. Obviously, not everyone succeeded. No system will ever ensure that, but no one can refute the fact that these people succeeded and they succeeded without the “reforms and the small schools and the charter schools and the demonization and the vilification of teachers.
It was not easy, but when teachers worked hard and when students “bought into the plan”, and parents supported schools and others who may have meant well, but realized if they could not lead or follow, they had to get out of the way got out of the way, it worked. I know it worked because I not only saw it work in the lives of my students when I and my colleagues taught, I saw it work in my life and the lives of my brothers and sisters, and cousins and uncles and aunts, and nieces, and nephews, and colleagues. I had the privilege and the opportunity to see it work with, as well as in, the lives of people of people like President Barack Obama, his wife, former congresswoman Shirley Chisholm, current chancellor of New York City schools, Dennis Walcott, former chancellor Joel Klein, Denzel Washington and a whole host of others.
Nothing is perfect, and anything can be improved and bettered, but simply making changes or saying the changes are making things better, doesn’t make things better. I taught, and continue to teach my students, they have a responsibility for their own education and their lives, and I like to think that when you look at those who have graduated from the school where I spent three decades teaching, (along with my colleagues), even though we weren’t perfect and the system didn’t work perfectly, we succeeded.

STORIES FROM MY FRIEND BERNIE #4

2011-11-11T11:19:00.000-08:00

Sojourner Truth said, “It is the mind that makes the body. This concept is applicable in just about any area. Even in law enforcement when you want to destroy a criminal organization, you don’t worry about its soldiers or followers, you take down the boss, the head, the “brain”. If she is right, and I believe she is, then we’ve got a big problem. That problem is that “education” today isn’t spending a lot of time on the development of the mind. There is very little examination or analysis (better known as thinking). Lessons are designed to fit into ten minute “bytes” in which very little, (if anything at all), can occur. Don’t believe me, let’s look at the 2008 presidential campaign. Throughout the campaign, McCain and Palin billed themselves as “the candidates of change”. When pressed on this issue in debates with Biden, she’d preface her remarks to Biden and the audience by saying that there was no need to talk about the past if you are about the idea of change. With all of the coverage of the campaigns by the campaigns by talking heads and political experts, not one of them examined, (thought about), the inanity of her statement. Not one of them made the point that, in fact, there can be no change without the past. Of necessity, whenever change occurs, something different is occurring now than whatever it was that occurred before –that would be the past! In addition to the previous point, here’s another point to consider (think about). How can anyone identify or tell that change is taking place without any knowledge of what had previously occurred?
Perhaps this “criticism” is picayune or unimportant, but I think it speaks to the issue loudly and clearly that analysis and examination are not seen as important or vital to the society at large and to education specifically. It was important to Thomas Jefferson who contended that in order to have a successful and a strong democracy, the electorate had to be educated. I didn’t live in the time period of Jefferson, but given his potency as a writer and speaker, as well as the fact that he was quite a philosopher, it is safe to infer that Jefferson’s use of the word education includes examination and analysis.
The present day concept of education as a test driven, statistics based situation fails to do what education is supposed to do. Cornell West, the preeminent scholar, speaks of paideia when he speaks of education. To me, paideia is the blueprint for education’s role, for education’s purpose is not only to instruct (so tests can be passed), it is also to inspire, to drive, to challenge, to ask one to reach for his/her best and then to pour that best back into the society. Passing tests and amassing knowledge is only a part of education’s role or purpose.
This may be news to business people, politicians or the “experts” who believe that everything can be quantified by some percentage or number, but educators know this fact. Marva Collins, Mary McLeod Bethune, Benjamin Mays, Dr. Lorraine Monroe, Frank Mickens, Joe Clark, Professor Fred Bornhauser, Harold Wright, Harold Keller, Jr. and a long list of other educators I have had the privilege to work with throughout my career know that education is much more than just a grade or passing tests. They understand that the ability think, to weigh ideas that are different, to break them down, to explain them or add to them, to inspire , to challenge, to ask someone to rise higher than he/she ever thought he/she could rise is the what education’s role must be if education is to work and succeed.
Very simply put, until and unless we return to Sojourner Truth’s axiom as it pertains to education, nothing else we do, no other configuration we create, no other philosophy we embrace, (i.e. smaller schools, charter schools, horseshoe shaped classrooms, etc), will allow education to do what it was designed to do- create analytical, incisive people who can think for themselves and who can improve their society through the utilization of that ability.

STORIES FROM MY FRIEND BERNIE #3

2011-11-11T11:17:00.000-08:00

Rev. Dr. Barbara Austin Lucas often invokes renowned sociologist Sarah Lawrence Lightfoot when she discusses the relationship educators must have with their charges. Lightfoot said, “You can’t educate anyone unless you can see your future in their eyes.” This means there has to be some connection, some investment, some sense that your future’s success is tied inextricably to the success or failure of the person sitting before you. That is a powerful statement, but more importantly, it is a true statement. You can’t teach “at a distance”. You have to be in the trenches, with your sleeves rolled up, not standing on the sidelines pointing out every mistake or theorizing about what might work. You’ve got to be a problem solver in addition to being the problem finder.

Any successful reform or change, particularly as it pertains to education, must have some sense of humanity, some sense of connection one to the other if it is to work. From where I am sitting, the educational reforms are lacking in this element. You gotta love the rhetoric; “No Child Left Behind”, “Children First”, “Rigor”, “Students First”- problem is, it’s only rhetoric. It has no humanity, it has no soul. As a poet, (and I am sure musicians and artists would agree), when I write, if the words have no humanity, nothing to connect the reader to the experience being captured on the paper, then the words are just words- they do not move or inspire, they just sit on the page. The same is true in education. If the changes or the words are just about making the numbers look good or making them fit a particular bottom line or paradigm, then they are devoid of the “connective tissue” that makes them more than just changes or catchy phrases. Many of the reformers’ children do not attend public schools, (and if they do, they do not attend those that are ravaged by the rhetoric driven reforms), many of them apparently did not attend public schools, (or have forgotten that those schools gave them the foundation to be where they are today), many, if not all of them, do not value or respect public schools, nor do they believe in, trust or respect public schools, public school students or those who work in the public schools.

I have always believed in public schools and their power to transform lives, and when it came time to put my money where my mouth was as it pertained to that belief, instead of choosing to enter a career that would have garnered millions of dollars for me, I, like a lot of others who had the same belief), became a teacher. Where would President Barack Obama or Colin Powell have been without a public school education? What about Barbara Streisand, or Sandy Koufax, or Al Davis? Or James Baldwin, or Garry Marshall, or Dr. Ben Carson, or the young men from Newark who wrote The Pact, or former New York City schools chancellors Harold Levy and Joel Klein, or Mets owner Fred Wilpon? Oh and these people, (and many more such as my brothers and sisters, many of my friends and many of the people I taught and worked with over the course of my thirty plus years career), attended public schools long before all of the reforms

and the rhetoric of reform. If the reforms and the rhetoric are so vital and necessary, if schools were such failures, how did any of these people even survive, forget become successful?

One thing I learned as a coach is that you have to trust your players. You have to believe they can do what you need done. If you trust them and believe in them, there is nothing they will not do for you. If you don’t trust them and believe in them, you won’t get anything from them at all. Teaching works the same way. If you believe in and trust the students you teach, most of the time, they’ll “play hard” for you. If you don’t, they will give you nothing. The New York City DOE and many of the other reformers do not value, trust respect or believe in either the schools or the students who attend them. I have always believed in and trusted the students I taught, even when they did not believe in or trust themselves), until and unless they gave me a reason not to, (which happened from time to time if we are being honest).

You can’t successfully reform education unless there’s some value placed upon it, and you can’t value anything you don’t believe in or respect, anything that is devoid of a “connection” to you, that if it fails, it weakens or hurts you, too. You can’t reform from the outside. You have to get in and move the rocks and the boulders, too. You have to be willing to do some of the heavy lifting and not just stand on the sidelines and tell everybody elsewhere to move things.

I know that someone reading this right now is saying, “This is just the rantings of a bitter, burned out, should-have-been-retired-years-ago-don’t-wanna-teach-no-more-teacher.” If the person thinking that is you, let’s take a little test. Remember science class when you were in school? Remember the litmus test?
That was the test where you took a coated strip and touched it to a liquid to test for the presence of acid and if the strip turned a certain color, that told you acid was present. Well, for me, this issue has a litmus test, too. For me the litmus test is the answer to this question- “Which one of the reformers would send their children to the schools their reforms have created?” Which one of them would send their children to a school that housed 6-8 different schools, with 6-8 different philosophies, that shared one library, auditorium, gymnasium, (that is if they have a gymnasium or library), that promote separation rather than collaboration, (by virtue of the fact that each school inside of each building is encouraged to “brand” its space), that have principals who cannot train teachers or teach them to become better teachers because they have taught only 2-3 years, (if they have taught at all), that have teachers who are only in teaching because the dot com companies bottomed out or Wall street collapsed, or schools that focus only on students passing tests rather than the students learning to analyze and critique philosophies and concepts, and challenge themselves, expect more of themselves, or schools that do not offer students

challenging, competitive classes such as AP classes, honors classes, calculus, physics, trigonometry, etc., (although those same students are supposedly
receiving “a world class education”), or schools that use technology as a solution rather as a tool to help students to succeed, or eschew the use of experience and experienced teachers whose methods and philosophies have been tried and tested? I am certain beyond any doubt; the answer will be “No.”

To me, if you would not be willing to trust this type of school/reform with your child/children, it is criminal to create schools with these elements/constructions for other children. It’s like you inviting me over to your house for dinner, you cooking all of the food, preparing a heaping plate of food for me and then refusing to eat the food you are offering me to eat. Somehow, that’s just plain wrong.

As a teacher, I have always taught my students the same way I’d want my children or my nieces or nephews or godchildren to be taught I’d want my nieces and my nephews or my children or godchildren to have teachers who are diligent and who teach them to analyze, think for themselves, to challenge themselves, to expect more of themselves. That is exactly what I have tried to do in every class I have taught for over three decades. For me this is the school’s role and this is the purpose of education.

STORIES FROM MY FRIEND BERNIE #2

2011-11-11T11:15:00.000-08:00

Frederick Douglass said, “Power concedes nothing without demand; it never has and it never will.” Douglass also said, “If there is no struggle, there is no progress.” While his statements were meant more for the sociopolitical arena as it pertains to the responsibility of the disenfranchised to help themselves instead of simply waiting to be saved or rescued, it is most certainly appropriate as it pertains to students in the educational arena. While the system, schools and even some teachers may not be serving students as fully as they should be, that does NOT excuse students from applying Douglass’ wisdom.

In the first quote, Douglass states that power won’t just do what is right or just- justice must be demanded. I like to tell my students that people don’t accumulate power to give it away or share it with others. One must demand that power utilize its power responsibly and fairly. This same attitude must be displayed by students in their educational walk. I tell my students they have a responsibility to and a role to play in their educations. Just like every player on a team has a job or role, so, too, does EVERY student have a role or a part to play in his/her own education? That means that instead of saying, “Yay”, or “Okay” when a teacher tells you there is no homework, the student has to request an assignment. It means that instead of accepting a teacher’s statement that you did a good job or that you did all right because you passed with a 65, the STUDENT must learn to ask for extra help to raise that 65 to an 80nor 90. It means that instead of asking for a second, third or fourth chance to pass, or some “package” that will allow the student to make up work he or she CHOSE not to do, the student MUST begin to DEMAND his/her best effort from him/herself the FIRST time.

The second quote is also applicable to students and their educations. Progress doesn’t just happen in anything. From Blacks escaping slavery, to gaining the right to vote or to enjoy equal access to education, to the first airplane flight, to the first man on the moon, to the first African American president of the United States, progress didn’t just happen. Death, failure, and disappointment had to be overcome for progress to occur. You can change the names of schools, fight over charter or non- charter schools being better or worse, add pages and pages to the evaluation process to make the acquisition of tenure more difficult, close schools or work like hell and disenfranchise teachers with seniority and experience, but I assure you that nothing you do will ensure progress until and unless STUDENTS are willing to struggle, to work to acquire their educations. Period. For like progress, education doesn’t just happen. You don’t just waltz into a classroom, sit down and “Presto Change-o” education happens! You have to do something, you have to fight for what you want to know, you have to struggle. No matter what you want to accomplish, if you want to move forward, it’s going to take work, it’s going to take struggle.

Douglass’ statements are most certainly appropriate and pertinent to the sociopolitical arena, but its pertinence is NOT exclusive to that area. In fact his statements can apply to everything from helping the disenfranchised to become enfranchised to winning a championship and everything in between, and one of those in between places is the role students MUST play in acquiring their educations.

Inspired by Gil Noble and Adelaide Sanford on the “Like It Is” program
re-aired August 7, 2011.

Stories from my Friend Bernie #1.

2011-11-11T11:12:00.000-08:00

“Ain’t Nothin’ New Under The Sun”

Many of the reformers and educrats speak and act as if education and its problems are brand new, as if they have never existed before now. The fact of the matter is,”Ain’t nothin’ new under the sun.” As long as I’ve been teaching, students have cut classes, failed tests, not done homework and dropped out of school. These things didn’t just start now. As long as there have been schools, these problems have existed. The solutions to these problems are not new. The wheel doesn’t have to be reinvented. All we need to do is to use and apply the solutions that already exist, that have been tested and tried, and in those cases where the older problems don’t work, you can create newer solutions. Take the problem of bullying for example. This is a major problem today, but its solution already exists in a simple thought which has been around for thousands of years. It’s called “The Golden Rule.” I sincerely doubt that anyone likes to be bullied- including bullies. Given this point, it would seem logical that if one doesn’t like being bullied and if one treats others the way he/she wants to be treated, and then no one would bully anyone. This also applies to the shootings that take place in so many of our communities. I am sure that none of the shooters would appreciate or want to be shot; therefore, if those people treated others the way they’d want to be treated, there’d be no shootings. After all, aren’t tolerance and cultural diversity based on or related to The Golden Rule as well? Think about it. Can you have intolerance if people are treating others the same way they want to be treated? Can diversity not exist if people are treating other people with the same respect they want/expect form others? The words and the terms are new world, 20th and 21st century, but the ideas that address them are old school old world. I like to tell my students that there is nothing new under the sun. After all, new ideas don’t just spring up out of nowhere. New ideas are instigated and inspired by ideas that already existed. Someone may add a new twist to it or build on it, but even a “brand new” idea isn’t completely brand new.
To prove this idea, look at the rules listed below. Which, if any of these rules would you say would be valuable or vital in the 21st century?
• The love of learning
• The pursuit of knowledge
• The ability to think for 20 oneself (individualism)
• The ability to stand alone against the crowd (courage)
• The ability to work persistently at a difficult task until it is finished (industriousness, self-discipline)
• The ability to think through the consequences of one’s actions on others (respect for others)
• The ability to consider the consequences of one’s actions on one’s well-being (self-respect)
• The recognition of higher ends than self-interest (honor)
• The ability to comport oneself appropriately in all situations (dignity)
• The recognition that civilized society requires certain kinds of behavior by individuals and groups (good manners, civility)
• The willingness to ask questions when puzzled (curiosity)
• The readiness to dream about other worlds, other ways of doing things (imagination)
• The ability to believe that one can improve one’s life and the lives of others (optimism)
• The ability to believe in principles larger than one’s own self-interest (idealism)
• The ability to speak well and write grammatically, using standard English
I’m just guessing that you picked all of them, and if you did, that’s funny because these rules which you picked as vital for the 21st century, were actually the rules in a schoolroom in the 19th! Not only does this “experiment” prove there is nothing new under the sun, it proves the elements needed to enjoy success today are the same rules that were needed 150 years ago, and probably long before that, that what was true then, is true today, because truth never changes.
Today so much emphasis is placed on technology when people speak about education: Smart boards, calculators, laptops- these and many more things are indispensable if students are to succeed academically. The problem with this is that technology changes almost daily. When they made the wheel, that was technology. Today, technology is the iPhone and the iPad, and the computers that can fit in the palm of your hands, (when at one time a computer would take up a whole room). Unlike truth, technology never remains the same, it always changes- it has to- that’s why I tell students not to depend on it.
Today educrats and reformers argue that students must have access to technology if they are going to succeed. Truth be told, not only do many of them have access to it, they are experts at it. IPhones, twitter, Facebook, iPads, texting- trust me, they are experts. Believe me, they know how these things work. They get technology! Here’s the problem. Their use of technology isn’t academically based. They are using it, they are experts at it, but their use of it has little or nothing to do with anything they are learning in school. This means that in and of itself, technology will not change anything. Only if its use is directed to facilitate or to complement learning can technology have any positive impact on education.
The simple fact is that no matter what the technology is or how it changes, the basic things, the truths are still the same. Students still have to be willing to acquire knowledge, have a love of learning, consider the consequences of their actions, recognize higher ends than their own self interest, comport themselves appropriately and ask questions when they are puzzled. Schools still must do what schools were created to do which is to provide access to education and knowledge, and to afford students the opportunity to obtain the education and the life they are willing to work to achieve, not do what parents and society are responsible to do, they must still offer their students challenging and competitive subjects and courses of study in order for them to successfully compete in the world in which they live.
For most of the problems that exist in education today, the answers are already available. You do not need visible signs of “impact” demonstrated on the classroom walls, or proficiency ratings of 80% for the whole class, or multi-paginated, multi-tiered evaluations and assessments. All you need are the solutions that have been tested and tried since the beginning of time, and the will to put them into practice, even though they are not as sexy or as exciting as the “new” technologies and ideas.

The Occupy Movements and the Universities

2011-10-29T03:13:00.001-07:00

The Occupy Movements and the Universities

Mark Naison
Fordham University

The Occupation movements spreading around the nation and the world have the potential to revitalize University life, particularly those initiatives involving community activism and the arts.. The role of arts activists in Occupy Wall Street is a story that has not been fully told,. Community arts organizations in New York such as the South Bronx's Rebel Diaz Arts Collective and Brooklyn's Global Block Collective have been involved with Occupy Wall Street for almost a month, making music videos on the site, documenting the movement's growth through film, and trying to bring working class people and people of colore into the movement. The Occupation has become an essential stopping point for a wide variety of performing artists, none of whom have asked for payment for their appearances ( see videos below)

Musicians Occupy Wall Street - YouTube
2 min - Oct 13, 2011
Uploaded by okayafrica
www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCRm_zXrwEc

Bronx Hip-Hop Duo Rebel Diaz, Live From Occupy Wall Street ...
3 min - Oct 6, 2011
Uploaded by democracynow
www.youtube.com/watch?v=VkPzXW1hpbA

Occupy Wall St. Hip Hop Anthem: Occupation Freedom ... - YouTube
3 min - Oct 10, 2011
Uploaded by djvibetv
www.youtube.com/watch?v=3pl0pHJg_

University faculty and participants in community outreach initiatives can only benefit from tapping into this tremendous source of energy and idealism. I have never seen students on my campus so excited about anything political or artistic as they have about these Occupation movements, which have spread into outer borough New York neighborhoods ( We have had "Occupy the Bronx") as well as cities throughout the nation and the world. What the movement has done is reinvigorate democratic practice- much of it face to face- widely regarded as nearly extinct among young people allegedly atomized by their cell phones and ipods. One my students, a soccer player at Fordham said the following about her experience on a march across the Brooklyn Bridge that led to mass arrests

"Going to the protest I felt like this was the closest I was going to get to reliving my father/uncle's young adulthood! While we were stuck on the bridge people were passing around cigarettes, water, food anything anyone had they shared. Announcements were organized so everyone knew what was going on. People were yelling were changing the world! THE WOLRD IS WATCHING. I called my father on the bridge told him I was getting arrested, and I could tell he was proud! It was unbelievable".

Her sense of excitement about the energy and communal spirit at OWN mirrors my own. Each time I have been at OWS I have sat in on discusion groups created on topics ranging from Mideast politics, to understanding derivatives, to educational reform. The discussions I have participated in have been rigorous, political diverse, and to be honest much more virbrant than most comparable discussions I have been part of at universities.

Those of us who work at Universities need to find ways of connecting to a movement which has inspired so much creativity and intellectual vitality.. As someone who has been to many “Occupation” events, ranging from teach ins, to grade ins, to marches, and has spoken about this movement at my own university and to global media, I have experienced this energy and vitality first hand. But most important, my STUDENTS have experienced this and it has given them a sense that they have the power to make changes in a society which they feared had become hopelessly stagnant and hierarchical. Consider the remarks of 2010 Fordham grad Johanne Sterling who works at Fordham's Dorothy Day Center for Service and Justice, about what participating in this movement meant to her, even though the experience got her arrested and sprayed with mace
"
"I had plans to attend a peaceful protest on Wall Street . . . I was happy to know that I was offering my voice and my support to a movement I believed in. As a young person in this country, I cannot say that I have not grown more and more unnerved with the injustices I see every day. The fact that our governmet is quietly but surely taking away our democratic rights (First with the Patriot Act, ironically named, and then with new voting restrictions that are being put into law), the fact that so many of my fellow graduates cannot find meaningful, rewarding work no matter how hard they try, the fact that our country's infrastruture is falling apart while the richest 1% continue to increase astronomical amounts of wealth, and the fact our justice system was able to execute and continue to execute and/or imprison innocent individuals disproportionatey based on their socio-economic position and their ethnicity are simply a few reasons as to why I decided to attend the rally."

This kind of civic consciousness and social justice activism is precisely what so many progressive scholars and university based community outreach programs have sought to inspire. It is being brought to life by young people themselves in this growing national movement.

There are now over 100 Occupations in cities throughout the nation. They are part of a global awakening of young people that has caused governments around the world to tremble, and financial elites to face the first real challenge to their power in decades

We in the Universities did not create this movement. But we ignore it at our peril. It brings to life many things we have been teaching. And it does something that we should be doing, but aren't doing enough- it empowers our students!

A Buffalo Story: How School Turnaround Mandates Undermine Effective Community Organizing

2011-10-22T05:50:00.000-07:00

A Buffalo Story: How Mindless Application of Federal and State School Turnaround Mandates Undermine Effective Community Organizing

Dr Mark Naison
Fordham University

During mid October, I had the privilege of spending two days getting an in-depth exposure to one of the most radical experiments in democratic urban transformation in the nation- a Choice Neighborhoods initiative in the East Side of Buffalo created by SUNY Buffalo’s Center for Urban Studies in partnership with Buffalo’s Municipal Housing Authority and Erie County’s community action agency. The brainchild of the Center for Urban Studies visionary leader, Dr Henry Taylor, the initiative seeks to engage residents in some of Buffalo’s poorest neighborhood in redesigning and transforming public housing projects, business districts, schools, and vacant properties in the target area. Improving schools is one of the key objectives of the initiative; but it seeks to do that not by insulating school children from the forces surrounding them and educating them to escape the neighborhood, but by engaging them in a democratic community planning process along with their teachers, their parents and their neighbors and by making a problem centered pedagogy part of the school curriculum. Even before the Choice Grant, the Center had gotten students in one of the schools involved in the initiative- Futures Academy- involved in transforming a rubble strewn lot across the street from the school into a beautiful park and vegetable garden and another smaller lot nearby into a bird park. The students had also done remarkable arts work for the initiative, both in public spaces, and the school. They had become agents of neighborhood change

What the students had accomplished was nothing short of miraculous, but unfortunately, such accomplishments did not on the metrics mandated for low performing schools by No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top and mechanically applied by the State Education Department in Albany. As a result, Futures Academy, whose school population was drawn from students who could not get into or were pushed out of charter schools and magnet schools, went through three different principals in the ten years the Center had worked in it, each one forced out solely because of poor student performance on standardized tests. Student participation on democratic neighborhood transformation could not save those principals; they were judged solely test performance and Futures Academy, for school administrators, became a revolving door.

While Professor Taylor and his colleagues realize they cannot change educational policies being shaped in Washington and Albany, it is sad to see how these policies place handicaps on what they are trying to accomplish. In a neighborhood where over 90 percent of the residents are black, most are poor, half of the land sits vacant, public transportation is inadequate, and abandoned stores and factories dot local business districts, the public schools are one of the few remaining neighborhood anchors. They are not only the largest remaining buildings in the East Side neighborhood, they contain space and resources – auditoriums, gymnasiums, class rooms computer labs- which could be vital assets to all neighborhood residents as they participate in the planning ,well as underutilized cultural capital in the form of student creativity/ Professor Taylor’s goal, through in school and after school programs is to enlist public school students in every part of the neighborhood redevelopment initiative, from having them involved in public art projects, neighborhood beautification initiatives and urban agriculture, to having them help redesign local business districts, to having them imagine new neighborhood institutions which enhance public safety and democratic participation. But to have students play this role effectively, the project needs on stability and continuity in the administration in the administration of the three public schools included in the initiative- Futures Academy and ML King School, both K-8 schools, and East High School. And unfortunately state and federal mandates are making that difficult to impossible.

Let us take East High School, the one secondary school in the planning zone. Although East has had a rich history serving Buffalo’s Black community, producing many famous and accomplished graduates, in recent years, as the East Side neighborhood has undergone disinvestment, depopulation and decay, it has become a school of “last choice” in the Buffalo school district and a revolving door for principals. Now, a brilliant new principal has been brought in who specializes in “turning around” tough schools and who is an enthusiastic partner in Professor Taylor’s initiative. But as he told me when we met, the first day he entered the school, he realized he would be out in three years because he could never raise graduation rates to meet national and state mandates. Why?
Because of the 160 students in his freshman class, 157 were “1’s” ( on state reading and math tests), 2 were “2’s, and 1 was a “3”! Essentially, ONE student in his freshmen class tested above grade level, 157 below!!

How did this happen? Basically because after magnet schools and charter schools picked their students, those who were left went to schools like East Side. Not only did these students test poorly, they disproportionately came from troubled families that moved from house to house with great frequency and occasionally disappeared. Given this population, it was going to be virtually impossible to meet the graduation rate targets established by the state and the school would have to be placed in receivership once again with the principal removed, and up to 50 percent of the teachers replaced!

Given this tragic and absurd outcome, why did the principal take the job and why did Dr Taylor choose to make East High School one of the anchors of his community development initiative.. The answer is simple. Because both saw East students as more than the sum total of their scores on standardized tests, and the problems they experienced in their homes and places of residence. They saw them as citizens in the making possessed of invaluable knowledge about their neighborhood and a deep reservoir of cultural capital not only in artistic and musical talent, but in resilience, endurance and ability to overcome great obstacles. They wanted to incorporate them in the neighborhood planning process, get their frank assessment of what needed to be preserved and what needed to be retained, and involve them in hands on tasks ranging from cleaning up the local business district, to organizing talent shows and oral history projects to highlight the community’s past strengths and future potential. In the process, their test scores might go up, and attendance might improve. But that was not the major goal. The goal was to tap the full range of East students talents in a process of community renewal and to encourage them to see East Buffalo as a place to be re-imagined and rebuilt, not as human toxic waste site that all people with skill and talent seek to escape/

This kind of idealism and faith in the human potential of students and neighborhoods is at the very heart of what Democratic Education should be about. Unfortunately, it is being undermined, in the name of equity, by federal and state policies which reduce students to test scores and graduation rates,

Dr Taylor,the Principal of East High School, the principal of the other two schools in the East Buffalo Choice neighborhood initiative will persever no matter what, but wouldn’t it be better if state and federal authorities relaxed automatic school closing triggers and allowed schools the flexibility to become true centers of community empowerment?

We can only hope that at some point, sanity will prevail in the US Department of Education and the New York State Board of Regents. Hopefully, that moment will come sooner, rather than later

Mark Naison
October 21, 2011

Why We Are Having a REAL Affirmative Action Bake Sale at Fordham

2011-10-05T06:49:00.001-07:00

Why We Are Having a REAL Affirmative Action Bake Sale At Fordham

Dr Mark Naison
Professor of African American Studies and History
Fordham University

The REAL Affirmative Action Bake Sale, organized by the Affirmative Action Senior Seminar at Fordham University, not only represents my classes’ outrage at the “Promote Diversity” Bake sale organized by College Republicans at the University of California Berkeley, it reflects my own frustration at the misinformation about Affirmative Action that prevails among large sections of the American public.

If you would believe Donald Trump --who claimed Barack Obama only got into Columbia and Harvard Law School because of Affirmative Action--and millions of other Americans, including many of my student’s friends and relatives, you would think that preferences given minorities are the major departure from an otherwise meritocratic admissions process at the nation’s top college.

In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. As I know from both my own research and from personal experience, preferences given recruited athletes and children of alumni are far more powerful than those given under represented minorities and affect a far larger number of students. According to James Shulman and William Bowen, in their book The Game of Life: College Sports and Educational Values, recruited male athletes, in the 1999 cohort, received a 48 percent admissions advantage, as compared to 25 percent for legacies, and 18 percent for minorities ( the comparable figures for women athletes were 54 percent, 24 percent, and 20 percent, respectively). Not only do athletes get a larger admissions advantage, Bowen and Shapiro report, they constitute a larger portion of the student population than under-represented minorities at the nation’s top colleges, averaging 20 percent at the Ivy League colleges and 40 percent at Williams. And the vast majority of the recruited athletes at those colleges who get those admissions advantages are white, including participants in sports like men’s and women’s lacrosse, golf, tennis and sailing, which few minorities participate in.

But it was not the material in The Game of Life which most outraged my students, it was the analysis offered in a book I used in my course for the first time, Peter Schmidt’s Color and Money: How Rich White Kids Are Winning The War Over College Affirmative Action. According to Schmidt, higher education has become a plutocracy, where “ a rich child has about 25 times as much chances as a poor one of someday enrolling in a college rated as highly selective or better.” In the last twenty years, Schmidt claims, universities have quietly given significant admissions advantages to students whose parents can pay full tuition, make a donation to the school, or have ties to influential politicians. Schmidt’s statistics, showing 74 percent of students in the top two tiers of universities come from families making over $83,000, as compared to 3 percent come from families making under $27,000 a year, enraged my students. They had no idea that students from wealthy families had such a huge advantage getting into college and when they read a September 21, 2011 New York Times article by Tamar Lewin, “Universities Seeking Out Students of Means” which confirmed all of Schmidt’s conclusions, they got even angrier

Enter the College Republicans “Increase Diversity” Bake Sale at Berkeley which charged Whites, Asians and Males higher prices than Blacks, Latinos and Women, and left athletes, legacies and children of the wealthy out of the equation. When I suggested that we might consider organizing a bake sale whose categories and pricing structure were based on the materials we had been covering in class, they jumped all over the idea. They formed committees to write press releases, secure support of campus organizations, develop a price structure consistent with what really goes on in college admissions and make sure we have an ample supply of baked goods. Thanks to all their hard work, thee sale will take place Friday, October 7, from 11 AM to 3 PM, in Fordham’s McGinley Student Center, and use the following price structure, based on the latest research on actual advantages in college admissions

Women (General Admission) $1.30

Men (General Admission) $1.25

Under-Represented Minorities $1.00

Legacies (Children of Alumni) $1.00

Recruited Athletes $.50

Children of the Very Wealthy $.25

We are also calling on students in other Universities to follow our example and organize bakes sales of their own based on sound research, not rumors and myths. The goal is not only to dramatize the extraordinary power of great wealth in American society- something highlighted by the Wall Street Occupation and the protests inspired by it around the country- but to remove the stigma that has been placed on minority students as recipients of unfair preferences. These students are tired of being attacked as an affront to American “meritocracy.” Enough is enough!

My students are excited and confident, looking forward to the discussion and debate on and off campus their bake sale will inspire

I am very proud that of the courage and energy they have displayed in organizing this ground breaking event!
.. Write a reply to all...
Attach a fileTake a picture or video.Some people in this conversation won't receive text messages.Do you want to encourage them to turn on text messaging?.
Skip.
Send to mobile Quick Reply mode: press Enter to send..

The Bloomberg School Legacy: Flawed Policies Poisoned by a Fatal Arrogance

2011-09-08T11:55:00.000-07:00

The Bloomberg School Legacy: Flawed Policies Poisoned by a Fatal Arrogance

Mark Naison
Fordham University

It should surprise no one that only 34 percent of New Yorkers approve of Michael Bloomberg’s education policies, the policy area within which the Mayor most hoped to create a legacy. The Mayor not only introduced numerous questionable initiatives- ranging from school closings, to preferential treatment of charter schools, to attempts to rate teacher performance based on student test scores-he did so with an arrogant disregard not only for the most experienced teachers and administrators in the system, but of parents and community leaders and elected officials who tried to make their voices heard in matters of educational policy.

This top down approach to reorganizing the City public school system not only reflected the ideology of the national School Reform movement- which viewed public schools as corrupt institutions in dire need of the kind of competition and accountability allegedly characteristic of the private sector- but an egotistical effort to reproduce the success of Bloomberg LP by importing its management techniques into the Department Education.

Within weeks of taking office, The Mayor put his mark on the school system by insisting the central headquarters of the NYC Department of Education, as well as all of its district offices, look exactly like an office of Bloomberg Inc, with cubicles replacing offices.

This astonishing reorganization, done without the input of anyone in the system, was designed to show that this Mayor was determined to put his own personal stamp on the system down to the smallest detail, and a penchant for Mayoral micromanagement has been a characteristic of the New York Department of Education ever since.

Among the highlights of Mayoral Micromanagement have been

Replacing four members of the Panel on Educational Policy, the major policy making body governing the Department of Education, when it refused to determine the promotion of third graders exclusively on their performance of standardized tests.

Publicly denouncing principals who questioned the school grades issued by the Department of Education after it became clear that the formulae used to compute those grades produced results that defied common sense, as well as school performance on state and national tests.

Appointing publishing executive Cathy Black as School Chancellor without the advice or input of anyone
In the Department of Education, including outgoing Chancellor Joel Klein

Showing favoritism to charter school advocates who were personal friends of the Mayor, such as Harlem Success Academy director Eve Moskowitz, giving them license to seize facilities from existing public schools and discourage the enrollment of students who might lower their institution’s test profiles

It is one thing to try to convince educators and the public that schools , administrators and teachers should be evaluated regularly on the basis of student test scores, and that public schools would benefit from competition from charters, it is another thing to implement those policies unilaterally, from the top down, while stifling public discussion and trying browbeat and intimidate opponents.

Lost in the process were not only principles of democratic governance, but any kind of institutional way to subject Mayoral policies to external oversight, critical evaluation, or adherence to the most basic rules of evidence. Among the most damaging results have been, favoritism, cronyism, and corruption in the awarding of Department of Education contracts, and the creation of evaluation systems, first of schools, now of teachers, that are wildly inaccurate, and counterintuitive to what parents , teachers and administrators believe.

When you have a system without checks and balances of any kind and without any institutionalized or marginally respected input from the major stakeholders in the system- parents, students, teachers and administrators- don’t be surprised if you generate tremendous opposition.

What we have now in New York is a school system filled with teachers and administrators working under extreme duress, convinced the Mayor is their enemy, of students whose school experience is defined by one test after another, and of parents who feel their voices don’t matter.

This is Mayoral Control Michael Bloomberg style.

Many people in this city-teachers and principals foremost among them- will breathe a huge sigh of relief when his third term is finally up.

Mark Naison
September 8, 2011

the Bloomberg School Legacy: Flawed Policies Poisoned by a Fatal Arrogance

2011-09-08T07:43:00.002-07:00

The Bloomberg School Legacy: Flawed Policies Poisoned by a Fatal Arrogance
Mark Naison
Fordham University

It should surprise no one that only 34 percent of New Yorkers approve of Michael Bloomberg’s education policies, the policy area within which the Mayor most hoped to create a legacy. The Mayor not only introduced numerous questionable initiatives- ranging from school closings, to preferential treatment of charter schools to attempts to rate teacher performance based on student test scores-he did so with an arrogant disregard not for the most experienced teachers and administrators in the system, but of parents and community leaders and elected officials who tried to make their voices heard in matters of educational policy.

This top down approach to reorganizing the City public school system not only reflected the ideology of the national School Reform movement- which viewed public schools as corrupt institutions in dire need of the kind of competition and accountability allegedly characteristi of the private section- but an egotistical effort to reproduce the success of Bloomberg LP by importing its management techniques into the Department Education.

Within weeks of taking office, The Mayor put his mark on the school system by insisting the central headquarters of the NYC Department of Education, as well as all of its district offices, look exactly like an office of Bloomberg Inc, with cubicles replacing offices.

This astonishing reorganization, done without the input of one in the system, was designed to show that this Mayor was determined to put his own personal stamp on the system down to the smallest detail, and a penchant for Mayoral micromanagement has been a characteristic of the New York Department of Education ever since.

Among the highlights of Mayoral Micromanagement have been

Replacing four members of the Panel on Educational Policy, the major policy making body governing the Department of Education, when it refused to determine the promotion of third graders exclusively on their performance of standardized tests.

Publicly denouncing principals who questioned the school grades issued by the Department of Education after it became clear that the formulae used to compute those grades produced results that defied common sense, as well as school performance on state and national tests.

Appointing publishing executive Cathy Black as School Chancellor without the advice or input of anyone
In the Department of Education, including outgoing Chancellor Joel Klein

Showing favoritism to charter school advocates who were personal friends of the Mayor, such as Harlem Success Academy director Eve Moskowitz, giving them license to seize facilities from existing public schools and discourage the enrollment of students who might lower their institution’s test profiles

It is one thing to try to convince educators and the public that schools , administrators and teachers should be evaluated regularly on the basis of student test scores, and that public schools would benefit from competition from charters, it is another thing to implement those policies unilaterally, from the top down, while stifling public discussion and trying browbeat and intimidate opponents.

Lost in the process were not only principles of democratic governance, but any kind of institutional way to subject Mayoral policies to external oversight, critical evaluation, or adherence to the most basic rules of evidence. Among the most damaging results have been, favoritism, cronyism, and corruption in the awarding of Department of Education contracts, and the creation of evaluation systems, first of schools, now of teachers, that are wildly inaccurate, and counterintuitive to what parents , teachers and administrators believe.

When you have a system without checks and balances of any kind and without any institutionalized or marginally respected input from the major stakeholders in the system- parents, students, teachers and administrators- don’t be surprised if you generate tremendous opposition.

What we have now in New York is a school system filled with teachers and administrators working under extreme duress, convinced the Mayor is their enemy, of students whose school experience is defined by one test after another, and of parents who feel their voices don’t matter.

This is Mayoral Control Michael Bloomberg style.

Many people in this city-teachers and principals foremost among them- will breathe a huge sigh of relief when his third term is finally up.

Mark Naison
September8, 2011

The Bloomberg School Legacy: Flawed Policies Poisoned by a Fatal Arrogance

2011-09-08T07:43:00.001-07:00

The Bloomberg School Legacy: Flawed Policies Poisoned by a Fatal Arrogance
Mark Naison
Fordham University

It should surprise no one that only 34 percent of New Yorkers approve of Michael Bloomberg’s education policies, the policy area within which the Mayor most hoped to create a legacy. The Mayor not only introduced numerous questionable initiatives- ranging from school closings, to preferential treatment of charter schools to attempts to rate teacher performance based on student test scores-he did so with an arrogant disregard not for the most experienced teachers and administrators in the system, but of parents and community leaders and elected officials who tried to make their voices heard in matters of educational policy.

This top down approach to reorganizing the City public school system not only reflected the ideology of the national School Reform movement- which viewed public schools as corrupt institutions in dire need of the kind of competition and accountability allegedly characteristi of the private section- but an egotistical effort to reproduce the success of Bloomberg LP by importing its management techniques into the Department Education.

Within weeks of taking office, The Mayor put his mark on the school system by insisting the central headquarters of the NYC Department of Education, as well as all of its district offices, look exactly like an office of Bloomberg Inc, with cubicles replacing offices.

This astonishing reorganization, done without the input of one in the system, was designed to show that this Mayor was determined to put his own personal stamp on the system down to the smallest detail, and a penchant for Mayoral micromanagement has been a characteristic of the New York Department of Education ever since.

Among the highlights of Mayoral Micromanagement have been

Replacing four members of the Panel on Educational Policy, the major policy making body governing the Department of Education, when it refused to determine the promotion of third graders exclusively on their performance of standardized tests.

Publicly denouncing principals who questioned the school grades issued by the Department of Education after it became clear that the formulae used to compute those grades produced results that defied common sense, as well as school performance on state and national tests.

Appointing publishing executive Cathy Black as School Chancellor without the advice or input of anyone
In the Department of Education, including outgoing Chancellor Joel Klein

Showing favoritism to charter school advocates who were personal friends of the Mayor, such as Harlem Success Academy director Eve Moskowitz, giving them license to seize facilities from existing public schools and discourage the enrollment of students who might lower their institution’s test profiles

It is one thing to try to convince educators and the public that schools , administrators and teachers should be evaluated regularly on the basis of student test scores, and that public schools would benefit from competition from charters, it is another thing to implement those policies unilaterally, from the top down, while stifling public discussion and trying browbeat and intimidate opponents.

Lost in the process were not only principles of democratic governance, but any kind of institutional way to subject Mayoral policies to external oversight, critical evaluation, or adherence to the most basic rules of evidence. Among the most damaging results have been, favoritism, cronyism, and corruption in the awarding of Department of Education contracts, and the creation of evaluation systems, first of schools, now of teachers, that are wildly inaccurate, and counterintuitive to what parents , teachers and administrators believe.

When you have a system without checks and balances of any kind and without any institutionalized or marginally respected input from the major stakeholders in the system- parents, students, teachers and administrators- don’t be surprised if you generate tremendous opposition.

What we have now in New York is a school system filled with teachers and administrators working under extreme duress, convinced the Mayor is their enemy, of students whose school experience is defined by one test after another, and of parents who feel their voices don’t matter.

This is Mayoral Control Michael Bloomberg style.

Many people in this city-teachers and principals foremost among them- will breathe a huge sigh of relief when his third term is finally up.

Mark Naison
September8, 2011

Teach for America, Steve Jobs and the Culture of Poverty

2011-08-21T08:08:00.000-07:00

One of the reasons that Teach for America is so attractive to
corporate funders like Steven Jobs of Apple- whatever portion of the
political spectrum them may come from- is that TFA offers an enhanced
version of the Culture of Poverty thesis that was in vogue in the early
and middle Sixties.

In the world according to TFA, poor school performance is a product
of communities who lack a strong foundation of middle class values.
burned out teachers who have given up trying to instill those values,
and teachers unions which protect burned out teachers

What is needed, to transform failing schools and communities, is a
constant infusion of highly motivated teachers who will be ambassaors
for middle class values and will leave before they are burned out or
begin to adapt to the culture of the communities in which they are located!

The "two years and out" commitment is actually consistent with TFA's
world view and "theory of change. Because TFA teachers are moving in and out
of low perofrming schools at a rapid rate, children of the poor will constantly be
exposed toemissaries of mainstream American values who refuse to accept the
"culture of failure" that exists in poor communities.

The result- great improvement in school performance at little cost

The message to funders- Give money to Teach for America and you
will gradually change the culture of poor neighborhoods through its most impressionable and malleable representatives,its youth, and over time, poverty will diminish, or be drastically reduced

What makes this kind of thinking, from the corporate point of view,
so attractive is that it rejects any structural explanations of
poverty that might require a reditribution of wealth or higher tax
rates on corporations.

It suggests the problems of poverty and inequality can be solved
through private philanthropy and individual sacrifice by bright
middle class college graduates .devoting a few years to uplifting poor
children early in their
careers

No evidence that such an approach will work is required. It
makes
donors feel so good that evidence doesn't matter.

Mark Naison
August 20, 2011

School Reform, Community Development and the Mal-Distribution of Wealth: The Road Not Taken

2011-08-20T03:11:00.001-07:00

School Reform, Community Development and the Mal-Distribution of Wealth: The Road Not Taken

Mark Naison

Reading Sarah Mosle’s review of Steven Brill’s new book on School Reform in the New York Times reminded me of the incredible expenditure of time, money and political capital this movement has engendered. I can think of no cause in recent American history which has brought together philanthropy, government and the media, along with a bi- partisan coalition encompassing elements of the Right and the Left, in behalf of an imperative to transform an important sector of American society . Using rhetoric which enlists egalitarian ideals ( No Child Left Behind) alongside the goal of improving the nation’s place in global capitalist competition ( Race to the Top) this movement has proven well nigh irresistible in shaping the way educational policy is being formed at the state, local and national level.

Unfortunately, in terms of either egalitarianism or competitiveness, this movement has failed miserably. Not only has the nation become far more unequal in terms of every important statistical indicator ( wealth distribution, youth poverty, minority unemployment, black/white wealth gap) since No Child Left behind was passed, but we have seen no change in the nation’s position in the global hierarchy in terms of performance on standardized tests.

Why has a movement which has inspired such elevated rhetoric ( “Education Reform is the Civil Rights Cause of the 21st Century), such bi-partisan political support, and such huge expenditures of money achieved so little?

Perhaps the most obvious answer is a simple one: there is no evidence schools alone, not matter how well funded they are, can lift people out of poverty when every other social policy drives them down.

But that answer doesn’t mean we should completely give up on transforming schools.
Schools and school reform can serve as instruments of community development if the resources put into them are deployed in ways which strengthen local economies immediately, not just in some distant future when the beneficiaries of school reform graduate from college and launch successful careers

Let’s use a little imagination. What if the hundreds of billions of dollars contributed by philanthropists like Bill Gates, Eli Broad, and hedge fund entrepreneurs to charter schools, Teach for America and local school districts who follow their model of “accountability” were used instead to hire local residents of poor communities to work in schools as school aids, recreation supervisors, and personnel in child care centers? Not only would such a policy help transform schools into dawn to dusk community centers for struggling neighborhoods, it would create tens, if not hundreds of thousands of new jobs in neighborhoods which are starved for employment and where families are under the severest economic stress.

Right now the vast majority of School Reform dollars go into the pockets of middle class and upper middle class professionals who live far from the neighborhoods in which “failing” schools are located- management consultants, employees of test companies, computer and information system managers, teachers and administrators in charter schools. They do nothing to develop local economies, strengthen families in need, provide employment to marginalized people, or redistribute income from the very wealthy to the very poor. If you wanted to by cynical, you can say that School Reform, in the name of helping the poor, has created a wonderful job program for the children of the middle class.

But that can only happen because most ( but not all) School Reformers divorce the goal of improving schools from the goal of lifting communities out of poverty.

As progressives, our job is to insist that the School/Community linkage be foremost in all Reform efforts, and that the vast majority of the funds to improve schools in poor communities be used to create jobs and programs for people who live in those communities. No more consultants, no more tests, no more computer systems, no more hot shot teachers who spend two years in low performing schools then leave. Let’s give bonuses for teachers and principals who live in the communities they teach in, stay in schools in poverty areas for ten or more years, and lets hire tens of thousands of local residents for useful and necessary work that turn schools into places where everyone in the neighborhood wants to be

If you do that, you might not only contribute to the goal of greater equality, you will help put a dent in what all experts agree is the major hindrance to America’s global competitiveness in educational performance- our extraordinarily high rate of child poverty.

Mark Naison
August 19,2011

The End of Free Speech? The Destructive Consequence of Creating a

2011-08-19T03:45:00.000-07:00

The End of Free Speech? The Destructive Consequence of Creating a
“Surveillance State” in the New York Public Schools

Mark Naison

Last spring, a former Bronx teacher named Janet Mayer published a
wonderful book about her experiences called As Bad As They Say: Three
Decades of Teaching in Bronx Schools. Most of the book was a tribute
to the heroic students she had taught at Grace Dodge High School in the
Bronx, who overcame incredible obstacles to achieve their goals; the
last chapter was a devastating critique of “No Child Left Behind”,
“Race to the Top” and Mayoral Control of Schools in New York City.

Teachers at Grace Dodge High School, whose unsung labors were
honored, along with Dodge students, in Mayer’s book, tried to organize
a book party for As Bad as They Say. . Their efforts were vetoed by the
principal, who was afraid that she and the school, would face
retaliation from DOE officials if the Dodge community gave public
recognition to a book which was critical of DOE policies

Such is the state of Free Speech in the era of Mayor Control of New
York’s public schools.

But wait as minute you say. Isn’t the principal a member of a union?
Aren’t the teachers? Won’t their unions support them if they hold a
public event which takes a position critical of DOE policies,
especially if it is done in a way that allow for expression of
conflicting opinions?

The answer, unfortunately is “No!”

In the last six years, an atmosphere of intimidation has been created
in the New York City public schools, as the Department of Education, in
the name of “accountability,” has created what amounts to a
Surveillance State, if not an actual Police State, in which every
teacher, school and principal, are being rated, and evaluated on the
basis of student test scores.

Instead of spies and informers, the DOE has spent hundreds of millions
of dollars on information systems and consultants, which track student
performance on the growing number of standardized tests the schools are
being deluged with.

And these evaluations are not just informational, Based on the
information accumulated, scores of schools have been closed,
principals removed, and thousands of teachers reassigned, often against
the protests of students, parents and community members in the schools
targeted for such action.

These actions, and the arrogant, dictatorial spirit with which they
have been enforced, have placed teachers and administrators under
incredible stress, especially those working in schools which serve
immigrants and children of the poor. With the threat of school
closings and reassignment-- if not actual loss of employment-- hanging
over their head, and with Big Brother Style Data systems quantifying
every minute variation on every test they administer, few teachers or
principals dare to question the overall policies which have swept
creativity, initiative, and critical thinking out of their classrooms.
The result is that the Department of Education, having smothered all
internal opposition, has had carte blanche to spend expend
extraordinary sums of money on consultants, data systems, and hiring of
new administrators, that could have been used to reduce class size
throughout the system

Now, after six years of Mayoral Control, the public is finally
waking up to how democracy has been smothered in the nation’s largest
public school system, and how favored groups ( charter school
administrators, test companies, information system providers) have been
allowed to cash in during the creation of the DOE’s Surveillance State.

The gloves are off. All important stakeholders- teachers,
students, parents, community leaders- must fight to insure that the
free exchange of ideas, inside the classroom and out, is encouraged in
the New York City public schools, and that a Police State atmosphere
imposed in the name of “accountability” is an unacceptable violation of
our liberties, and a terrible example to provide to our youth

Mark Naison
August 18, 2011

Education and Plutocracy

2011-08-17T03:43:00.000-07:00

Education and Plutocracy

Mark Naison

The 2 most powerful people shaping public education in NY State,
Michael Bloomberg, Mayor of New York City, and Merryl Tisch, chair of
the New York State Board of Regents, are both billionaires! On their
watch, private interests- test publishers, software companies, and
educational consulting firms- have gained a huge foothold in the
state's public schools. This is the logical consequence of Plutocratic
Rule. Once they leave office, public vigilance should keep people of
great wealth out of any positions of control in our educational system.
To quote the old adage: “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice,
shame on me!”

What I Would Do If I Had Arne Duncan's Job

2011-08-11T00:53:00.000-07:00

What I Would Do If I Had Arne Duncan's Job

Mark Naison

First of all, I would state, for the record, that there is no quick or instant way to make our schools perform better unless we have a major initiative to reduce poverty that encompasses employment, health care, nutrition and housing as well as education.

Then, I would end Race to the Top and No Child Left Behind, deemphazie standardized testing and make schools places where young people, especially those from poor and working class backgrounds want to spend time in and where they get skills that lead to useful employment. Here would be the keystones of my program.

1 Create first rate vocational and technical education programs like the kind they have in Germany and like they used to have in NYC in the 1950's. Help train the technicians needed to build a new energy efficient economy for the 21St Century.

2. Create after school progarms and night centers in the public schools which featues sports, the arts, and modern information technology, all led by first rate teacher mentors, helped by teachers in training. Young people in NY City also had programs like this when I was growing up. They were elminated in the 1970's fiscal crisis

3. Vastly expand the hours and resources of public libraries so they not only create safe zones where young people can do their homework free of harassment and noise, but are places where they can have access to computer and information technology they might not have in their home.

4. Create CCC and WPA type jobs program for out of work out of school teens and young adults, paying them to help rebuild our rotting infastructure and mentor young people in their neighborhoods.

I can assure you that these programs would be much more effective engaging young people than our current strategy of deluging them with standarized tests to make them competitive with young people in other countries.

SOS Rally 7?30/11 From Ground Level

2011-08-08T15:19:00.000-07:00

A Teacher's Impact: from SOS Rally

2011-08-08T15:15:00.000-07:00

The Achievement Rap

2011-08-07T03:22:00.000-07:00

Apparently, the "Achievement Rap" I performed at the Save Our Schools March in DC is being seized on by conservative commentators- the latest of which is Andrew Breitbart- as a symbol of everthing that's wrong with public education and teachers unions. Gee, all I did was say that Ed Reformers are poised to reap huge profits from testing and privitization.

Notorious PhD. " The Achievement Rap"‏ - YouTube

Exposing the Man Behind the Curtain Part Three

2011-08-03T12:20:00.001-07:00

Exposing the Man Behind the Curtain: What's Behind "Education Reform"? Part 3 of 3

In the Wizard of Oz, Dorothy was instructed to follow the yellow brick road. In L. Frank Baum's political satire this represented the gold standard, measured in ounces...or Oz. Along the way she found the scarecrow, representing the farmers, who was hurt as he stumbled on the yellow bricks. She also found the rusted tin man, representing industrial workers who were suffering from the depression of the 1890s. It was the wicked witch of the east, or the big business interests of the east, who had cursed him. These same big business interests have been financing groups like the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ), who in 2010 are definitely cursing teachers. And a careful read of their analysis of the Boston Public Schools tells us in the end, it's still about the yellow brick road.

The 3rd part of the NCTQ analysis addresses the issue of working conditions and compensation. It's here we get the real purpose behind their report and why the business community and pro business foundations like The Boston Foundation bankroll their "studies". More unpaid hours, less compensation, less sick time, lower pensions, and merit pay. Everything the business community values (or devalues as the case may be).

Of course their report is filled with multi colored graphs to "prove" their assertion that teachers do not need or deserve the benefits we have fought for throughout the years. lifting the teaching profession to a point where teachers only occasionally have to work a 2nd job to live. They show us in graphs that Boston has the highest salary structure in the state, but fail to talk about the high cost of living in the Boston area or the cost of commuting if one can't afford to live in the city. They cynically compare with long bar graphs how we have a shorter contractual day than SOME communities, but fail to even estimate the number of unpaid hours every teacher puts in after school or at home. They deride any compensation without acknowledging the thousands of dollars that teachers spend out of their own pockets to teach in underfunded schools every year.

To "prove" they are right they insert anonymous quotes from Boston teachers. Find ONE teacher who agrees with you and use this as evidence that NCTQ must be right. A particular quote that sticks in my craw has a teacher saying, “I find it really hard to be a professional when I am paid only on years of service and coursework.” They use this quote to justify the business demand that we institute merit pay and have teachers compete with each other for additional salary. Is this the type of teacher they want? Ones who cannot feel like a professional unless they have a chance to get more than the other guy?

Years ago I took a business course in college. The invited speaker that day was from the New York Stock Exchange who informed us that the only way to get ahead in business was to knock down the guy in front of you, kick him, and then step over them. Organizations like NCTQ, financed by the business community, want us to institute this type of behavior into public education. But good teachers do not base their status on the size of their wallets, but on the knowledge that every day they come to the profession and work hard educating the next generation. Sure we want fair compensation. But we also want sharing communities in our schools. That is what motivates us, not competing with each other in a dog eat dog world.

As I read through the NCTQ report on improving teacher quality I kept asking myself what does this have to do with education? Is this education reform? Where is this coming from? Of course it's not about reform, it's about exploitation and squeezing more out of an already overworked teaching force. It's coming at us hard now because of the economic conditions in this country after the business community bankrupted it. There is a squeeze on profits and public education cannot exist without a portion of these profits.

But this country is still a wealthy country. The problem is that too much of the wealth is in the hands of the elite, the business elite that finances NCTQ. In 1928 before the Great Depression 24% of the wealth was controlled by 1% of the population. But as working people fought for social security, unemployment compensation, the GI Bill after WWII, civil rights, and equal pay for women this percentage was drastically reduced. In 1970 the richest 1% only controlled 9% of the wealth.

But since 1970 these numbers have been reversed. Through manipulation of the public with rhetoric around taxes as well as shifting the tax burden onto working people we find ourselves again in 1929. The richest 1% again control 24% of the nation's wealth. So instead of accepting NCTQ rhetoric around the "overpaid" school teacher let's start demanding a fairer distribution of the wealth in this society and adequate funding for public education.

Dorothy's life in Kansas was a hard life, made harder from the profiteers of her day. In Oz she met someone else on the yellow brick road. She met the cowardly lion. In Baum's allegory he represented the fiery orator William Jennings Bryan, a hero to the populist movement of the time. His critics often called him cowardly for opposing the Spanish-American War.

Today, critics of teacher unions often portray us as cowardly for opposing them. Our courage can be found standing up for all the Dorothy's who sit in our classrooms every day and exposing the great and powerful Oz standing behind the curtain of what THEY call "education reform". We can't do this as individuals. Our power is in our union. Dorothy always had the power to go home by clicking together her ruby slippers. So as we fight for real education reform let's click OUR heels together and chant - There's no place like our union!

Exposing the Man Behind the Curtain Part Two

2011-08-03T12:19:00.001-07:00

Exposing the Man Behind the Curtain: What's Behind "Education Reform"? Part 2 of 3

In the Wizard of Oz, the Great and Powerful Oz would huff and puff and go to great lengths to demean Dorothy, the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Cowardly Lion. He did this to hide the fact that he was an ineffective wizard. The current wave of "education reformers" are no different. They continuously blame the teachers for the problems in public education, blame our unions, and pronounce themselves all powerful so that we bend to their will. Not so fast. Let's look behind the curtain.

Last month we looked at the recommendations for teacher assignment proposed in the recent document published by the National Council on Teacher Quality after their "analysis" of the Boston Public Schools. This month let's take a look at how they see building an effective teaching corps.

One good thing the NCTQ does find in the Boston Public Schools is the mentoring program. According to their survey over 70% of new teachers attribute at least part of their success to their mentor. Boston has a highly educated teaching force from which these mentors are recruited.

What the document does not tell us is that it took years of struggle and ultimately a lawsuit to force the district into developing a year round mentoring program. That would not have happened without our union.

Teacher evaluation gets prominent play within this document, as it should. It is important that we have an effective method for evaluating teachers. The document of course misses the boat. Evaluations should be a collaborative process in which the goal should be improvement of a teacher's practice. Teaching is a complex art. None of us are ever perfect and all of us can improve. But the document focuses little on how to make this process collaborative. Rather it calls for more top-down authoritative outcomes.

The document is adamant. Boston principals do not appear to be evaluating teachers as required by state law. More central office staff should be brought in to evaluate teachers. Use standardized tests as a measure of teacher performance. And oh yes, let's also use evaluations to separate out the best teachers from their peers.

If the goal is to improve the teaching force then these recommendations fall far short. Fear, intimidation, and rankings may be a corporate approach to improvement (and of course I would argue a poor approach in any realm), but in schools it will do nothing to build the type of learning community where people feel safe to talk about their practice. We will learn very little about our practice through drive-by evaluations from central administrators who know very little about our particular schools, or the particular children we teach, or the particularities of what we do every day in the classroom. The goal seems to be to compartmentalize education, rather than empowering those who do the day to day work every day to make rationale, thoughtful change.

Most of what is being proposed is based on standardized test scores, with very little analysis as to whether or not this is right. But the prescription is clear. Replace teacher after teacher that fails to meet these arbitrary goals. And make it easy to do so. NCTQ has the audacity to state that a firing rate is too low...since after all...the test scores are too low. AFT President Randi Weingarten hit the nail on the head when she said that this type of thinking places, "100% of the responsibility on teachers with 0% authority."

When Dorothy finally saw the wizard for who he truly was she realized that she had the power all along. As a union we need to stand up to this corporate top down approach to education being proposed by those behind the curtain. The answers for how to improve public education must come from the teachers and staff in a true professional collaboration with the administrators in our buildings. Our power is in our union, but too few schools have active faculty senates. We need to change this. If the union is our home, then let's click are heels together and keep repeating...There's no place like home.

Garret Virchick

Exposing The Man Behind The Curtain Part One- Award Winning Article by Garrett Virchick of the Boston Teachers Union

2011-08-03T12:17:00.001-07:00

Exposing the Man Behind the Curtain: What's Behind "Education Reform"? Part 1 of 3

Garrett Virchick

Boston Teachers Union

In the Wizard of Oz, Dorothy learned that behind all the smoke and mirrors, fire and thunder of the great and powerful Wizard of Oz there was nothing more than a con artist. But she only learned that after Toto pulled back the curtain and exposed the man pulling all the levers. To author L. Frank Baum the wizard represented the politicians of his day. The wizards today are the so called education reformers who promise people better schools. But behind their smoke and mirrors are empty promises to the majority of people who want a better life for their children, and real attacks on public school employees and their unions. We need to pull back the curtain.

A good place to start pulling back the curtain is on the recently released study performed by the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ). This organization claims to be non-partisan and only committed to improving teaching. Yet it was commissioned by the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education and a close read of the 62 page document shows that much of its prescription for what ails the Boston Public Schools has little to do with creating democratic schools and a whole lot to do with creating top-down businesses with all the power concentrated in the hands of the administration.

The document, entitled "Human Capital in Boston Public Schools" is broken into 3 sections and contains 10 goals. The sections are I) Hiring, Transfer and Assignment, II) Developing an Effective Teaching Corps, and III) Working Conditions and Compensation. This month we will look at their goals and recommendations for Hiring, Transfer and Assignment.

Over the years adherence to strict seniority rules in the placement of teachers have largely been eliminated in our contracts. No longer do the most senior teachers get to pick the school where they want to teach. Teachers do have the right to apply for transfers, but principals are under no obligation to accept the teacher with the most seniority. Seniority only comes into play in the excess pool, where the most senior teacher is guaranteed one of their top 3 choices of vacant positions in other buildings. This insures that when budget cuts and layoffs occur the school system cannot simply look to save money by letting go more expensive veteran teachers. No teacher, and certainly no union likes layoffs, but when they do occur determining it based on seniority is the only fair way for this to happen.

NCTQ is recommending that this minimal protection be eliminated in favor of giving principals complete control in the hiring process. If you lose your position due to budget cuts...well...tough. You would be "free" to compete for a position. But if you don't find (or can't find) a position after one year you would be terminated.

The smoke and mirrors NCTQ throws up to confuse the issue is their claim that this is the only way to insure that every child gets the best teacher. And what parent doesn't want the best teacher for their child? They claim that union seniority rules, however minimal they may be, puts the interests of adults before the interests of children. They play on people's emotions and sincere desires to get the best possible education for their children. But in reality this "market" model of education reform that would have teachers competing with each other in the marketplace has little to do with putting the best teacher in front of children, and a whole lot to do with union busting.

What would the school system do without union protections? Let's look to the past, before teacher unions, and then ask a few questions. Before teacher unions it was often political connections that got you the job in the public sector. You would have to curry favor to get and keep your job. If you had enough connections you got placed in better schools. If you spoke out about the injustices you saw in your school? You didn't last long. Just ask Jonathan Kozol, author of Death at An Early Age and other books about the inequalities that exist in public schools, who lost his teaching job in Boston for giving his students a Langston Hughes poem to read.

But that was the past. What would happen today? Would a principal hire a pregnant woman with 10 years experience over a fresh young teacher unburdened by family? Would a teacher with 15 years experience who stood up to an autocratic administrator have a fair shot in this brave new educational marketplace they would like to create? What would stop the school system from eliminating more expensive teachers if given the chance? Is creating competition between teachers the way to build collaborative communities in our schools? Is the real issue union busting?

The corporate interests that bankroll these so-called education reform wizards never liked unions. It cuts into their profits. The union movement of the past created the middle class in this country. The response of business was to ship union manufacturing jobs first to the non-union south and then across the border in search of low wages. High priced lobbyists bought politicians to change labor laws to make it more difficult to organize. Today, most union membership is concentrated in the public sector. I guess we can't be shipped overseas. As the economic crisis gets deeper, smoke and mirrors are being used and public worker unions are targeted as the problem.

NCTQ goes further and criticizes the union contract for the failure to attract the best candidates to open positions in our schools. The timely staffing of schools is important if Boston is to attract the best candidates for openings that exist in our schools. NCTQ does point to practices that do hurt this ability. But it's principals they point to who often "hide" positions by not posting them during the transfer process. This lengthens the process and keeps perspective candidates waiting. NCTQ then makes the disingenuous claim that the only way to solve this problem is to get rid of the transfer process and minimal seniority rights. It's principals who need to change this practice and should be compelled to stop if this is the reason that positions take so long to be filled.

There are many ways to improve the teaching force and create good schools. Meaningful professional development throughout one's career, the time to work with and discuss your practice with colleagues, and creating schools that are real communities with shared decision making are just a few. This is where our energies should go. This is REAL education reform. It's not to be found with the man behind the curtain.

The Lessons of History and the Save Our Schools March

2011-08-01T10:20:00.000-07:00

The Lessons of History and the Save Our Schools March

Mark Naison

Fordham University

The Save Our Schools Conference and March was the most inspiring single protest I have attended in the last thirty years. To see public school teachers from more than 40 states rally in defense of their maligned profession, and to hear the most important education scholars of our time tear apart the business/testing model driving education policy in the country, made me feel that I was part of a movement that was not only going to change school policies, but reinvigorate justice organizing in a nation that had lost its way.

At the “Activism” panel at the Save Our Schools Conference, I had an epiphany which I want to share, not only with education activists, but all people committed to progressive political change. And it had to do with how we should relate to initiatives such as Teach For America and charter schools, which began with a progressive mission, but now are deluged with corporate money and seem to be committed to the business/testing paradigm which is encouraging privatization of public education and degrading the teaching profession.

And my epiphany was this. If historic circumstances have moved these initiatives to the right, different historical circumstances can move them back to the left. And it could happen pretty quickly. If the current debt ceiling deal goes through, working class and poor communities are going to suffer levels of hardship unseen in our lifetimes, making the prospect of schools, reformed or not, elevating people out of poverty seem improbable, if not absurd. Cuts in food support, housing grants, health care, youth recreation and college access grants, all part of the debt reduction formula, are going to have heart rending effects on students in working class communities, putting incredible pressure on every school and teacher in affected communities.

To think that Teach for America Corps members and charter school teachers and administrators will be permanently immune to the rapidly escalating pain and hardship of students and families they work with defies common sense. Many will start to rethink the business/testing model of pedagogy they have been exposed to; some will become justice fighters for the communities they are working in. And when that happens, progressives, whether in teachers unions or not, should be right there with them, encouraging them to participate in the broad struggle for democracy in America and to use their position as educators to do help organize beleaguered communities to rise up in protest and demand a fair share of the nation’s wealth.

An impossible dream? Not really. Something like this happened 70 years ago during the heyday of the industrial labor movement During the prosperous 1920’s, the nation’s largest corporations such as Ford Motor Company, General Electric, and US Steel, organized company unions and employee representation plans to prevent their workers from joining trade unions. The strategy was so successful that no one major industrial corporation was unionized when the Depression struck.

But Depression conditions, leading to 1/3 of the labor force unemployed, and 1/3 working part time when Franklin Roosevelt assumed the Presidency, produced a rapid change in working class attitudes. Organizers for industrial unions, largely ignored by workers during the 1920’s found workers receptive to their message in the three most important open shot industries- steel, automobile and electronics- and began to quietly infiltrate company unions. By the time

the CIO was founded in 1935, company unions in the automobile and electronics industry began to affiliate en masse with the new CIO unions, giving them an immediate base in the heart of America’s largest companies. The great sit down strikes in the automobile industry, which led to the unionization of US Steel and well as General Motors, would not have happened

had not company unions in the automobile industry become part of the CIO and the same dynamic occurred in the electrical industry, where both Westinghouse and General Electric ended being organized by CIO unions.

If company unions, supported by the most powerful and wealthy corporations of that era, could move in a progressive direction in response to rapidly deteriorating economic conditions, there is no reason to assume that the same thing could not happen to charter schools and Teach for American in the coming years, as the American economy goes into free fall and working class communities experience unspeakable hardship.

Given this, it behooves us, a progressive organizers and justice fighters, to keep lines of communication open to people in these organizations and be there to work with them if they

join us in resistance to policies which concentrate economic sacrifice among America’s poor.

Anything less than this would be selling our movement short. To stop the political juggernaut moving this nation to the right, we need to mobilize the broadest coalition of activists and organizers, including people we may have sharply disagreed with in the past.

Mark Naison

August 2, 2011

Notorious Phd’s “Achievement Rap” A Tribute to Those Who Invented the Achievement Gap

2011-07-27T13:58:00.000-07:00

Notorious Phd’s “Achievement Rap”

A Tribute to Those Who Invented the Achievement Gap

While some people call “the achievement gap”

Inspired me to write an achievement rap

Exposing the hustlers who rule our nation

Who’ve hijacked the train and left us at the station

They’ve exported our jobs, treated us like fools

Now they are poised to take over our schools

And run them for profit, like they do our jails

So they make up some lies to say that we’ve failed

When the failure is theirs, cause they’ve stolen our wealth

Whatever is good, they’ve reserved for themselves

Now they’re saying that we hold the whole nation back

If we don’t pass the tests their companies fast track

When reality is they’re the ones who need testing

To see in whose pockets school profits are resting

From Murdoch to Klein, from Gates to Rhee

The achievement gap hustle is one big crime spree.

My Problem With Charter Schools-Too Many Are"Bad Neighborhood Citizens"

2011-07-22T06:58:00.001-07:00

My Problem with Charter Schools- Too Many Are "Bad Neighborhood Citizens"

I am not in principle against charter schools. Experimenting with new models of school organization can be a good thing, and giving parents more options within the public school system can promote an atmosphere conducive to better teaching and learning

But in a society dominated by trickle down economics,where there is little commitment to improve public education as a whole, charter schools have not fulfilled their original promise. With rare exceptions, they have functioned as though their success requires the failure of neighboring institutions, refusing to work cooperatively with traditional public schools when they share a building, pushing out or excluding special needs, elll children, and those marked as "behavior problems" and embracing what amounts to a two tier styemm in inner city schools- one favored and amply funded- the other looked on with suspcion and contempt

Charter schools can lead to improvements in the quality of education, but only if they embrae all children and try to work with and support public schools they share space and neighborhoods with,not quarantine them as if they were carriers of a contagious disease

Right now, based on what I have seen in the Bronx, and other parts of New YorkCity, charter schools have not improved the quality of education in inner city neighorhoods. The best have supplied a small number of families with better educational options. But on the whole, charter schools have been "bad neighborhood citizens," viewing everyone outside their ranks as a threat to their educational mission,and doing everything possible to "stack the deck" against traditional public schools by indirectly or overtly excluding students who might not test well or be compliant learners

This "us againnst the neighborhood" is the last thing New York, and the nation's immigrant and working class communities need asthey find themselves starved of resources by budget cuts at the city, state and federal level

Until charter schools start fighting for ALL the children and families in the neighborhoods they are located in, rather than the 10 percent enrolled in their institutions, they will be unable to make a positive contribution to the struggle for racial and economic equality in the United States

Mark Naison
July 22,2011

Time to Create A Progessive Caucus in Teach for America?

2011-07-18T16:43:00.000-07:00

Although the leadership of TFA is closely allied with forces seeking to privatize public education, and use high stakes testing as a vehicle to rate teachers and administrators, there are many TFA Corps members, past and present, who believe that racism, poverty and regressive taxation, not failing schools, are the primary causes of neighborhood distress and economic
stagnation in the United States.

Perhaps it is time that these people, who now number in the thousands, organize a progressive caucus in TFA to fight within the organizaiton to reduce its emphasis on high stakes testing, encourage TFA corps members to make teaching their lifetime career, and to have TFA
openly repudiate "trickle down economics" and support the redistribution of wealth through progressive taxation..

I for one would be willing to use all resources at my disposal to help such a caucus get started, and I know of many other progressive academics
around the country who would do the same,

TFA Corps members and alumni who think such a caucus is worth discussing should feel free to contact me via my Fordham ( naison@fordham.edu) or personal ( mnaison@aol.com) email

Sincerely

Mark D Naison
Professor of African American Studies and History
Forham University
Principal Investigator, Bronx African American History Proect

A Bronx Tale: Questions for Those Who Argue That Failing Schools Cause Urban Decay

2011-07-11T04:52:00.000-07:00

A Bronx Tale: Questions for Those Who Argue Failing Schools Cause Urban Decay

Mark Naison

Fordham University

It has become fashionable for the Right Wing of the School Reform Movement, along with some progressives, to argue that failing schools are a major cause of the decay and stagnation in inner city neighborhoods.

As a historian of the Bronx, who has traced the borough’s development from the 1930’s through the present, I would like to raise a few questions about this formulation, based on important episodes in the Bronx history.

First, when factory owners in the Bronx began closing their operations in 1950’s and 1960’s, or moving them to other states or other countries, did they do so because the schools of the Bronx were failing and the places they were moving their operations to ( e.g. South Carolina, Alabama, Haiti, the Dominican Republic) had better schools and a better educated labor force? The resulting job losses devastated the Bronx’s economy, but they were the result of factory owners quest for cheaper labor, not for a better educated labor force.

Second, when banks and insurance companies began redlining the Bronx, and landlords in the borough started burning their buildings to collect insurance money ( a phenomenon which reached epidemic proportions from the late 60’s through the late 70’s) did they do so because the Bronx public schools were performing poorly or did they do so because the job losses referred to in Question 1 made it difficult for South Bronx tenants to pay their rent?

Third, when the city of New York during the 1975 fiscal crisis, decided to eliminate music programs in the public schools, and shut down the after school centers and night centers which had been fixtures in every public school in the city since the early 1950’s, did they do so to punish the public schools for failing to educate their students properly, or because banks refused to lend money to keep the city government afloat unless they made drastic reductions in youth services no longer deemed “essential?”

Fourth, when a crack epidemic swept through the Bronx from the mid 1980’s through the mid

1990’s, did it do so because the schools were failing to do their job, or because young people in the Bronx gravitated to the underground economy because there were no legal job opportunities available and because youth recreation programs had been devastated by budget cuts?

Presented in chronological order, these were the four great tragedies that led the Bronx, once a place where upwardly mobile Black and Latino families moved to in search of better housing, better schools and safer communities ( from the 1930’s through the 1950’s) become a international symbol of urban decay and urban violence.

Can anyone seriously argue that” failing schools” were the major cause for this chain of disasters, or were the causes to be found in global movements of capital, investment decisions by banks, landlords and local businesses, and government policies that took resources and services out of Bronx neighborhoods and Bronx institutions, including public schools

Mark Naison

July 11, 2011

Why I Am Wary of Geoffrey Canada as a Social Commentator

2011-07-09T06:20:00.000-07:00

Why I am Wary of Geoffrey Canada As a Social Commentator
Dr Mark Naison
Fordham University

I have been wary of Geoffrey Canada as a social commentator ever since he published a book called "Fist,Knife, Stick Gun" whose first section describes the Morrisania section of the South Bronx in the 1950's and 1960's as a hell hole, a place plagued with violence and negativity. Violence and negativity there certainly was, but there were also great neighborhood sports programs, vibrant churches, great music and arts programs in the public schools, and many mentors and "old heads" who helped guide young people away from trouble. Canada's grim vision of this predominantly Black section of the Bronx, contradicted by liiterally scores of interviews I did with people who lived in the same community, was a disturbing example of literary "tunnel vision"- an author's propensity to make his personal experience universal. By contrast, read Allen Jones "The Rat That Got Away: a Bronx Memoir", set South Bronx housing projects and neighborhoods in the same time period, whch recognizes that the same community could contain hustlers, political activists, striving students, gang leaders, protective parents, drug dealers and inspired teachers and mentors.

Today, Canada's seems to apply the same tunnel vision to education when he views failing schools as the bane of struggling neighborhoods and says that private business would never tolerate such failures. But such a comment could only be made by someone who doesn't examine the role of the private sector in America's inner city neighborhoods,, which was to shut down operations, and move out when neighborhood conditions and global economic trends made them unprofitable. While public schools in these communities remained open,, factories shut own, banks closed their doors,,insurance companies and banks redlined the areas, landlords abandoned and burned properties, and whole business districts disappeared.. In many cases, it was neighorhood public schools, hardpressed and occasionally disorderly as they were ( read Janet Mayer's wonderful book "As Bad As They Say: Three Decades of Teaching in the Bronx") were the one place where young people could find support and inspiration when they were abanoned by private capital, and savage by government cutbacks.

To now hold them up to scrutiny as failures in an otherwise successful society can only be done by erasing what has happened in inner city America in the last 40 years. Global economic trends and private investment decisions, coupled with government policies which siphoned wealth upward, were the major factors which destabilized inner city neighborhoods, not teachers unions and poorly run public schools

Exposing Education Reform's Big Lie: It Is Jobs and Political Mobilization, Not Schools, Which Lift People Out of Poverty

2011-07-06T13:38:00.000-07:00

Exposing Education Reform’s Big Lie: It is Jobs and Political Mobilization, Not Schools Which Lift People Out of Poverty

Dr Mark Naison

Fordham University

Once again, a major cheating scandal has been uncovered in an urban school district. What happened in Houston ten years ago ( but not before it’s allegedly miraculous test score gains helped spawn No Child Left Behind) has happened in Atlanta. A state investigation has uncovered systematic falsification of test scores by teachers, principals, and district administrators in a district where careers could be made or broken by those results, leading to the resignation of the district superintendant and potential suspensions, and possibly criminal indictments, or scores of teachers and principals

To regard what took place in Atlanta as an exception to an otherwise unblemished record of probity in administering standardized tests would be like regarding Bernie Madoff’s ponzi scheme as an aberration in an otherwise healthy financial system. In each instance, unscrupulous individuals took the basic tenets of a flawed system to an extreme. In the case of Madoff, he provided clients with high returns based on non-existent investments, rather than flawed ones ( subprime mortgages packed into Triple A bonds); in the case of Atlanta, officials decided to invent impossible results rather than browbeat and terminate teachers and principals when they didn’t achieve them.

Let us be clear- the Atlanta scandal is the logical outcome of a national movement, supported by government and private capital, to radically improve school performance and hopefully lift people out of poverty, through a centrally imposed and rigidly administered combination of privatization, competition, material incentives and high stakes testing. You would think that a movement which commands such widespread support, and extraordinary resources, has a history of proven examples, either in the US, or other nations, to guide its implementation.

But the truth is that there is not a single time in American history- with the exception of the ten years following the end of slavery- where you can point to educational reform as a factor which lifted a group out of poverty, or allowed an important minority group to improve its status relative to the majority population. The kind of “heavy” lifting required to do that, with that one exception of the Reconstruction Era during which activists founded schools for a people once denied literacy, has come, not from top down educational reform, but from bottom up political mobilization, coupled with changes in labor markets which radically improve earning opportunities for the group in question.

Let us look at the one moment in the 20th Century where the African American population not only experienced a rapid improvement in its economic status, but improved its status relative to whites, the time between 1940 and 1950. During those ten years, black per capital income rose from 44% of the white total to 57%. This income growth was not only a result of wartime prosperity, and Black migration from the rural to urban areas, but a result of the protest movement launched by A Phillip Randolph in 1941 to demand equal treatment for Blacks in the emerging war economy, as well as the enrollment of Black workers in industrial unions. Randolph’s march on Washington Movement didn’t lead to the desegregation of the armed forces, but it did lead President Roosevelt to issue a proclamation requiring non-discriminatory employment in defense industries and to create a Commission to enforce this decree. While huge pockets of discrimination remained, African Americans, women as well as men, found work in factories throughout the nation producing ships, aircraft, and motorized vehicles and were enrolled in the unions that represented the bulk of workers involved in war production.

In Detroit, in Los Angeles, in Youngstown, in Pittsburgh, in Richmond California, Black workers, many of them newly arrived in the South were earning incomes four to five times what they would have made as sharecroppers or tenant farmers and had union protection in their places of employment. This economic revolution spawned a political revolution, with nearly 500,000 African Americans joining the NAACP, and a cultural one as well, with rhythm and blues becoming the music of choice for the emerging black working class, inspiring clubs and radio stations and small record labels to cater to this rapidly growing black consumer market.

Though educational opportunities for blacks did improve in this period, it was changes in the job market, fought for, and consolidated by grass roots political movements, reinforced by strong labor unions, that were the primary engine of change.

There is a lesson here that activists and educators should consider. If you want to improve economic conditions in Black and working class neighborhoods, than it would make more sense to raise incomes, either by unionizing low wage industries, or demanding that tax revenues be directed into job creation, rather than trying to legislate magical improvements in schools based on results on standardized tests.

Children living in impoverished communities cannot be magically vaulted into the middle class by pounding information into their heads and testing them on it relentlessly . However, their parents, and older brothers and sisters, can be lifted into the middle class through jobs that offer decent incomes and security coupled with opportunity for personal advancement through education.

School Reform is the American Elite’s preferred response to poverty and inequality, a strategy that requires no sacrifice, no redistribution nor any self-organization by America’s disfranchised groups. Every day, it is proving itself a dismal failure

It’s time that a new strategy be launched that focuses on jobs, economic opportunity and the redistribution of wealth, one linking civil rights groups, unions, and people living in working class and poor communities who have watched wealth and opportunity be siphoned out of their communities by the very wealthy- the same people, ironically, who are the biggest supporters of School Reform!

Mark Naison

Why I ain’t ain’t marching anymore. (with apologies to Phil Ochs)

2011-06-29T10:06:00.000-07:00

The last and only time I marched on Washington D.C. was the Moratorium to end the Vietnam War in November 1969. Hundreds of thousands marched through the cold streets of Washington D.C. while FBI agents took pictures of us as we shouted “Peace Now” and waved our flags and signs. My friend and I had constructed a giant (we thought it novel) Peace Flag that was eventually used up on the speaker’s platform. We were so proud. We slept on the gym floor of a local parish church. When it was time to leave, at first we couldn’t find our bus to go back to NY, but eventually we did. Frankly, it is all a blur but a well worthwhile one.

I was not a joiner, a marcher or a protester. I was not much of an activist either. I had friends who were deeply involved in the movement but I was happy to get involved in conversations and do my little part to convince people, one at a time, that the War was wrong. However, when friends were deployed I felt it important to do more. So I marched.

Here we are 42 years later. I will march on Washington this July because again we must stop a war. This time it is the war against teachers, students, and education. Over the past 10 years what started as an intervention has become a full-scale assault. The parallels with Vietnam are astounding.

Now as well as then presidential decisions to begin by giving assistance in “the battlefield” became congressional acts to fund, arm and send troops. Corporations were enlisted to fund and manufacture the goods to fight. Escalation became the operating word.

This time I was content to argue against standardized testing, No Child Left Behind, and most recently, Race To The Top. This time I pointed out not how a military-industrial complex gained control of foreign policy, but how a new education-industrial complex had seized control of education policy, for their own profit.

In addition, what seemed like a good idea, TFA, had morphed into what I now call a 5^th branch of the armed forces. At first it innocuously sent advisors in small numbers to educational “battlefields”. But now its power and numbers escalate as we idly sit by.

Not for nothing, but TFA recruits young men and women in a not so unfamiliar way. “Join the Army- Be All You Can be? Join the Marines- Looking For A Few Good Men? Join the Navy- It's Not Just a Job, It's An Adventure? Join the Air Force- Aim High? TFA- This could be the best career decision you make?”

TFA recruits are also thrust into a war zone, yet less prepared than my friends were 42 years ago. Often misled and naive 20 somethings, they are unarmed when they go to war to defeat the enemies of education: poverty, poor training, poor leadership, and a host of other saboteurs.

So now 42 years later I go to Washington to march again. But this time I go as more than a marcher. I go as an organizer, presenter, and activist. I do all this because the Chief Executive, Congress, and an Industrial Complex including TFA threaten the avocation I have loved for 41 years.

I march because of the high school kids and programs I see threatened by this assault.

I march because of what this war on education will do to my former colleagues and the new teachers with whom I work.

I march to teach how good high schools can be if we let professionals do the work.

I march to fix how we train new teachers (traditional and TFA) to be better able to fight the real war they and our students face day in day out.

I march to get TFA to change; to work with traditional teacher training institutions; to stop vilifying veteran teachers and actually recruit them to train their recruits; to help us recruit top talent to stay in teaching; to become "lifers". I march to get TFA to listen.

I march for change.

I march for reform.

I march for academic freedom.

I march for curricula and methodologies to develop the best-informed, critical thinking, problem solving students in the world.

Most of all I march for our kids.

What's a guy to think?

2011-06-28T11:12:00.000-07:00

I haven't been here in a while. I've been teaching a summer school course to traditional Grad School Ed newbies who aren't TFAs. I also just finished working with my 10 "graduating" 2011 cohort TFA's as well as my returning 3 from the 2012 cohort. I've been helping to prepare the SOS MARCH AND CALL TO ACTION CONFERENCE AND RALLY (http://www.saveourschoolsmarch.org/) and reading a lot of blogs, articles, and comments as they float past my internet accounts.

So what's new? Nothing positive. That's what irks me. There are very few positive statements out there. Everyone is shouting at everyone else. No one seems to listen. Even worse, no one seems to want to. Here I am teaching my future teachers to listen to and respect the points of view of others, and here are all of us "educators" doing the opposite. The problem is that many of those I respect have given in to the reasonableness of being unreasonable.

Name calling. Moving further from a reasonable solution. Becoming more entrenched in a position. Giving a Union or Administration "title" to points of view then refusing to listen to them because of the author. These are the saddening trends I see.

Truthfully, it is disheartening. As I attempt to figure out how to approach one of the workshops I am to plan with others about TFA and Teacher Training, I find myself between a rock and a hard place. As I have said before, at first I was happy that there would be an influx of our best and brightest into teaching. We hadn't had that kind of response from high achieving students in decades. Before anyone overreacts, history tells us that not every reformer became a teacher in the 60's and very early 70's for teaching's sake alone. Many men came to escape the draft. Women came because other doors were closed to them. Alas, there is no longer a draft and women now can venture into so many other formerly closed professions. Thus there was a decline in the percentage of top students who became teachers. One only has to look at college records to see.

Anyway, back to the issue. Then TFA became a behemoth and with such stature became a self promoting monster that drank its own Kool-Aid.. No need to get into all of that. You've read it all. What does that have to do with the 19 TFA's I have worked with directly. I see them as kids; students. I treat hem with all the respect I would any student. It bothers me that they are lumped in to the BIG TFA TENT and cursed at without being known as human beings often by the same people who would scorn those who curse at the kids I taught in High School either because they were teenagers or minorities or both.

What I found with, a few exceptions, were kids thrust into a situation they were not prepared to face. TFA gave them little help but did one thing. It made them dependent on TFA. Come to our centers. Come use our material (As bad as a lot of it is, there are some good things too.) Come hang out with supervisors as young as you. But they spend a minimum of 6 hours in schools every day that most teachers try to find their way out of. Most work for ineffective, at best, school leaders and with disheartened worn down colleagues who often resent their naive and youthful energy. Have we forgotten when we were that energetic and how some of our older colleagues made us feel? Have we grown so callous that we throw stones at those who are more like we were than we care to think? Why?

I can't get mad at kids who I've seen cry. (Oh and there are some who call them crybabies.) Big shots. They've forgotten what it's like to be naive and thrust into the kinds of situations they're in. Those of us who came from poor/working class urban families had it easier to adjust. Of course. We had no culture shock. But if you are suburban? Come on now!

Back in 1974 my fiancee and I worked in a summer fresh air fund camp near NYC. We were recruited by a colleague from the Bronx high school where I worked. She was a suburban college grad. These were tough kids that she was totally unprepared for despite my advice before we arrived. She cried. She adjusted. She became successful there and in her future role as a clinical psychologist. So when I see these well-meaning kids cry I have empathy for them. Sadly the same empathy we want them to have as teachers for their students has disappeared for them as individuals because of the distain we hold for the organization that recruited them.

Not for nothing, but TFA recruits in a not so unfamiliar way. Join the Army- Be All You Can be? Join the Marines- Looking For A Few Good Men? Join the Navy- It's Not Just a Job, It's An Adventure? Join the Air Force- Aim High?

"For approximately a century, the United States military has utilized slogans to attract recruits. O’Guinn, Allen and Semenik (200, p.380) define a slogan as “a short phrase...used to help establish an image, identity, or position for...an organization...to increase memorability.” As is the case with several slogans employed by the United States military, a good slogan can become an integral part of a brand’s image and personality. Act as a shorthand identification for the brand. Provide information on important brand benefits. Provide continuity across different media and between advertising campaigns. Bring about thematic integrated marketing communications. (O’Guinn et al., p. 380). Given the mixed reception that various military recruitment slogans have received over the years, an examination of the appeals utilized in the slogans may be instructive. A number of models have been developed to explain motivation. These models include Expectancy Theory, Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, Aldefer’s ERG Theory, and McClellands’s Acquired Needs Theory."

Then our recruits are thrust into a war zone. Not exactly what many bargained for. Many were misled naive teenagers or young 20 somethings. Often they join up to climb a non-military career ladder. TFA is nothing more than an unofficial branch of the armed forces, except their recruits are unarmed when they go to war trying to defeat the enemies of education: poverty, poor training, poor leadership, and a host of other saboteurs. Do we try to reform the armed services by chastising our troops? Unfortunately we did during Vietnam. We learned our lesson from that regarding this generation's troops involved in 2 unpopular wars.

We must get TFA to change. We must get TFA to work with traditional teacher training institutions. We must get them to stop vilifying veteran teachers and actually recruit them to train their recruits. We must get TFA to help us recruit top talent to stay in teaching; to become "lifers". We must get TFA to listen. But we have to work with our TFA recruits to make them better professionals. We must influence them to stay, and become lifers. But will TFA listen if we don't? Will we listen if they don't? If neither side listens, then what? What if everybody continues to vilify everyone else instead of working together to come to solutions?

Then we lose more potentially good teachers from every source we recruit them from, traditional, or TFA.

Sadly, I ponder.

High Stakes Testing- A Brilliant Strategy to Make Working Class Youth Disengage From School

2011-06-28T09:20:00.000-07:00

High Stakes Testing- A Brilliant Strategy to Make Working Class Youth Disengage From School

Dr Mark Naison

Fordham University

If I was going to figure out a plan to get working class youth to disengage from school, here would be my major components. First, I would make students sit at their desks all day and force them to constantly memorize materials to prepare for tests. Second, I would take away recess and eliminate gym. Third, I would cut out arts projects and hands on science experiments. Fourth, I would limit the number of school trips. Fifth, I would take away extracurricular activities like bands, and dance teams and talent shows and reduce the number of athletic teams, so that student’s energies could be exclusively concentrated on strictly academic tasks.

But wait a minute, isn’t that exactly what the dominant Education Reform movement in the United States is doing, from Secretary of Education Arne Duncan on down. Aren’t policy makers forcing schools to add more and more standardized tests and threatening teachers and principals with mass firings if their scores on those tests don’t go up, with the results that anything that isn’t test driven is eliminated from the school culture?

Yes that’s what’s going on in education, all across the country. Starting with No Child Left Behind and continuing through Race to the Top, we are hell bent on making students from working class and poor families economically competitive with their wealthier peers by increasing their test scores and improving their graduation rates. And the way to do that, we believe, is to make them devote more and more of their time to acquiring basic literacy and then translating those skills into passing standardized tests in every subject.

But in formulating this strategy, which from the outside appears to be sensible and rational, we erase the world view of the very students in whose interests claim to be acting. We treat working class students as passive recipients of a service, who will do whatever we tell them to, rather than critical thinkers, and impassioned, sometimes impulsive historical actors, who respond to school policies based on their culture, values and their sense of how those policies effect their short term and long term interests.

As someone who grew up in a tough working class neighborhood, and has worked in similar neighborhoods as a coach, community organizer and teacher, I can assure you that young people in these communities are anything but passive when it comes to how they respond to externally imposed authority. Although some children in those communities accept authority unquestioningly, many more make it a matter of pride to challenge and test adults outside their families who claim power of them and get respect from their peers for doing so. No teacher, or coach, or social worker assigned to teach “in the hood” gets a free pass from that testing, which sometimes reaches the proportions of hazing. Whatever respect you get has to be earned.

And what goes for teachers or community workers goes for schools. Most people in poor and working class neighborhoods do not see schools as working in their or their children’s interests. Their own experiences with schools have often not been that positive and their attitudes of skepticism and even hostility readily transfer to their children. Overcoming that ingrained skepticism not only requires efforts by individual teachers, it requires efforts by the entire school to make students feel that it is a place where they are respected, where their voice can be heard and their culture validated, and where they can actually have some fun. The best inner city schools I know not only make sure they maintain a welcoming atmosphere, but try to create a festive one, with music and the arts being part of every public meeting, with sports events being highlighted, and where student, parent and community input is incorporated into every dimension of the school culture.

Now enter the Era of Test Mania, with administrators and teachers panicked they will lose their jobs if they do not produce continuous results on one high stakes test after another. Forget the school being a place where student and community creativity can be validated. Every bit of time, and energy and emotion must be devoted to test prep. Students have to sit still and listen, and memorize and regurgitate large bodies of information. Time for self expression disappears. Time for physical activity is erased. The school becomes a place filled stress and fear.

Some students will conform, and may even pass all the tests that they are given, but just as many- a good portion of them boys- will rebel, either by disrupting classes, challenging the teacher, vandalizing the school or not going to school altogether. There is no way that working class kids like I was or a lot of the kids that I coached and taught over the years, are going to sit in school and obediently memorize material if you don’t give them some physical outlets, some chance to move and express themselves, and some opportunity to speak out on issues important to them. When you are brought up to “take no …. from anyone” and stand up for yourself, you are not about to allow teachers and school administrators to humiliate you, intimidate you, and silence your rebellious spirit. In neighborhoods where respect of peers is the key to survival, where the underground economy beckons, and where many people, in the words of Big Pun “would rather sell reefer than do Pizza delivery,” schools which try to discipline students, rather than engage them, will find they are in for trouble

The vision of School Reform currently dominant in our country, where teachers and principals browbeat and harass students to pass tests in order to protect their own jobs, is going to blow up in our face.

And though teacher protest will be an important component of the resistance, it will be student disengagement and violence which will ultimately put this phase of Reform to rest

Mark Naison

June 28, 2011

Teach for America and Me: A Failed Courtship

2011-06-22T11:54:00.001-07:00

Teach for America and Me: A Failed Courtship

Dr Mark Naison

Fordham University

Every spring without fail, a Teach for America recruiter approaches me and asks if they can come to my classes and recruit students for TFA, and every year, without fail, I give them the same answer: “Sorry.

Until Teach for America changes its objective to training lifetime educators and raises the time commitment to five years rather than two, I will not allow TFA to recruit in my classes. The idea of sending talented students into schools in high poverty areas and then after two years, encouraging them to pursue careers in finance, law, and business in the hope that they will then advocate for educational equity rubs me the wrong way”

It was not always thus. Ten years ago, when a Teach for America recruiter first approached me, I was enthusiastic about the idea of recruiting my most idealistic and talented students for work in high poverty schools and allowed the TFA representative to make presentations in my classes, which are filled with Urban Studies and African American Studies majors. Several of my best students applied, all of whom wanted to become teachers, and several of whom came from the kind of high poverty neighborhoods TFA proposed to send its recruits to teach in

Not one of them was accepted! Enraged, I did a little research and found that TFA had accepted only four of the nearly 100 Fordham students who applied. I become even more enraged when I found out from the New York Times that TFA had accepted 44 out of a hundred applicants from Yale that year. Something was really wrong here if an organization who wanted to serve low income communities rejected every applicant from Fordham who came from those communities and accepted half of the applicants from an Ivy League school where very few of the students, even students of color, come from working class or poor families

Since that time, the percentage of Fordham students accepted has marginally increased, but the organization has done little to win my confidence that it is seriously committed to recruiting people willing to make a lifetime commitment to teaching and administering schools in high poverty areas.

Never, in its recruiting literature, has Teach for America described teaching as the most valuable professional choice that an idealistic, socially conscious person can make, and encourage the brightest students to make teaching their permanent career. Indeed, the organization does everything in its power to make joining Teach for America seem a like a great pathway to success in other, higher paying professions. Three years ago, the TFA recruiter plastered the Fordham campus with flyers that said “Learn how joining TFA can help you gain admission to Stanford Business School.” To me, the message of that flyer was “use teaching in high poverty areas a stepping stone to a career in business.” It was not only profoundly disrespectful of every person who chooses to commit their life to the teaching profession, it advocated using students in high poverty areas as guinea pigs for an experiment in “resume padding” for ambitious young people

In saying these things, let me make it clear that my quarrel is not with the many talented young people who join Teach for America, some of whom decide to remain in the communities they work in and some of whom become lifetime educators. It is with the leaders of the organization who enjoy the favor with which TFA is regarded with captains of industry, members of Congress, the media, and the foundation world, and have used this access to move rapidly to positions as heads of local school systems, executives in Charter school companies, and educational analysts in management consulting firms. The organization”s facile circumvention of the grinding, difficult but profoundly empowering work of teaching and administering schools has created the illusion that there are quick fixes , not only for failing schools, but for deeply entrenched patterns of poverty and inequality. No organization has been more complicit that TFA in the demonization of teachers and teachers unions, and no organization has provided more “shock troops” for Education Reform strategies which emphasize privatization and high stakes testing. Michelle Rhee, a TFA recruit, is the poster child for such policies, but she is hardly alone.
Her counterparts can be found in New Orleans ( where they led the movement toward a system dominated by charter school) in New York ( where they play an important role in the Bloomberg

Education bureaucracy) and in many other cities.

And that elusive goal of educational equity. How well has it advanced in the years TFA has been operating? Not only has there been little progress, in the last fifteen years, in narrowing the test score gap by race and class, but income inequality has become greater, in those years, than any time in modern American history. TFA has done nothing to promote income redistribution, reduce the size of the prison population, encourage social investment in high poverty neighborhoods, or revitalize arts and science and history in the nation’s schools. It’s main accomplishment has been to marginally increase the number of talented people entering the teaching profession, but only a small fraction of those remain in the schools to which they were originally sent.

But the most objectionable aspect of Teach for America –other than its contempt for lifetime educators- is its willingness to create another pathway to wealth and power for those already privileged, in the rapidly expanding Educational Industrial Complex, which offers numerous careers for the ambitious and well connected. An organization which began by promoting idealism and educational equity has become, to all too many of its recruits, a vehicle for profiting from the misery of America’s poor.

Mark Naison

June 22 2011

Brilliant Critique of White House Education Policy by Bronx Teacher Jenna Schlosbon

2011-06-19T03:14:00.000-07:00

From Barack Obama's Facebook Page
by Jenna Schlosbon on Saturday, June 18, 2011 at 9:43pm
Shame on you, Barack Obama. I voted for you. I campaigned for you. I donated to you AND raised money for you. When I heard you speak about the problem of educational inequality in this country at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, I felt inspired. This is an issue that has been extraordinarily important to me for some time now, and I believed that you actually intended to do something about it. But instead, you continue to support the high stakes testing agenda and business-like competition among our public schools.

You and your Secretary of Education support tying teacher tenure/hiring/firing to standardized test scores. In so doing, you reduce children, particularly children of color who are living in poverty, to data points, forcing us to reduce our curriculum to incessant test prep for fear of a)having our schools shut down or b)losing our jobs. This is NOT education. This is fear-based. This puts a tremendous amount of stress on teachers and students alike. This is rote. This strips joy, curiosity, and creativity from learning. What about socio-emotional development? What about varied learning needs and learning styles? We need to educate the whole child, which these policies will not allow us to do. (And by the way, President Obama, Sidwell Friends, where you send your daughters, has stated that they do not believe tying teacher pay to student test scores is an effective measure of learning, evaluation, or progress.)

By upholding said policies you are just as bad as Klein, Bloomberg, and all of these other milllionaire/billionaire pro-corporate "education reformers" who are "reforming" (destroying) our public schools in an effort to create something that benefits the corporate structure which controls this country: a mass proletariat who can unquestioningly obey, follow directions, and complete rote tasks INSTEAD of citizens who can question, or dare I say challenge the status quo, formulate an opinion, think critically and creatively, or have any semblance of a moral compass.

We need freedom from high-stakes standardized tests and the freedom to make our curriculum more relevant to our students' lives, not only in an effort to engage them, but to show them how to be active citizens in their own communities, and perhaps even empower them to improve their communities.

President Obama, improving our public schools does not mean ridding schools of tenured, experienced educators and filling them with droves of 22-year-olds (via TFA and other similar programs) as is the trend under current leadership in New York City. This only creates an atmosphere of chaos, confusion, stress, and eventual burnout and teacher turnover as these young teachers do not have the support of older veteran role models to show them the way. Although filling schools with young, un-tenured teachers, burning them out, and then cycling through the next batch may be smart financially (new teachers are the cheapest labor), high teacher-turnover leads to further instability in our urban public schools which does very little to help impoverished students who, very often, already lack stability and structure at home.

Stop scapegoating and punishing teachers who do the best they can with the limited time and resources they have, and address the real reasons why our public school children, particularly urban public school children of color, are behind their wealthier white peers: poverty. Poverty affects students' nutrition and health, supervision and structure at home (which in turn affects attendance and homework completion/studying), living conditions...both inside and outside the home, parental education level, and these are only just a few examples. Our students' families need living wage jobs. Tax policy must be adjusted. No self-respecting, educated, hard-working professional can withstand being blamed day in and day out for the wounds of poverty that directly affect student learning and/or having his or her job threatened year after year due to "numbers" on these innane standardized tests.

Mr. Obama, you need to set the tone for real education reform, not the faux-"reform" that these non-educator millionaires are propagating. End the teacher-blaming. Let teachers teach. Stop supporting privatization, union busting, and charter school takeovers, and start supporting our teachers and students by acknowledging that poverty impedes academic performance and actually discussing ways to address poverty in America. Tax policy and labor policy are two places to start.

Until you remove Arne Duncan as Secretary of Education and/or begin to acknowledge that the high-stakes testing business model is flawed and detrimental to our schools, I don't know that I can give you my vote in 2012, and educators across the country agree.

You will be hearing from me again and thousands upon thousands of educators, students, and other supporters at the Save Our Schools March on July 30th in Washington D.C.

My Trip to A Rally Against School Budget Cuts At Lehman High School

2011-06-11T06:51:00.000-07:00

My Trip to A Rally Against School Budget Cuts At Lehman High School: Thoughts on Neighborhood, Teaching and School Reform

Professor Mark Naison

Fordham University

On Friday, June 10 left my office at Fordham around 2 PM to drive to a rally against education budget cuts at Herbert Lehman HS in the East Bronx, where I was slated to speak. I took the Bronx River Parkway South at Fordham Road and got off at East Tremont Avenue and began a two and a half mile drive through the Bronx on East Tremont through crowded, vital neighborhoods which most residents of Manhattan and Upscale Brooklyn will never see.

On streets clogged with cars, trucks, city buses, gypsy cabs, and school buses, I observed a social and architectural landscape which resembled the Brooklyn of my youth, with the faces changed to reflect New York’s current demographic profile. There wasn’t a single luxury high rise in sight. The housing stock consisted of two and three family houses, some brick, some wood covered with aluminum siding, and apartment buildings ranging from 4 story walk ups to the twenty plus eight to ten story buildings in the huge Parkchester development built in the 1940’s that are now middle income co-ops. The commercial strip was vibrant, filled with diners, furniture stores, used car lots and body shops,, and rows of stores ranging from nail places and hair salons to travel agencies, ethnic restaurants and banks. There were several schools along the way, public and Catholic ( including St Raymond’s HS) and school buses everywhere. The sidewalks were as crowded as the streets, filled with school kids, mothers with young children , elderly people taking a stroll or going to the diner, and strong looking men loading trucks and making deliveries. But what was most striking is that there were no visible signs of great poverty or great wealth. There were no vacant lots and storefronts, no food lines outside storefront churches, no idle young men hanging outside bodegas; but neither were there health food stores, sushi bars, and hip young professionals sitting at tables outside cafes. What you had were crowds of working class and middle class New Yorkers of multiple ages, colors and nationalities, some Black, some Latino, some South Asian, some white, going about their business purposefully on a hot Friday afternoon. To an old Brooklinite raised in a New York where the wealth was much more equally distributed than it is now, it felt familiar, it felt good.

After a forty minute drive, I finally got to Lehman High School, a huge modernist building that sits atop the Hutchinson River Parkway, parked outside the diner across the street, and started looking for the rally. It was almost 3 PM and kids were pouring out of the School, thousands of them! This was far the most diverse crowd I had seen at the more than ten Bronx High Schools I had spoken at. There were many Black and Latino students, but there were also a significant number of white and South Asian students as well. The students represented every color of the rainbow and multiple cultural traditions. Women in hijabs, mostly South Asian, walked side by side with black, and Latino and white girls wearing tight shorts and low cut tops; and the guys outfits varied from football and baseball jerseys, to hip hop and skater gear, to nicely ironed shirts and pants that could have come out of a JC Penney catalogue. For the most part, the kids looked happy, relaxed and comfortable with one another. I didn’t sense the fear or the air of menace that I sometimes felt outside Bronx High Schools. I had to remind myself that this was a school that had been given a grade of “F” by the New York City Department of Education ( more on that later!) and had been assigned a team of School Turnaround Specialists to raise test scores and create a more positive atmosphere. From the outside at least, the school atmosphere looked just fine!

When I finally found the rally site, where a small group of teachers had assembled, along with a large number of police officers, I introduced myself and began preparing to participate in whatever capacity they wanted me to. The main organizers were two Latino men in their thirties or forties and a white woman in her late twenties who had invited me to the rally, Debbie Looser. Three or four teachers soon arrived to join us, all black or Latino women who appeared to be in their forties, along with a small group of students, and we began walking in a circle carrying signs which had been made up for the occasion chanting “Bloomberg Says Cutback, We Say Fightback.” The line of marchers kept growing rapidly. I was gratified to that see a former student of mine Cathy Chan, who lived in the neighborhood had come to the rally with her boyfriend to show her support for the students and teachers at Lehman, but I was most pleased to see how many Lehman students joined the picket line. After fifteen minutes of marching, the group had grown to sixty plus people, more than half of them students and had created a loud and forceful protest that was visibly supported by many people in the area, including a group of fire fighters who honked loudly in support as they drove by

As the protest grew, a couple of things stood out for me. First was the incredible rapport between teachers and students that I saw on the picket line. The teachers assembled, whose number grew to over twenty by the time the protest ended, clearly knew students personally, and from the comments exchanged and the hugs and high fives, had relationships with them that extended beyond lecturer, tester and grade giver. The rally chants that were unveiled when the students arrived in numbers also were telling

“Stop the Budget Cuts—No More Football”

“Stop the Budget Cuts- No More Baseball”

“Stop the Budget Cuts- No More Art Classes”

“Stop the Budget Cuts- No More Theater”

“Stop The Budget Cuts- No More Computer Classes”

Clearly, at this so called Failing School, students developed powerful relationship to teachers through activities like sports, and the arts and the cultivation of computer skills, activities which were are not seen by the current generation of School Reformers as worthy of preservation in times of fiscal austerity.

And as I marched and chanted with this wonderful students and teachers, who represented the heart and soul of immigrant working class/ middle class New York, I thought, if this is “Failure” our city needs a lot more of it. The camaraderie and mutual appreciation I saw between teachers and students and students may not be quantifiable according to Race to the Top and No Child Left Behind, but it is more important than anything they are now measuring when it comes to determining the quality of public education. In a corner of the East Bronx,

I saw a school of more than 5,000 students that was an integral part of a vibrant, multicultural neighborhood, with teachers who loved their students and worked hard to bring out their talents inside and outside the classroom.

If what I saw and heard and experienced at Lehman HS can’t be capture on existing tests and assessment systems, maybe it’s time to throw out the assessments, not destroy what’s positive in this remarkable school.

Mark Naison

June 11, 2011

Why President Obama Must Remove Arne Duncan As Secretary of Education If He Hopes to Win Re-Election

2011-06-08T06:13:00.000-07:00

Why President Obama Must Remove Arne Duncan As Secretary of Education
If He Hopes to Win Re-Election

Professor Mark Naison
Fordham University

The 2008 Election Campaign of Barack Obama inspired a spirit of sacrifice and idealism that I had not seen among close friends since the early days of the Civil Right Movement. My upstairs neighbors, both in their mid 70’s, camped out in Virginia a week before the election to help get out the vote in that state. My best friend and his wife did the same in Florida. At least ten people in my circle took regular trips to Pennsylvania and Ohio on weekends to help move those “swing states” into the Democratic camp. And my dear friend Rich Klimmer, now deceased, spent three months in a hotel room in Philadelphia, while undergoing dialysis three times a week, coordinating the labor campaign for Obama in Pennsylvania.

What did all these people have in common, other than a passion to elect the first African American president in American History?

Every single one of them were college professors or public school teachers! No group worked harder for Barack Obama’s election than America’s teachers, who not only contributed funds to his campaign, but were the campaign’s most effective “grunt workers”, doing everything possible to reach voters in swing states, whether by participating inphone banks or by traveling long distances to reach voters door to
door.

Today, America’s teachers are so disillusioned with the Obama Administration that their participation in the 2012 is a big question mark. Teachers I know may ultimately vote for Barack Obama, but they will do so only because they fear the Republican candidate will do more damage, not because they think the Obama Administration’s policies are moving the nation in the right direction. When it comes to education policy, most teachers and professors see the Obama administration as promoting national initiatives which strip teachers of their autonomy, make them scapegoats for the nation’s problems, and promote formulas for assessing teacher quality that will, if accepted, turn reduce instruction at all levels to memorization and test prep. They are very likely to sit out the next Presidential campaign unless the Administration switches gears and embraces a teacher centered strategy for improving American’s schools and universities.

But to do that, President Obama will have to remove the Harvard trained lawyer who runs the US Department of Education, Arne Duncan.Not only does Duncan promote policies which force schools and universities make testing and assessment a far more significant part ofclassroom learning, in his comments to the press and elected officials,he literally oozes contempt for teachers and school administrators. In Arne Duncan’s field of vision,, America’s schools and universities are islands of backwardness and inefficiency in a dynamic society where competition produces excellence and those who can’t compete lose their jobs. Obsessed with quantifying success and punishing failure, he ison a mission to turn every dimension of classroom learning, from kindergarten through graduate school, into something that can be measured and evaluated with the simplicity and clarity of sales figures in a bank or corporation, thereby allowing for ironclad measures of teacher evaluation on a national scale. When anyone suggests that teaching involves more than preparing students for tests, and involves elements such as likes nurturing, mentoring and character building, or stimulating imagination and creativity, Duncan responds with impatience and contempt. He sees himself as single handedly driving the nation towards educational competitiveness by shaking up the nation’steachers,, made soft by tenure and union protections, and forcing them to be as success driven and fearful as those who work in the private sector.

While Duncan’s approach has succeeded in making teachers angry and fearful, nowhere has it improved the nation’s schools. The strategic mix of school closings, teacher assessment protocols based on student
test results, and the closing of “failing” schools, mandated by No Child Left Behind has not raised tests results in a single major urban school district, nor has it brought new idealism and energy to teaching and learning. Instead it has enraged teachers, confused administrators, and led to protests by students and parents who feel that their input has been erased by the national formulas that determined a larger and larger portion of school policies.

On the University level, Duncan has forced rating agencies like Middle States to require assessment protocols that vastly simplify what goes on in college classrooms and strip faculty members of powers of peer evaluation that have been in place since the 1960’s. The same obsession to find out if teachers have been “successful” according to a one size fits all formula, forced down the throat of local school districts through the financial incentives of Race to the Top,, has been forced on universities through the threat of the cutting off of federal funding. As a result, faculty members throughout the country have been forced to used a language in evaluating their work that has o standing or credibility in their discipline ( what “outcomes” and “goals” would one measure in a course on Greek philosophy or Hip Hop Dance) and violates every norm of academic freedom that faculty members have fought for since the McCarthy Era.

The negative effect on teacher morale of such policies is well documented, but they have also started to inspire resistance. All over the nation, teachers are taking to the streets to resist attacks on their autonomy and professional status, and university professors are starting to mobilize against the threat posed to academic freedom and departmental self-governance by nationally designed and enforced assessment protocols. Everywhere you go in this country, the name Arne Duncan inspires outrage, not only among teachers, and college professors, but among school administrators and college presidents

If President Obama has any hope of being re-elected in 2012, he’d better pay attention to this groundswell of outrage and replace Arne Duncan with a Secretary of Education who shows more greater respect for the idealism, creativity and hard work of a group that played a central role in his 2008 campaign.-America’s Teachers

Mark Naison
June 7,2011

When It Comes to Bronx Community History: Charter Schools Are Missing in Action

2011-06-07T07:30:00.000-07:00

When It Comes to Bronx Community History: Charter Schools Are Missing in Action

Professor Mark Naison
Fordham University

For the last ten years, I have had the privilege of leading one of the most exciting community
History projects in the nation. The Bronx African American History Project, a collaboration between faculty in Fordham Department of African and African American Studies and community based scholars, has, in that short time , conducted more than 300 oral history interviews, told the story of vibrant Black neighborhoods in the Bronx never previously written about , uncovered a musical legacy of unmatched richness and variety, and most recently has begun charting the development of an African immigrant population which is the largest in the nation. Scholars from all over the country and all over the world have come to explore our data base and our community tours have attracted groups from Germany, Denmark, Los Angeles and Hartford as well as groups from churches, universities, schools and cultural organizations throughout New York City

But perhaps the most gratifying portion of the research has been the opportunity we have been given to bring community history into the Bronx public schools. Seven years ago, a social studies coordinator in a Bronx school district, Phil Panaritis, invited a young colleague, Brian Purnell, and me to give presentations about the BAAHP’s research at a social studies conference for Bronx teachers, and from that time on, invitations to make presentations about Bronx community have become a fixture of our work. I have given more than ten walking tours of historic Black Bronx neighborhoods for school groups, done oral history training for teachers in 13 Bronx schools, been invited to speak at numerous school assemblies and graduation exercises , and have participated in at least five Teaching American History projects for Bronx teachers. One school in particular, PS 140 in Morrisania neighborhood, has become an important community partner in our research, creating an “old school museum” which honors the cultural traditions of the Morrisania neighborhood and incorporating community history into all school celebrations. One of the schools signature events, a “school yard jam” highlighting jazz, doo wop, salsa, and hip hop- all music produced in South Bronx communities- was featured at the 2008 Convention of the Organization of American Historians at the New York Hilton as an example of an innovative history project in a public school, and was written up in the New York Times.

In the course of organizing these events- which even included a Bronx-Berlin youth exchange involving an innovative Bronx High School , CUNY Prep- I have met scores of teachers, more than a few principals and thousands of students, and the experience has left me convinced that community history can be an incredibly empowering aspect of school culture.
But in thinking about this experience, I realized that one important school constituency was completely missing from our research project’s community outreach- charter schools!.
Of the more than 30 elementary schools, middle schools, and high schools I have done community history programs for, not a single one was a charter school.

Given the number of charter schools in the Bronx, some of them run by national organizations like KIPP and Green Dot, and given the publicity our research has been given by The New York Times, the Daily News, and local cable outlets like Bronx Net and Cablevision, I do not think that omission is accidental. Charter school principals and teachers read newspapers, and get invitations to participate in Teaching American History Projects but they seem to regard studying community history as a diversion rather than something that could better connect students to their neighborhoods and get them exited about learning history. The composition of their teaching staffs also contributes to this bias. Unlike Bronx public schools, which contain numerous veteran teachers who grew up in the neighborhoods their schools are located in, charter schools are filled with young teachers, many of them coming from alternative certification programs like Teach for America, who have no connection to the neighborhood their schools are located in and who are ordered to immerse their students in ritualized learning protocols designed to produce results on standardized tests.

This indifference to community history not only misses an opportunity to get students excited about acquiring historical knowledge, it also undermines an ideal of informed citizenship which encourages students to become active in improving their neighborhood. Both directly and indirectly, it suggests that all that is of value exists outside their community, brought in by missionary teachers and administrators.

Make no mistake about it, charter schools, if the Bronx is an example , are agents of de-politicization in communities which desperately need to know their history and fight for their rights. Community history is a precious resource which administrators who know and love Bronx neighborhoods are excited to claim. Charter schools, in failing to claim this resource,
reveal how little they are truly connected to the neighborhoods in which they are located

Mark Naison
June 6, 2011

The Money Trail in Education Reform Leads To Everyone But Those Who Need It The Most

2011-05-23T03:32:00.001-07:00

"The Public Education-Industrial Complex is the latest sector of the Misery Industries. The Public Education-Industrial Complex works hand in hand with the Prison-Industrial Complex to turn the misery of inner city residents into profit-making businesses that owe both their existence and profits to the misery found in these communities."

Professor Henry Louis Taylor

The Money Trail in Education Reform Leads to Everyone But Those Who Need It The Most

Dr Mark Naison
Fordham University

In the last ten years, tens of billions of dollars have been spent to reform America’s schools-some of it coming from the Federal Department of Education, some of it from state legislatures, some of it from private foundations. This money has gone to fund research on Common Core Standards, to close failing schools and open up new ones, to create new protocols for assessing schools and teachers, to create new batteries of tests to evaluate students learning, to bring management consultants into school systems and in some cases into individual schools and to fund charter schools and educational maintenance organizations.

In New York City, Education Reform funding has spawned a variety of new public sector careers , ranging from “accountability officers” in the Department of Education, to the heads of charter school companies making multiple six figure salaries, to management consultants on the payroll of the DOE, to scores of new principals whose jobs have created in small schools created when large, allegedly “failing” ones have been broken up. When you add this the tens of millions of dollars spent to create new computer systems for the DOE, and the hundreds of millions of dollars given to publishing companies like Mc Graw Hill to create new tests for almost every subject and every grade, you can see the opportunity for profit making and career building this movement has inspired among aspiring professionals.

But how much of this funding has gone directly to the people this reform movement was supposedly created to help, working class and minority students and their families? How many jobs for students, or their parents, have Education Reform funds created, either in school programs or after school centers. Has this money helped keep families in their apartments, allowed them to secure medical care or access better sports, arts and recreation programs?

The answer to this is a resounding no! In New York City and around the nation, the funds have created a whole new layer of middle class professionals in the schools, most of them white, and helped create opportunities for profit to a number of private corporations, but have done nothing to ease the burden of poverty on the nation’s working class and minorities.

As of 2011, the child poverty rate in the United States had reached 25 percent, the highest level since the Depression, and Black Unemployment had reached 16 percent. Given this, how can the supporters of test driven education reform, whether they are in Washington, state houses, city halls, or the offices of major foundations, justify spending tens of billions of dollars to ( allegedly) improve schools without one cent of it going into the pockets of poor people!

While people in inner city neighborhoods are losing their homes, their jobs, their medical care, their recreational opportunities, and are experiencing daily fear and stress, new school professionals are flooding their communities with programs that to date have offered no return on their investment to the people they were allegedly designed to benefit.

What we have in America, put forward by those who claim to put “Children First”, is a cynical round of profit taking and career building reminiscent of the Gilded Age.

It’s time that people serious about ending poverty in America take a serious look at the Education Reform movement and FOLLOW THE MONEY TRAIL!

From what I can see, it leads directly into more profits for the haves, and more hardship for the have nots.

Mark Naison
May 21, 2011
=

Test Driven Educational Reform- A Desperate Response to A Society Rotting at the Core

2011-05-17T07:25:00.001-07:00

Test Driven Educational Reform- A Desperate Response to A Society Rotting at the Core

Professor Mark Naison

Fordham University

The breadth of support for tying teacher evaluation to student test scores is something which cuts across all parts of the political spectrum. It is something which unites Barack Obama with Newt Gingrich, Bill Gates with the Koch Brothers, Andrew Cuomo with Scott Walker, and Al Sharpton with Glen Beck and Bill O’Reilly While those of us who have spent our lives in the classroom regard this as ill-advised and counterproductive, it is important to examine why test driven educational reform is virtually the only policy initiative which commands this kind of bi-partisan support.

To do so, we have to take an honest look at what has happened to America’s working class and poor in the last thirty years, particularly in those portions of the country which were once part of America’s industrial heartland. Looked at from the vantage point of once proud industrial centers like Detroit, Baltimore, Buffalo, Newark, Bridgeport, Gary, Youngstown, and Philadelphia, the United States is a society literally rotting at the core. Whole stretches of these cities lay abandoned ever since their factories closed, with only piles of bricks and metals left as reminders of industries that once employed millions of people. Often, the only new building in the most decayed sections of these cities are schools and prisons, with the former often serving as recruiting grounds for the latter. With more than 2 million people now in prison in the US- as compared to less than 400,000 in 1980- and with over 10 million people having spend time in prison and been rendered virtually unemployable, there are huge stretches of urban America, and more than a few small towns, where the streets are filled with men, and more than a few women, who have no secure connection to the legal labor market and whose pessimism and despair creates an atmosphere that literally sucks the energy out of everyone around them As someone who has walked these streets, as well as driven through them in most of the above mentioned cities, it is hard not to feel like a whole section of the American population has been abandoned by their government. No one talks about these people, no one does anything for them, no one discusses the conditions they are living as problems central to the future of the society. Needless to say, these conditions have been immeasurably worsened by tax policies and industrial policies, adopted in the last 30 years, which have frozen working class incomes and concentrated wealth in the top layers of the society to an unprecedented degree.

So where does school reform come in? Some time during the last ten years, a broad spectrum of groups in American society, some of them elected officials and community organizers, some of them business leaders, decided that the way to bring America’s most devastates communities into the economic mainstream was by radically transforming schools. If we somehow turned schools into places of energy and optimism, where young people learned skills necessary to compete in a global economy, then maybe the children of the poor could escape the fate of their parents and we could achieve a more equal society without changing tax policy or redistributing wealth.

It was an extraordinarily seductive vision. It appealed to parents and community leaders living in poor neighborhoods because it appeared to show, for the first time in decades, that the nation was willing to invest in the future of their children. It appealed to political conservatives because some of the reforms proposed- school vouchers and charter schools- involved the application of market principles to the public sector. And it appealed to the very rich, because it promised a path to greater equality that left the tax system that allowed them to acquire great wealth untouched

In the beginning, school reform appeared to be a “win win:” for everybody. But after the first few years, when dramatic reforms, including vouchers and founding of charter schools, appeared to show few significant gains in test scores, or changes in the atmosphere of neighborhoods where the experiments took place, the discourse of reform started to center on the “problem of bad teachers.” With cruel cynicism, reformers began arguing that their brilliant plans were being sabotaged by poorly motivated and recalcitrant teachers, and that elevating children out of poverty through schooling could only be effective if teachers were forced to work much harder and be fired if they refused to produce.

This conclusion resulted in a determination to use test scores, not just to rate the progress of students, but to motivate teachers and administrators. Across the nation, with the encouragement of educational foundations funded by some of America’s wealthiest people, school systems began tying the salaries and careers of teachers and principals to the test scores of students they worked with, began systematically attacking teachers unions for standing in the way of these motivational schemes.

When teachers resisted giving up seniority rights to allow such accountability plans to be put in place, they were demonized as the major obstacle, not only to educational reform, but to the achievement of economic and even racial equality. Public school teachers, and leaders of teachers unions, were lambasted in the media, and by public officials in Washington and State Capitals, as selfish and pampered. If school systems could replace teachers at will the way business did with employees when they didn’t perform, than school performance would improve over night and the US would become economically competitive and egalitarian with one wave of the magic wand. The key was to constantly rate student learning by measurable criteria and determine the status of teachers, administrators and entire schools on the basis of such “data.”

By the time Barack Obama was elected, the momentum of this accountability frenzy was well nigh irreversible.

There was only one problem. There was no place in the entire United States where such strategies achieved any of the intended results. There was not one school system in a low income community where test scores were significantly raised by tying teacher salaries and tenure to student test scores, nor was evidence anywhere that such reforms had a measurable effect on income distribution or economic development in depressed communities. To put the matter bluntly, if you applied the same accountability criteria to educational reformers that were are being used to rate teachers and principals, they would all be fired.

What test driven school reform turns out to be, when all is said and done, is an initially well intentioned, but now cruelly deceptive effort to reduce poverty and inequality without addressing any of its root causes in taxation, industrial policy and the distribution of funding forr housing, health care and community economic development

Because of that, it can never succeed in achieving its professed goals, but along the way, it can suck the life out of schools and demoralize a generation of students and teachers.

In school systems around the country, that is exactly what it is doing.

Mark Naison

May 16, 2011

2011-05-14T11:04:00.001-07:00

Moment of National Insanity: Adding the Pressure of High Stakes Testing to the Pressures of

Poverty

Professor Mark Naison

Fordham Univesity

Hearing that the Governor of New York plans to raise student test scores from 20 percent to 40 percent of teacher ratings just reinforces my perception that a species of insanity has overtaken those in charge of education in the United States.

The idea that we need to make passing standardized tests the central mission of our schools in order for the US to remain competitive with other nations not only ignores the central role of imagination and creative thinking in the global economy, it is a strategy certain to increase disparities between the rich and poor in the United States, already the largest in the advanced world.

In neighborhoods where young people need teachers to provide nurturing and support to counteract the harsh lives they are often lead, tying teacher salaries and promotions to student performance on high stake tests will turn teachers into virtual slave drivers determined to squeeze results out of students lest their own jobs be in jeopardy. Where compassion and caring should prevail, you build in an adversarial relationship guaranteed to maximize stress on everyone involved.

As the film “Race To Nowhere” demonstrates, this can have negative consequences even in affluent communities, but the results will be most devastating to young people in poor communities who are alleged to be the primary beneficiaries of high stakes testing.

The last thing these young people need is for school to be turned into a zone of stress where the teacher’s job depends on students memorizing huge amounts of data, with no time left for art, music, play, or community building activities.

Because to be poor in America is to live with stress. The stress of not knowing whether you will have enough food to get through the weekend without being hungry most of the time. The stress of not knowing whether the lights are going to get cut off, the heat will work, or whether you will be evicted from your apartment for non- payment of rent and forced to move to a shelter or be taken in by relatives. The stress of living with 15 people in a space meant for six, where you have to sleep in shifts, and where there is no place to do your homework. The stress of worrying whether your uncle, who you just moved in with, is going to sexually molest you or beat you up if you do something he doesn’t like The stress of having to go to the emergency room of a hospital and wait 8 hours for someone to see you. The stress of never being able to go to the dentist when you have a toothache. The stress of walking a gauntlet on your way to school, or even to the corner store, because someone doesn’t like the way you look, the ethnic group you are part of, the block you live on, or just think you are fair game for harassment because you are a young girl who has reached puberty. The stress of watching your mother get old before her time because she is working three jobs to keep you housed and fed and is mistreated by bosses, husbands, boyfriends, and virtually every public servant she interacts with. The stress of being recruited for a gang and told that if you don’t join, you will be made that gang’s “bitch.” The stress of being looked upon by every police officer as a potential criminal because you are a young person of color living in “the hood” and being stopped and searched by police with numbing regularity when you are doing nothing illegal.

So yes, let’s take young people for who those experiences are a daily reality and ratchet up the pressure on them in school by increasing the number of tests they have, and telling teachers their careers are dependent on how those students perform on those tests.

Do you really think this is going to work? What you are going to do is push young people already near the breaking point over the edge. Some may obediently conform. But many more will rebel by lashing out at their teachers or their fellow students, or leaving school to find some place they can find relief from the stress and pressure that is enveloping their lives

Schools should be places where young people are nurtured, loved and gradually given the skills to change their lives. It should be a safe zone, not a pressure cooker.

Governor Cuomo is joining a long line of elected officials who, in the name of improving national competitiveness, are making a whole generation of young people- mostly but not all in poor and working class neighborhoods- hate going to school.

Our best teachers and principals know how damaging this is and are starting to speak out.
But unless students and parents join the resistance to linking teacher evaluation to high stakes testing, it will take years, possibly decades, to undo the damage that will be done to our schools by arrogant and misguided public officials.

Mark Naison

May 14, 2012

WHERE HAS HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE GONE?

2011-05-12T09:20:00.000-07:00

I was quite angered at Fernanda Santos’ May 10, 2011 New York Times article, “New to Teaching, Idealistic, at Risk for Layoff”. Ms. Santos doesn't go into the background of the issue. It is a soft, puff piece, designed to make us feel for new teachers, especially those from TFA.

I feel for Samantha Sherwood, the young teacher featured in the article. I know what it is like to lose my job while those I knew weren't nearly as good as me kept theirs. I feel for those TFA's I mentor through Fordham University's GSE program who, in some cases, are just as dedicated and idealistic as I was when I started. I don't care where they came from. I judge them by the core of their character. I will not prejudge. I will evaluate them based on what I see in my role as mentor, and now adjunct instructor at Fordham. I did not like being judged by my elders then who thought of newbies like me as young upstarts threatening their positions, so I wont judge her now.

After five years in teaching I had taught several different social studies classes and taught and created curriculum for new ones. I started an African American History course. I taught AP American History. I ran a humanities program for 9^th graders that coordinated inter and co-curricular classes in Social Studies, English, Foreign Language, Music, Art, and even Gym. I coached football. I was the senior class advisor who ran 3 graduations, proms, senior class trips, and more. All of this was in a comprehensive high school of almost 4000, not 400. Today I would be considered an old pro at 25, but back then I was still just a youngster.

Yet, I was one of thousands, who, in the mid 1970's, were laid off, in my case after 5 years of teaching, during an even worse financial crunch than NYC is facing today. Remember the NY Daily News headline? "FORD TO NY- DROP DEAD"? Ford had "declared flatly...that he would veto any bill calling for a 'federal bail-out of New York City’."

But here's the thing. Ok, a few things.

First, if today's newbies are as dedicated as I was, they'll come back when the money returns, as I did. ) I hope this young lady does. As soon I found out I could be rehired by NYC, I did everything I could to come back to the school I loved - Adlai Stevenson High School, in the Bronx. (Now closed by order of “da mayor” and “da college drop out”---Bill Gates.

Second, if she does return to her school, I hope she isn't met by new colleagues, excessed from other schools, who resent her return. I know how that feels.

Third, it seems Ms. Santos has also tasted the Mayor’s Kool-Aid. The issue isn't as simple as "da mayor" and his media tag team make it out to be. Due process is the important phrase left out of this equation. This is the DOE’s thinking. Wouldn't it be great if we could put the most expensive folks out to pasture and keep saving money by hiring newbies at less than half the cost, and if they give us trouble, we can also fire them?

Back to history. Who remembers what it was like before the UFT was formed in NYC? Good teachers, regardless of age, were fired because of cost, or worse, because they didn't agree with how their principal did things.

Who remembers that for decades the BOE, (now DOE) hired new people like me to fill full time regular positions but we were officially paid as PER- DIEM SUBS. Yes, for two years I was paid and treated like like “Mrs. Shabberclonzky, who filled in for your absent teachers and got the lowest pay rate AND NO BENEFITS! It took a few years and, as I recall, a court case to fix that.

So as we look at the history we find that in the despicable attempts (now, before the union, and in the 1970's) to save money and keep control in their hands NYC D(B)OE will do lots of terrible things rarely reported accurately.

One is this attempt to get rid of DUE process (Tenure) by making L.H.F.F. the rallying cry. Last hired, first fired sucked then, as it does now. But it is not the real issue. The real issue is how do you keep the best and brightest regardless of age without losing DUE PROCESS. That is the problem with this article. It does what most of the articles written about education do. They divert the public from the complexities involved.

So, back to Miss Sherwood. Should she lose her job if she is as good as the article says? NO! Should she teach if she is dedicated, idealistic, and good! YES! Should she be a Chairperson? I can’t say. The major role of a Chairperson is teacher training. Is she experienced, knowledgeable, and good enough to do that after only 3 years? I’d have to say NO!

Finally, should the way the DOE under “da mayor, Uncle Mike change the way they think about education in NYC? What do you think I think?

2011-05-10T05:37:00.001-07:00

From Centers of Obedience to Centers of Resistance: A Strategy To Restore

Hope to the City’s Public Schools

Professor Mark Naison

Fordham University

A tragic series of events is unfolding in working class New York. The lingering effects of the Recession, irresponsible private investments, and federal and state budget cuts, coupled with a failure to raise taxes on the wealthy, have created a toxic brew which is eroding the already fragile living standards of the city’s poor and bringing with it higher levels of homelessness, hunger and violence.

Nowhere is this more visible than in the housing market where a combination of foreclosures on private homes, failed investments by private equity companies, the phasing out of federal rent subsidies, the proposed end of Work Advantage Program in New York State, and rising rents in public housing have taken thousands of units of affordable housing out of commission and forced tens of thousands of people to “double” and “triple up” with friends and relatives or move into shelters.

The effects of this are visible throughout the city’s public schools where more and more children are arriving at school stressed, hungry, and frightened as their families are displaced and their ability to assure their children of adequate sleep, food and study space is undermined.Once, such wounded children could find safe, protected space in libraries and after school programs, but with upcoming budget cuts to libraries (which will cut public library hours from 40 to 28 a week) and to after school and recreational programs, these youngsters will be increasingly on their own, forced to spend time in public places-streets, subways and shelters-where danger lurks for young people without adult supervision and protection.

In the face of this unfolding tragedy, what are teachers, principals, and school guidance counselors to do?

The official policy of the NYC Department of Education is to pretend this isn’t happening. Their response is more assessments, more tests, more ratings, more pressure on students and everyone who is working with them.

And the result is predictable. The misery of the students is spreading to the teachers whose spirit is being broken, not only by the violent incidents occurring in schools with increasing frequency, but by the evident pain their students are in, visible not only in their inability to concentrate in class, but their harrowing stories of hunger and homelessness and family catastrophe, All of this is taking place, I must add, amidst fierce pressure from the DOE to raise test scores and graduation rates, with the fear of school closings and loss of employment as potential penalties.

It’s time to flip the script. Schools must become places, not only where students in trouble are protected and nurtured, but where the adults working there fight for them as if they were their own children.

Every New York City public school should become a center of resistance to budget cuts, not only in schools, but in libraries, after school centers, and programs that provide or protect affordable housing. The culture of compliance and obedience, which has left teachers and students alike demoralized and terrorized, must be replaced by a culture of resistance. The school must become a place where political education and political organizing takes place uniting teachers, parents and students in strategies which will put pressure on elected officials that haven’t been seen since the 60’s. Pressure to restore housing subsidies, expand funding for after school programs, restore library budgets to their 2008 levels, bring more arts and sports programs into the public schools, create more school health centers, end all teacher layoffs and and tax the wealthy to pay for these reforms.

Not only will such actions restore a sense of agency to teachers, who are regularly vilified in the press and by public officials, as the cause of their students “failures,” it will give hope and inspiration to tens of thousands of young people, and members of their families, who are losing hope that their lives will involve anything other than hardship and pain.

It’s time to transform New York City public schools from centers of fear and intimidation to “liberated zones” where teachers, students and parents can talk freely how to make their schools and neighborhoods places where people who are not wealthy can lead decent lives and provide hope and opportunity to their children. And if that leads them directly to the steps of City Hall, the State Legislature, and the US Congress, or to the headquarters of Wall Street banks so be it.

On a small scale, this is starting to happen. A group of insurgent teachers and parents have started a program called “Fight Back Fridays” with actions taking place at public schools around the city on May 20.

But this should only be the beginning of a mighty wave of protest that will transform the New York City public schools from centers of obedience into center of resistance to the budget cuts and to government by the rich, for the rich, which seems to be the trend, not only in New York, but around the country.

The Sleeping Giant is starting to awake. Student, teachers and parents, joined together, can be a mighty force for Justice and Democracy

Mark Naison

May 10, 2011.

2011-05-09T03:50:00.001-07:00

If We Want to Rescue Our Public Schools- And Our Youth- It’s Time to Start
Teaching “Inequality”

Professor Mark Naison
Fordham University

All across the country, public school budgets are being cut. Teachers are being laid off, arts and sports programs are being eliminated, class size is going through the roof. For working class and immigrant youth, these policies mean that American society is no longer even promising them the illusion of social mobility. What awaits them, should they graduate from high school is a grim choice between the military, low wage labor, or immersion in the underground economy, coupled with the very real prospect of going to prison.

Given this grim reality, it is time for teachers to start reserving time in their classrooms to talk about the real story in America – Inequality! Students in poor and working class neighborhoods intuitively know that their futures are grim. Why not give them the evidence to show their suspicions are correct and that policies can be adopted that could give them greater opportunity if they are willing to organize and fight for their right to decent paying employment as well as a good education

The best place to start your lesson plan with income inequality. Every student in the United States should know that the top 1 percent of the population now controls 23 percent of the income, as compared to 9 percent in the 1950’s and 1960’s. Then move on to tax policy. Explain to students that federal tax rate on the highest incomes, which was over 90 percent in the 1950’s, is now below 40 percent. Then move on to union membership. Explain that in the 1950’s, 35 percent of the American labor force were members of unions, as compared to 13 percent. Conclude with the growth of the prison industrial complex. Explain that in 1980, less than 400,000 people were in federal and state prisons as compared to over 2 million today, and that among the African American males, there are now more people ages 18-30 in prison than there are in college

Then, after presenting these sobering statistics, ask students to “ connect the dots.” Ask them if there is any relationship between income distribution and the growth of the prison population. Ask them to discuss who goes to prison, and how it affects those people’s lives. Do people released from prison ever become part of the mainstream economy, or are they permanently condemned to a life of poverty and insecurity? Ask students to write about people they know who went to prison and came out. What happened to those people? How did that experience affect their families?

Then move on to education. Have students analyze the education they are receiving. What kind of future are they being prepared for by a curriculum that puts so much emphasis on standardized tests? Ask them to compare the experience of people they know who graduated from high school and those who didn’t. Was the experience of the two groups that different?

Then move on to politics. If the students conclude that the whole society, including the educational system, is stacked against them, what should they do about it? If they are going to protest, what examples in the past can be used a models. Teach them about the civil rights movement, the labor and unemployed movements in the Great Depression, the women’s rights movement and the movement against the Vietnam War. Give them the example of the Greensboro Lunch Counter Sit Ins where a group of four students decided to take history into their own hands. Ask them whether this protest has any relevance to what young people are going through today.

Then bring in hip hop. Explain how hip hop was created in the South Bronx by young people who had been written off by policy makers and created an entire new musical form at the very same time that music programs, and music teachers, were removed from the New York City schools. Ask them if that story, of marginalized young people making history, has any relevance to their experience? Ask them what it would mean for people like themselves to “make history.”

The pedagogy I am describing, I guarantee you, will grab students attention far more than the packaged history lessons being shoved down students throats so they can pass standardized tests. It will also impart critical thinking skills, and encourage writing, reflection and debate, in a manner that progressive educational reformers ( those that still remain) could readily embrace

But above all, it would inspire students, many of whom now are deeply depressed and profoundly pessimistic, to see that they are not doomed to poverty and marginality and that they can take actions that can make their voice be heard and change their circumstances.

Truth telling can be empowering. It can turn victims of unjust policies into agents of their own liberation.

It is time for teachers to unleash the genie of “Student Power” through bold and inspired teaching. It all begins with “Inequality.”

Mark Naison
May 9, 2011

Why More And More Students “In the Hood” Are Out of Control

2011-05-05T07:09:00.001-07:00

Why More And More Students “In the Hood” Are Out of Control

Professor Mark Naison

Fordham University

During the last year, I have gotten more and more reports from the best teachers I know in Bronx public schools, that their students “are out of control.” We are not talking about Ivy League Teach for America types who grew up in wealthy suburbs, but tough, charismatic, physically imposing women, graduates of New York City public schools, with formidable classroom management skills and a great sense of humor.

At first, I found these reports hard to believe. The women I am talking about are not only physically strong, they are incredibly innovative in their pedagogy- the best of the best! If they can’t control a class of Bronx 11 or 14 year olds, who could?

But then I started thinking about their work in a much larger context than one suggested by discussions of curriculum, class management, or graduation rates. And I came up with a startling conclusion- that students living in America’s poor neighborhoods, even by age 10 or 11, already know, intuitively, that the schools they are in are unlikely to get them out of the world of poverty and hardship that surrounds them. As a result, they see what goes on in classrooms- especially all the tests they are bombarded with- as fundamentally irrelevant to their lives!

And they are not wrong in their assessment! If they look around their neighborhoods, they see precious few people who have used education to better their lives. For every person in their hood who gets out by pursuing higher education, there are five who leave by going to prison or joining the armed forces! In their world, there is little real life reinforcement of the message schools preach- that the way to success in America is by passing tests, graduating from high school and going on to college. Those who do manage to jump through all those hoops, when they get to college, find the path is long and treacherous, both economically and academically, and if they do manage to get a college degree often can’t get jobs at all, or can’t get jobs that allow them to pay off their student loans!.

The current economic crisis has only made the path of self-denial and academic effort seem more problematical. At a time when even middle class college graduates, from top private colleges, have trouble finding work how are you going to “sell” the proposition that education is the path to success in South Bronx neighborhoods like Morrisania or Hunts Point?

The bottom line is- in a city where the top 1 percent of the population monopolizes 44 percent of the income- you can’t! The deck is already so stacked against young people growing up in poverty that no legerdemain or trickery or classroom magic can convince them that the things they are learning and being tested on will have any positive effect on their lives.

So why shouldn’t they fool around? Why shouldn’t they act out? Why shouldn’t they try to enhance their reputation as a thug, a comedian, or a flirt by making the classroom their private theater? After all, those traits represent real life social capital in the world they inhabit, as opposed to the math problems, history lessons, or sentences they are given to construct.

Some people attribute the phenomenon of poor kids acting out to the stress they are under outside of school- reflected in issues ranging from poor diet, to lack of sleep, to gang violence, to physical abuse in their places of residence. All those are undoubtedly contributing factors. But let’s not discount the “rational” element in student behavior, reflected in their very real understanding that the schools they are in are simply unable to deliver on the promise of a better life they use to “sell” their pedagogy.

Given that cold reality, there is absolutely no reason why a student in a place like the South Bronx should defer the joy and status of being a class comedian or “thug in training” for the prospect of participating in an endless round of test preparation, which for people in their neighborhood is truly “ A Race To Nowhere.”

Mark Naison

May 5, 2011

Some Thoughts on Ivy League Admissions-And Affirmative Action- for Donald Trump

2011-04-27T02:04:00.001-07:00

Some Thoughts on Ivy League Admissions- and Affirmative Action-- for Donald Trump
Professor Mark Naison
Fordham University

Donald Trump’s comments that Barack Obama didn’t have the grades to get into Ivy League
Schools shows a profound ignorance of the admissions policies of those institutions. According to Bowen, Shapiro et all who thoroughly researched the admissions policies of elite universities in the US ( and whose conclusions can be found in their 2002 book The Game of Life: College Sports and Educational Values) the greatest admissions advantage at those schools goes not to children of alumni, or underrepresented minorities, but to recruited athletes! Not only are their twice as many recruited athletes as underrepresented minorities at these schools, but the admissions advantage accruing to an athlete, whether male or female, is twice as powerful as those given to a minority or a “legacy”.

We are not talking about a small number of students here. At most Ivy League schools, close to 20 percent of the undergraduates are recruited athletes, and at Williams College, they
constitute 40 percent of the student population. Given the variety of the sports encompassed, which go from lacrosse, to golf, to tennis to sailing, to soccer, to hockey along with softball, baseball, basketball and football, it turns out that the overwhelming majority of beneficiaries of
“sports affirmative action” are white. Not only are these athletes admitted with significantly lower grades and SAT’s than the university mean, but their grades in college tend to be lower than those of their fellow students. Nevertheless, their incomes after college are no lower than those of their fellow students because a large proportion of them go into careers in the financial sector, which go out of their way to recruit “Ivy league athletes” as key components of their work force.

The populist resentment of allegedly “undeserving” minorities who push hardworking white students out of top college- which Trump is exploiting with his rhetoric- turns out to be misplaced. To put the matter bluntly, there are a lot more white hockey and football players who get into Ivy League schools with SAT’s below the school norm than there are Black and Latino students from the inner city. As someone who spent more than 15 years coaching athletes from diverse racial and class backgrounds in Brooklyn in the 1980’s and 1990’s, I know this from personal experience as well as research. One young woman I worked with, a nationally ranked tennis player who was highly recruited by every Ivy League college, actually got a letter from Harvard telling her that her target SAT score for admission was 1100! Another young man from our community, a highly recruited left handed pitcher, was told that his admission target for Princeton was 1200, with an expected verbal score of 600 because “Princeton has a lot of reading.” Needless to say, both of those young people were white!

So much for “undeserving minorities” pushing white kids out of top colleges! To put this in perspective, I have taught African American Studies at Fordham for more than 40 years and talked to hundreds of Black and Latino students about their college recruitment experiences. Not one of them has mentioned being given SAT targets that low for admission to Harvard, Yale or Princeton!

Donald Trump needs to find a new subject for his demagoguery. If Barack Obama got into Columbia with lower grades and SAT’s scores than the college mean, he was only one of many students- the vast majority of whom were white- who fell into that category. And his success, along with so many others so admitted, should be a warning that traits measurable on standardized tests are not the only indicators of talent and potential that should be considered for university admission. When Ivy League schools admit students, irrespective of the scores they register on standardized tests, they almost never drop out, and usually achieve professional success after graduation. Whether these schools should have as much power as they do in American society is another question, but none of the students they bring in are programmed to “fail.”

Columbia College chose wisely in admitting Barack Obama. His admission was only one small part of a broad policy for creating a student body diverse in talent as well as cultural background from which far more whites than ethnic and racial minorities were beneficiaries

Mark Naison
Aprl 27, 2011

Teaching Is Relationshp Building

2011-04-03T06:04:00.000-07:00

Teaching is Relationship Building-Something School Reformers Often Forget Dr Mark Naison Fordham University One of the most pernicious examples of the tunnel vision of school reformers is the “school turnaround” concept incorporated in the Obama Administration’s “Race To the Top” legislation and currently being implemented in school districts throughout the nation. “Turnaround” strategy proposes that a school designated as “failing”-invariably on test scores- be closed and either replaced with a charter school or reopened as a new school, in the same facility, with a different principal and no more than fifty percent of the current teaching staff. Not only does this concept presume that “bad teachers” are the primary cause of a school’s alleged failures, but it places no value on relationships that teachers build with students and their families, relationships that often last far beyond the time they were in class and are integral to student success and help sustain teacher morale even in the most daunting conditions Anyone who has been a teacher knows that building up the confidence of students and giving them the courage to realize their potential and find their voice involves more than classroom learning. It often requires individualized instruction and mentoring, joint participation in extracurricular activities and trips, and a commitment to maintain communication long after the student leaves your class. When this happens, students come to see relationships with their teachers as sources of strength throughout their lives, a form of “cultural capital” that allows them to surmount obstacles and realize their dreams. In working class and poor communities, where families are under constant stress, lifetime communication with teachers can be the critical factor enabling students to stay in school in the face of crises that would crush most people. Janet Mayer’s wonderful new book, As Bad As They Say: Three Decades of Teaching in the Bronx, provides example of example of how this longtime Bronx teacher supported her students through personal challenges that included evictions, murders, rapes, heatless homes, unemployed parents and responsibilities for raising younger siblings. This influence didn’t just take place when students were in Mayer’s classes. It often went on for fifteen or twenty years after they left her school. And it led to students who could have easily fallen through the cracks becoming productive, successful citizens, some of them teachers themselves. The power of relationship building- something that cannot be measured by student performance on standardized tests- is something I have experienced over and over again in my own teaching at the college level. The most transformative moments in my teaching have not taken place during class sessions, or on midterm or final examinations, but it individual encounters with students where they confront obstacles and with my help, confronted strategies to overcome them An example of this, from the late 90’s remain etched in my memory. M was a Fordham basketball star from an Irish working class family in New Jersey, who along with some of her teammates, had enrolled in several of my Black history classes at Fordham . She was incredibly shy, never saying a word in class, but one day, she showed up in my office and started crying. “Dr Naison,” she said, “I don’t belong at this school. I only got 800 on my SAT’s and I feel like everyone here is so much smarter than me. What am I going to do?” I took a deep breath, prayed I wouldn’t screw this up, and started developing a strategy. “M, they aren’t smarter than you, they just have more educated parents and went to better high schools. But we are going to overcome that. Every time you write a paper, hand me a rough draft a week before and I will edit if for you. Before every test, come with your friends to my office and I will give you a strategy for studying as a group. And in return, you and your friends can work with me on my crossover and spin moves!” The last comment drew a reluctant smile from M and she went to work. Little by little, she went from being a C student, to a B student, to getting B+’s and A-‘s in the last class she took with me during the second semester of her senior year. But the best part of this transformation was watching M find her voice. By the time she graduated, she was not only participating regularly In class discussions, she was being perceived as a leader by her fellow students, including those who came in to the school with much higher SAT’s and grades. After she graduated from Fordham M’s confidence only grew. After playing pro basketball in Europe for several years, she returned to New Jersey and became a teacher and coach, using her own hard won confidence to build the confidence of others. In my forty years at Fordham, I have built many relationships with individual students I have taught, some of whom have gone on to become mayors of cities, leaders of government agencies, world renowned scholars and journalists, but no teaching or mentoring experience has been more satisfying than the one I had with M. Why? Because M represents the majority of students attending schools in America’s poor and working class communities. They not only lack the skills that upper middle class students acquire in their families and the high performing schools they attend, they often suffer from a crippling lack of self-confidence in approaching the tasks that schools present. That confidence deficit, I am convinced, is at least as important as the skills deficit and it cannot be overcome through test prep drills and group instruction. It requires individual attention from teachers, and not just in a classroom setting. It requires extra work and encouragement after school, on weekends, and sometimes long after the student leaves the teachers direct care. If you rotate teachers in and out of schools at a dizzying rate and create pressures that drive them out of the profession after a few years, you will destroy the relationship building component that is at the heart of great teaching. Ironically, under the pressure of federal mandates, this is being done in the very communities that have the greatest need for inspired teaching and mentoring.

COLLEGE READY

2011-04-01T08:18:00.000-07:00

We have a new goal. The chancellor of the NYC DOE, Cathie Black, has miraculously discovered that high school graduates should be college ready upon graduation. I wonder what Ms. Black defines as being college ready. All of her references to being college ready refer to the same old clichés about test scores, "teacher effectiveness, teacher evaluations, [and] having the best teachers in every single class."

This is typical of the new regime. Joel Klein. Cathie Black. Michelle Rhee. Arne Duncan.

Does she (or they) tackle the question of what students need to be able to do to be college ready? Does she discuss critical thinking? What about problem solving? Time management? Independence? Of course they need to increase their reading and writing abilities. But does that make them college ready, or simply high school graduates?

When told students were doing a 5 page research paper, Ms. Black was also quoted as saying, "'Hmmm. Didn’t seem to me — now length doesn’t necessarily mean rigor — but it didn’t seem to me as though that was something that would be thought of as a significant research paper."

Is she talking about product or process when she refers to rigor? The most difficult and challenging writing assignment I ever had was in graduate school. We had to discuss how five authors agreed or disagreed about three themes.... all in 5 pages. That was rigorous; not because of its length, but in how it forced us to use precise language. She should know that. She was an English major.

There are many schools in and out of the city that make kids college ready. The private schools and the best public schools do because they don't spend excessive time on test prep. (Exception. Private tutors for SAT, ACT, and AP exams.)

"Black said she knows when that leadership works by looking around a school and seeing whether the principal knows his or her students, and if the teachers appear engaged." To me the most important criterion is whether the students are engaged in rigorous, challenging, and engaging work.

One program that engages high school seniors in over 60 schools across the city and in 4 NYC high schools is WISE. "WISE serves as a bridge for seniors from high school to college, work and lifelong learning. A WISE program enables high school seniors of all ability levels to design an individualized, passion-driven project. Projects can include, but are not limited to, internships, independent research, self-improvement, community service or cultural, artistic and performance-based activities. The topics students can explore in school-based, experiential learning programs are limitless. As a result, students discover in themselves and in one another skills, strengths and talents they had not realized were present.

As part of the process of developing and completing their WISE projects, students select a staff mentor, maintain a reflective and research-supported journal and make a public presentation. During the school day, as well as in the evenings and on weekends, students devote significant time to work on their projects—they research their topics, maintain written daily journals, meet with their mentors to explore and reflect upon project issues, and discuss their topics with one another. Upon completion of the project, each student gives a public presentation assessed by a panel of students, teachers and community members.

Students need to be independent learners and problem solvers to succeed in college and at work. They have to manage time, develop good interpersonal skills, set realistic goals and become self-reliant. WISE students gain these abilities and more in executing their individualized senior experiences, which not only eases their transition to college and work, but also enhances their chances for success.

The WISE experience takes students from the confines of a traditional classroom and invites them into a world full of opportunities to learn from others in stimulating settings. It also fosters students’ independence, as they learn to manage their own time and interact with new people in adult environments.

In order to develop a project, students must be able to reach out and convince a mentor and an outside sponsor to work with them. They need to be mature, responsible individuals.

WISE students have to adapt to a variety of people. They have to learn to navigate new and different environments. Through the rigorous WISE process, students learn how to enter the new world outside of the classroom and the school. They become young adults.

Planning and executing a WISE project can become a subject for a unique and winning college application essay. And for those colleges that demand one, the interview becomes a wonderful opportunity for students to shine by discussing their WISE project. In addition, college admission officers are charged with deciding which of many similar applicants possess the background to enhance the community of a particular institution. A WISE experience gives students a “leg up” in this process. Indeed, when WISE students arrive at college, they are better prepared to be successful students and active campus citizens.

Following a passion allows a student the freedom to explore a major field of study, service opportunities or a career. Thus, a WISE project also gives a student direction for the future and an entry to the benefits of lifelong learning." (www.wiseservices.org)

I invite Ms. Black and so called education leaders to talk to WISE students, graduates, and staff to see what true engagement means and how college ready WISE students become.

IT'S THE TRAINING, STUPID!

2011-03-31T07:52:00.000-07:00

With all the noise about TFA , school budgets, hiring, firing, tenure, Rhee and thee, we seem to forget that teacher training a big variable in the education equation.

http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/living-in-dialogue/2011/03/bilby_greene.html

School Reform- A New Notorious Phd Jam

2011-03-22T05:06:00.001-07:00

School Reform

A New Notorious Phd Jam

Inequality’s

America’s shame

Bankers screw up

And teachers get blamed

Billionaires

Love school reform

It keeps prisons full

and profits warm

Chorus

School reform,

School reform

It keeps prisons full

And profits warm

You can’t lift students up

When you knock teachers down

It’s a trick to help the rich

Rule your town

But reformers keep shouting

Test, Test, Test

Driving out great teachers

Beating down the rest

Making students hate school

And take to the streets

Where their choice is prison

Or rocking dope beats

Chorus

School reform,

School reform

It keeps prisons full

And profits warm

You can’t lift students up

When you knock teachers down

It’s a trick to help the rich

Rule your town

Union Busting

Is the Reformers game

Whether Walker, Christie

Or Bloomberg’s their name

They want to run teachers in

Then run them out quick

Before they learn

What makes students tick

Chorus

School reform,

School reform

It keeps prisons full

And profits warm

You can’t lift students up

When you knock teachers down

It’s a trick to help the rich

Rule your town

So teachers and students

Need to take schools back

Tell reformers that testing

Sets learning back

Bring back art and music

Science, lab and gym

And march down town

So the banks don’t win

Chorus

School reform,

School reform

It keeps prisons full

And profits warm

You can’t lift students up

When you knock teachers down

It’s a trick to help the rich

Rule your town

WHAT'S IN A NAME? MAYBE DA MAYOR KNOWS

2011-03-18T06:16:00.000-07:00

Those of you unfamiliar with the state of secondary education in NYC should know what has been going on here. Over the past several years the NYC Department of Education, (under mayoral control) has determinedly and steadfastly worked to close all the large neighborhood high schools in the city and replace them with several smaller schools within each of those buildings. Led by former Chancellor Joel Klein and now present Mayor Bloomberg appointee, Cathie Black, the city has jumped on the Bill Gates bandwagon. Those buildings once had a Principal, perhaps two administrative Assistant Principals and several department chairpersons (also dubbed assistant principals) whose primary job was to train, mentor, and supervise teachers. Now these buildings are called campuses with anywhere from 3-8 schools between those walls. Each smaller school has a Principal and one or two Assistant Principals and no department chairs to train and mentor new teachers. The result has been more and more business management, more test prep, and less and less education.

Once upon a time, almost all of the 100 public high schools in New York City were named for famous people or, like Bayside High School, their particular neighborhood. Some were named after activities, but that was easy to grasp because students in schools like Music and Art or Automotive high schools were studying to become experts in their fields. Now each new school seems to be given a multisyllabic subject based name with variations on a theme.

As a result of this Gates inspired movement year now comes the annual announcement. Which schools are to be closed by the DOE? Which are to be saved? Which have been proclaimed by the all-powerful database to be the best? Then it dawned on me. Maybe, it's the names. Was there a correlation? The key to quality education must be in the schools’ names. After all, wasn't my alma mater, The Bronx High School of Science (6 words) one of the best high schools in the country from its inception in 1938? For years it had the longest name of any high school in the city. Of course it was better than Brooklyn Technical High School, (4 words) and Stuyvesant High School, (3 words) the other specialized high schools in New York for which students have to take an academic admission exam. Ah hah! That must be it. The Bloomberg/Klein/Black administration finally figured it out. Every school’s name must sound like The Bronx High School of Science to give it a better chance at success. I decided to go to the lists and see for myself. I went to the DOE school performance database, found the 23 schools the DOE announced would close and compared them with the top 23 schools on the list.

Here are the lists. On the left, are the 23 High Schools to be closed. On the right, ladies and gentlemen the new champions–the top 23 according to the NYC DOE.

23 NYC HIGH SCHOOLS TO BE CLOSED

TOP 23 NYC DOE HIGH SCHOOLS

August Martin High School

Beach Channel High School 

Boys and Girls High School 

Christopher Columbus High School

Fordham Leadership Academy for Business and Technology 

Grace Dodge Career and Technical Education High School 

Grover Cleveland High School 

High School of Graphic Communication Arts

Jamaica High School 

Jane Addams High School for Academic Careers 

John Adams High School 

John Dewey High School 

John F. Kennedy High School

Metropolitan Corporate Academy 

Monroe Academy for Business/Law

Newtown High School 

Norman Thomas High School 

Paul Robeson High School 

Mother Hale Academy 

Richmond Hill High School 

Sheepshead Bay High School 

Washington Irving High School 

W.H. Maxwell CTE High School

Theater Arts Production Company School

Brooklyn International High School at Water's Edge

Williamsburg Preparatory School

Marble Hill High School for International Studies

Williamsburg High School for Architecture and Design

Manhattan Village Academy

High School for Violin and Dance

Manhattan Bridges High School

Bronx Aerospace High School

Bronx Health Sciences High School

El Puente Academy for Peace and Justice

Urban Assembly School for Careers in Sports

The High School of Fashion Industries

Academy of Finance and Enterprise

The Metropolitan High School

Discovery High School

Pace High School

High School for Dual Language and Asian Studies

Bedford Academy High School

South Bronx Preparatory: A College Board School

Unity Center for Urban Technologies

Mott Hall Bronx High School

The High School for Enterprise, Business and Technology

High School for International Business and Finance

As I looked down the 2011 list I found a pattern. Of the failing schools, 19 of 23 are named after a person or place, 17 of 23 have names containing 4 or fewer words, and 4 of 23 have names containing 6 or more words. On the other hand, the vast majority of the DOE’s better performing schools had longer multisyllabic names. Only 10 of 23 are named after a person or place, 8 of 23 have names containing 4 or fewer words, and 9 of 23 have names containing 6 or more words. EUREKA. I was right.

I was intrigued. I continued to examine NYC high school names. Some new names tacked subject matter on to names of real people, such as The Alfred E. Smith Career and Technical Education High School. Ten words. What an e-mail address that makes. That one confused me. I though he was a governor of New York, not a techie. Then there is the peculiar case of Bronx Leadership Academies I and II. Is the latter school only for second tier leaders or middle management? What makes the High School for Innovative Advertising and Media so innovative? I looked at its website. Although situated deep in Canarsie Brooklyn, the site’s banner photo convinces the reader that it is right on the other side of the Brooklyn Bridge from Manhattan. Now that is an innovative use of media.

The Rockaway Park High School For Environmental Sustainability (nineteen syllables) may have had the longest name. It couldn't fit in the spreadsheet column. After a while my eyes became so tired, I thought I began to see schools with titles like the Manhattan Duke Ellington Academy for Antidisestablishmentarianistic Song Writing and the Astoria School for Lopadotemachoselachogaleokranioleipsanodrimhypotrimmatosilphioparao (Take a deep breath here.) melitokatakechymenokichlepikossyphophattoperisteralektryon (Another breath.) optekephalliokigklopeleiolagoiosiraiobaphetraganopterygon Seafood Cooking. That, by the way is a real word. Those must be two very successful schools. Their admissions tests not only require the students to show their talents as song writers and chefs, but also the ability to say the names five times fast, without glancing at the test. Obviously the students at these schools must acquire a greater vocabulary and therefore achieve higher reading levels.

The longer the name, the better the school. Wow, these new school reformers must really be on to something. I began to dream about starting a new New York City high school. What would I call it? Hmmm, The Metropolitan Academy for the Study of Moronic Educational Practices? MASMEP! Then, startled by an image of the Duke humming a song about the Anglican Church while eating a fish fricassee, I woke up with Lewis Carroll’s “Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland” lying across my chest.