(PART 3)
The stories of Pygmalion, The Pied Piper and The Emperor’s New Clothes were among the tales that I was told as a child by my parents and grandparents, presumably to prepare me for rational thinking and sound decision making skills as I would grow up and inevitably be faced by less kind individuals with self serving goals who would seek to take advantage of me. This great Nation’s current path of searching for a new super spiffy initiative through which to teach our students is a certain slope of intellectual subjugation and opportunistic segregation against which the Civil Rights Movement has been struggling since 1954 with the breakout case Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka. Schools of choice and theme based educational models may show an ability to produce heightened student achievement, albeit short term and largely subjective, but blatantly risk denying all students their 14th Amendment protected right to equal protection under the law for an appropriate education. We know this but when do the students understand it? Although the developers of every new small design academy style school claim it provides a rigorous curriculum for college preparedness they by nature provide an unequal, different, look at the world which may not stigmatize the students’ outlook but deprive it of the variety our total society thereby creating a segregated environment.
Having been high school chemistry/biology teacher in Hartford, CT for six years I have seen the product of Sheff v. O’Neill, the need for positive change and the promise of it. In reform, I have seen students jumbled, grades fixed to promote and graduate students, special needs students neglected and students in magnet schools left unattended by staff. What exactly is being reformed in our schools?
(PART 4)
Several months ago at a Connecticut Forum event panelist Joel Klein, the outgoing Chancellor of Education in New York City, stated that smaller class sizes are optimal for learning. He also touted Hartford’s Superintendent of Schools, Dr. Steven Adamowski, as a wonder child of school redesign. Having begun my career in education in Hartford, CT as a chemistry teacher in 2003 and working continuously in the system until my contract was inappropriately non renewed in August of 2009 for erroneous reasons after I declined to cave to extortive tactics meant to elicit my voluntary resignation in the good name of budgetary reduction in force, I fail to see the rationale of the new design as anything that resembles effective or economically sound education administration. The autonomy granted these new education paradigm administrators in the name of saving our schools is an unleashed petard that is destroying talented teacher’s careers and demolishing hope for a bright future for our students. Many teachers such as me are being forced into unemployment while demigod administrators rape the tax coffers with their grotesque salaries and unwarranted bonuses. Additionally they dole out excessive consulting fees to cronies in an abusive misuse of the public trust. Money that did pay many great teachers well deserved salaries is now being converted for discretionary spending purposes by administrators that do not deserve to be called superintendents. The term carpetbagger comes to mind. What is transparency when you are not told the truth? How is bridging the projected school budget shortfall related to bridging the student achievement gap when the financial deficit is a theoretical contrivance presented without a fully understandable or supported explanation and assessment data is distributed for which there is no corroborating evidence other than subjective posturing by administrators who have no direct classroom connection?
(PART 5)
As a result of school redesign in many school systems students endure overcrowded classes, lack of critical materials and a revolving door approach to teacher and administrator supply which includes education interns, long term substitutes, outsourced tutors and even individuals brought here from other countries, such as India, on temporary “visiting” teacher credentials. Who should be glad they have this? Disjointed educational experiences are the greatest deterrent to achievement possible and yet this is largely the mainstream reality of the new design of education in many communities. Any parent and every student are, of course, excited on graduation day but the value of the learning behind the diploma is more important than having the diploma in hand. Greatness will never be achieved by a piece of paper. It is the inspired work of individuals that have learned the necessary skills to advance themselves and their societies beyond their dreams that have created the country we live in and nothing less will sustain it. Acceptance of mediocrity and abject complacency were not the goals of the framers of this country, Civil Rights Movement or our more recent traditional education model and should be something we all fight against daily.
Parents need to hold their child’s education system accountable for providing an appropriate education that will help the students have the opportunities that this Nation can provide. Accepting anything less than the highest accountability of an education system is shameful. Parents and community members alike need to visit schools while in session and attend school board meetings. Parents need to develop personal accountability relationships with the administrators and teachers who are responsible for their child and not accept mass produced emails from school computer servers as parent-teacher contact opportunities. Fight for a great education. Saving great teachers is saving a great education.
(PART 6)
New design education paradigm administration wants parents and politicians to believe that “Traditional Design” education professionals, teachers, are intrinsically bad, greedy, stale and lazy. The notion that teachers are overpaid is a bad notion. Teaching has been a profession in which an individual can expect to have a career with reasonable compensation, benefits and retirement. This was the reasonable goal of Lech Walesa in his fight for solidarity in Poland. Have we forgotten that the United States set the bar for fair treatment of workers? If a teacher wants to relax while the students have summer vacation, so be it. I do not think that anyone who would want to become a teacher just to have the summer off would think it a fair trade when they found out what they had to do for the rest of the year. Besides, having vacations and summers off when the schools are out is bad timing for good ticket prices. The truth is many teachers work through the summer. When was the last time you heard an infomercial about becoming a millionaire by teaching and having the summer off to count your money?
Another tremendous misconception regarding the education design that worked is that teacher unions protect bad teachers. It is the fundamental duty of administrators to identify teachers lacking in skill or ability and then work to correct the teacher’s deficit through support, guidance and training before the teacher reaches tenure. Unions tend to ignore fighting for non tenured teachers because their contract is essential at will and administration can terminate them without cause at any time. So, isn’t it pretty clear that bad administrators create and empower bad and ineffective teachers that unions must protect? The new education administration paradigm is a gamble and hardly worth a pair of nickels.
No comments:
Post a Comment