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Dagobah Resident
Although the old Board Of Education was incompetent and corrupt, the new Department of Education under mayoral control is ruthless and corrupt, but frighteningly competent in creating chaos as an excuse for implementing sweeping change.
The tactics used since Bloomberg took over reads like a chapter from Naomi Klein's "The Shock Doctrine." On the organizational level, districts were dismantled and turned into regions, then, a few years later, regions were dismantled and turned into districts.
On the school level, large high schools are given ratings on a "school report card" based mostly on standardized tests results and compared to similar schools in terms of population, size, standardized test scores and other criteria that carry very little weight such as parent evaluatios.. If a school's scores drop even a little, they can be rated "F" even if most of its students do well on the tests. In this way even successful public schools can be closed to make way for unproven private charter schools.
Over the last few years, many large high schools have been closed, and then reopened as a cluster of smaller schools each with their separate missions,principals, staff, and students, all sharing the same building and competing for the same gym, library, and auditorium.
On the staff level, the trend is to hold teachers responsible for the improvements made by their students. This may seem reasonable except that the criteria are based again on standardized tests. Students may be ill on the testing day, stressed about personal issues,
nervous about the test itself. The schools that the teachers work in may be overcrowded, lacking in resources, and staffed by teachers new to the profession.
The older teachers are being forced out of the system in the following ways:
1. Teachers can no longer transfer based on seniority. Because principals are now
responsible for paying salaries from their individual budgets, they are less inclined
to hire older teachers who cost more. By older teachers, I'm referring to teachers who
have ten or more years in the system.
2. Many older teachers have ended up in what are called "rubber rooms" which the teachers
compare to gulags. Many don't know why they are there - they haven't been charged
with anything - but they must sit there sometimes for years before their case gets
called. By the time their cases are called, enough time has elapsed so that witnesses
and evidence have disappeared. A number of these teachers are whistleblowers.
On the Administrative level, principals are given almost total control. Following the business model, they are the CEOs of the school responsible for ultimately proving that they can get the test scores up. Those that do get bonuses. Those that don't can get fired and replaced.
As a result, there is increased pressure on principals, (CEOs) to produce the results the DOE wants.
On the Parental level, parents are so confused by the constant changes that they often don't know where to turn to get their questions answered. There are so many new schools, that there is no way to know which ones are functional and which ones are not. In addition, the weight that these standardized tests now carry to determine which schools and programs students can be admitted to, creates a lot of stress on families.
On the Student level many extracurricular program have been cut resulting in a rise in gang activity in some schools. Other programs for Special Education students are being dismantled as more and more Special needs students are mainstreamed into classes in which they can't cope. Large schools become overcrowded as students who would have been absorbed into other large schools that have been phased out have no where else to go.
All of these conditions lead to the situation described by Nat Hentoff in the following "Village Voice" article which was prompted by the possibility of a presidential bid by Mayor Bloomberg:
President Bloomberg? Not This Bad Apple
Mayor Mike should get more heat for teaching kids to fear the police
by Nat Hentoff
February 19th, 2008 12:00 AM
The New York Sun—reacting, apparently, to a popular groundswell that somehow escaped my attention—once again urged Michael Bloomberg to make an independent run at the White House in its January 30 issue: "[H]e may yet be the best standard bearer of what we think of as the New York Idea . . . dynamism, open-ness, and the logic of capitalism and freedom," the Sun's editorialists wrote.
Supposing that he is still tempted by a presidential run, we should take him at his word: "Being a mayor, you have to be explicit in what you stand for. You have to be accountable," he has said.
OK, let's hold him accountable. Bloomberg will tout the national plaudits and awards that he and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein have received for reforming New York's school system. What he's far less apt to mention, however, is the way he's allowed Police Commissioner Ray Kelly and the NYPD to treat students and even teachers as if—as one middle-school student puts it—"we're on Rikers Island."
Last April, 13-year-old Chelsea Fraser was arrested and handcuffed by New York's Finest, in front of her classmates at the Dyker Heights Intermediate School, for writing "okay" on her school desk. She was charged with criminal mischief and writing graffiti. It took three hours for her mother to get to see the perpetrator at the precinct.
This year, on January 24, five-year-old Dennis Rivera, a kindergarten student at P.S. 81 in Queens who suffers from attention-deficit disorder, speech problems, and asthma, had his hands cuffed by a so-called "school safety agent"—behind his back, with metal restraints—and then was sent to Elmhurst Medical Center for evaluation after throwing a tantrum. (The SSAs are hired and trained by the NYPD and have the authority to arrest.) Released from the psych ward after four hours, the four-foot-three, 68-pound suspect has had nightmares ever since and insists that he doesn't want to go back to school. Chancellor Klein found the shackling of this supposed malefactor "troubling," but I've seen no further statement of accountability from him. And Bloomberg, that embodiment of the "New York Idea," has also been silent.
Previously, on January 15, two NYPD officers, seeing what they took to be unruly kids on a school bus, handcuffed 10-year-old Imecca Burton, who has attention-deficit disorder and dyslexia. "I thought," she said, "half my life would be gone." Adds her mother, Taneisha Pearson: "She's only 10, and now she's afraid of police and she's afraid to go outside."
These actions by the ever-vigilant guardians of our security got space in the Daily News and the Post. But no connections were made—except by the New York Civil Liberties Union—to a much more disturbing system of official lawlessness in the schools that has been created by the Bloomberg-Klein-Kelly gang of police and their school safety agents.
Said the NYCLU's executive director, Donna Lieberman, on January 25: "This should be a wake-up call to the mayor, the City Council, and the Department of Education. There is a crisis in our schools. . . .ince school discipline has been turned over to the NYPD, behavior problems have turned into criminal matters and youth of color—and children with disabilities—are paying the price."
In March 2007, the NYCLU—after receiving many complaints about the hooliganish behavior of the police and SSAs, about which Chancellor Klein has been inexcusably silent—issued a meticulously documented report, "Criminalizing the Classroom: the Over-Policing of New York City Schools." In the Voice, I wrote two indictments last year based on that report and my own research: "Schoolyard Bullies" (June 27) and "The Mayor and His Shock Troops" (July 3).
The New York City Council knows full well about this transmogrification of parts of the city's school system into a juvenile penal colony. On October 10, 2007, Donna Lieberman testified before the council's Education, Juvenile Justice, and Public Safety committees about some of the overpolicing reports that the NYCLU has been receiving from students and faculty.
So far, these three City Council committees have yet to summon the mayor, the police commissioner, or the schools chancellor to testify about this wholly irresponsible educational malpractice.
This is what Donna Lieberman told the members of those three committees: "We received one report involving teachers [at the New School for Arts and Sciences] who had called a local precinct to ask for assistance in breaking up a fight. By the time the police arrived, the fight was resolved and the situation was calm.
"But the police arrived at the school with the swagger and aggressiveness of street thugs. They began yelling at the children and directing profanity at both students and teachers. When one teacher asked the police not to curse at the children, the cops threatened him with arrest. And when a second teacher rallied in support of the first teacher, the police arrested both teachers and paraded them out of the school in handcuffs. . . .
"We [also] heard of a school principal who was arrested for objecting when a school safety agent entered a classroom to arrest a student in a circumstance where the arrest was not required by an exigent circumstance." The school was East Side Community High School; principal Mark Federmen's grievous offense was to tell the police to use the back door rather than the front to take the miscreant out.
Donna Lieberman's entirely rational response: "This incident demonstrates the urgent need for oversight of police practices in the schools."
In "Criminalizing the Classroom," the NYCLU gave a much-needed educational lesson to Bloomberg, Kelly, and Klein: "In the Los Angeles United School District, the Miami-Dade Public Schools, and the Clark County School District in Nevada—respectively, the second, fourth and sixth largest school districts in the country—the school police departments report to and are supervised by educators. . . .
"New York is alone [among America's largest school districts] in placing schools personnel [the NYPD and its SSAs] who are neither responsible to the educational bureaucracy nor specifically trained to 'educate, counsel and protect our school communities.' " (Emphasis added).
Next week: What can, should, and must be done to rein in the Bloomberg-Klein-Kelly gang, as spelled out in the NYCLU's School Safety Act, which was submitted by the NYCLU and a consortium of local and national organizations to the City Council last October.
As yet, there have been no hearings on this acutely needed legislation, because no member of the City Council has introduced it. Is the people's voice, Christine Quinn, no longer the formidable Speaker of the Council?
The tactics used since Bloomberg took over reads like a chapter from Naomi Klein's "The Shock Doctrine." On the organizational level, districts were dismantled and turned into regions, then, a few years later, regions were dismantled and turned into districts.
On the school level, large high schools are given ratings on a "school report card" based mostly on standardized tests results and compared to similar schools in terms of population, size, standardized test scores and other criteria that carry very little weight such as parent evaluatios.. If a school's scores drop even a little, they can be rated "F" even if most of its students do well on the tests. In this way even successful public schools can be closed to make way for unproven private charter schools.
Over the last few years, many large high schools have been closed, and then reopened as a cluster of smaller schools each with their separate missions,principals, staff, and students, all sharing the same building and competing for the same gym, library, and auditorium.
On the staff level, the trend is to hold teachers responsible for the improvements made by their students. This may seem reasonable except that the criteria are based again on standardized tests. Students may be ill on the testing day, stressed about personal issues,
nervous about the test itself. The schools that the teachers work in may be overcrowded, lacking in resources, and staffed by teachers new to the profession.
The older teachers are being forced out of the system in the following ways:
1. Teachers can no longer transfer based on seniority. Because principals are now
responsible for paying salaries from their individual budgets, they are less inclined
to hire older teachers who cost more. By older teachers, I'm referring to teachers who
have ten or more years in the system.
2. Many older teachers have ended up in what are called "rubber rooms" which the teachers
compare to gulags. Many don't know why they are there - they haven't been charged
with anything - but they must sit there sometimes for years before their case gets
called. By the time their cases are called, enough time has elapsed so that witnesses
and evidence have disappeared. A number of these teachers are whistleblowers.
On the Administrative level, principals are given almost total control. Following the business model, they are the CEOs of the school responsible for ultimately proving that they can get the test scores up. Those that do get bonuses. Those that don't can get fired and replaced.
As a result, there is increased pressure on principals, (CEOs) to produce the results the DOE wants.
On the Parental level, parents are so confused by the constant changes that they often don't know where to turn to get their questions answered. There are so many new schools, that there is no way to know which ones are functional and which ones are not. In addition, the weight that these standardized tests now carry to determine which schools and programs students can be admitted to, creates a lot of stress on families.
On the Student level many extracurricular program have been cut resulting in a rise in gang activity in some schools. Other programs for Special Education students are being dismantled as more and more Special needs students are mainstreamed into classes in which they can't cope. Large schools become overcrowded as students who would have been absorbed into other large schools that have been phased out have no where else to go.
All of these conditions lead to the situation described by Nat Hentoff in the following "Village Voice" article which was prompted by the possibility of a presidential bid by Mayor Bloomberg:
President Bloomberg? Not This Bad Apple
Mayor Mike should get more heat for teaching kids to fear the police
by Nat Hentoff
February 19th, 2008 12:00 AM
The New York Sun—reacting, apparently, to a popular groundswell that somehow escaped my attention—once again urged Michael Bloomberg to make an independent run at the White House in its January 30 issue: "[H]e may yet be the best standard bearer of what we think of as the New York Idea . . . dynamism, open-ness, and the logic of capitalism and freedom," the Sun's editorialists wrote.
Supposing that he is still tempted by a presidential run, we should take him at his word: "Being a mayor, you have to be explicit in what you stand for. You have to be accountable," he has said.
OK, let's hold him accountable. Bloomberg will tout the national plaudits and awards that he and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein have received for reforming New York's school system. What he's far less apt to mention, however, is the way he's allowed Police Commissioner Ray Kelly and the NYPD to treat students and even teachers as if—as one middle-school student puts it—"we're on Rikers Island."
Last April, 13-year-old Chelsea Fraser was arrested and handcuffed by New York's Finest, in front of her classmates at the Dyker Heights Intermediate School, for writing "okay" on her school desk. She was charged with criminal mischief and writing graffiti. It took three hours for her mother to get to see the perpetrator at the precinct.
This year, on January 24, five-year-old Dennis Rivera, a kindergarten student at P.S. 81 in Queens who suffers from attention-deficit disorder, speech problems, and asthma, had his hands cuffed by a so-called "school safety agent"—behind his back, with metal restraints—and then was sent to Elmhurst Medical Center for evaluation after throwing a tantrum. (The SSAs are hired and trained by the NYPD and have the authority to arrest.) Released from the psych ward after four hours, the four-foot-three, 68-pound suspect has had nightmares ever since and insists that he doesn't want to go back to school. Chancellor Klein found the shackling of this supposed malefactor "troubling," but I've seen no further statement of accountability from him. And Bloomberg, that embodiment of the "New York Idea," has also been silent.
Previously, on January 15, two NYPD officers, seeing what they took to be unruly kids on a school bus, handcuffed 10-year-old Imecca Burton, who has attention-deficit disorder and dyslexia. "I thought," she said, "half my life would be gone." Adds her mother, Taneisha Pearson: "She's only 10, and now she's afraid of police and she's afraid to go outside."
These actions by the ever-vigilant guardians of our security got space in the Daily News and the Post. But no connections were made—except by the New York Civil Liberties Union—to a much more disturbing system of official lawlessness in the schools that has been created by the Bloomberg-Klein-Kelly gang of police and their school safety agents.
Said the NYCLU's executive director, Donna Lieberman, on January 25: "This should be a wake-up call to the mayor, the City Council, and the Department of Education. There is a crisis in our schools. . . .
In March 2007, the NYCLU—after receiving many complaints about the hooliganish behavior of the police and SSAs, about which Chancellor Klein has been inexcusably silent—issued a meticulously documented report, "Criminalizing the Classroom: the Over-Policing of New York City Schools." In the Voice, I wrote two indictments last year based on that report and my own research: "Schoolyard Bullies" (June 27) and "The Mayor and His Shock Troops" (July 3).
The New York City Council knows full well about this transmogrification of parts of the city's school system into a juvenile penal colony. On October 10, 2007, Donna Lieberman testified before the council's Education, Juvenile Justice, and Public Safety committees about some of the overpolicing reports that the NYCLU has been receiving from students and faculty.
So far, these three City Council committees have yet to summon the mayor, the police commissioner, or the schools chancellor to testify about this wholly irresponsible educational malpractice.
This is what Donna Lieberman told the members of those three committees: "We received one report involving teachers [at the New School for Arts and Sciences] who had called a local precinct to ask for assistance in breaking up a fight. By the time the police arrived, the fight was resolved and the situation was calm.
"But the police arrived at the school with the swagger and aggressiveness of street thugs. They began yelling at the children and directing profanity at both students and teachers. When one teacher asked the police not to curse at the children, the cops threatened him with arrest. And when a second teacher rallied in support of the first teacher, the police arrested both teachers and paraded them out of the school in handcuffs. . . .
"We [also] heard of a school principal who was arrested for objecting when a school safety agent entered a classroom to arrest a student in a circumstance where the arrest was not required by an exigent circumstance." The school was East Side Community High School; principal Mark Federmen's grievous offense was to tell the police to use the back door rather than the front to take the miscreant out.
Donna Lieberman's entirely rational response: "This incident demonstrates the urgent need for oversight of police practices in the schools."
In "Criminalizing the Classroom," the NYCLU gave a much-needed educational lesson to Bloomberg, Kelly, and Klein: "In the Los Angeles United School District, the Miami-Dade Public Schools, and the Clark County School District in Nevada—respectively, the second, fourth and sixth largest school districts in the country—the school police departments report to and are supervised by educators. . . .
"New York is alone [among America's largest school districts] in placing schools personnel [the NYPD and its SSAs] who are neither responsible to the educational bureaucracy nor specifically trained to 'educate, counsel and protect our school communities.' " (Emphasis added).
Next week: What can, should, and must be done to rein in the Bloomberg-Klein-Kelly gang, as spelled out in the NYCLU's School Safety Act, which was submitted by the NYCLU and a consortium of local and national organizations to the City Council last October.
As yet, there have been no hearings on this acutely needed legislation, because no member of the City Council has introduced it. Is the people's voice, Christine Quinn, no longer the formidable Speaker of the Council?
