I will admit to having been only hopeful about where our schools will go under Mayor Bill de Blasio. He has a varied group of supporters. He had to in order to win election, especially by a landslide. Some of those supporters are advocates of corporate educational "reform." Now, with the appointment of Carmen Fariña, I am upgrading from hopeful to optimistic.
The challenge for New York City public schools is that anybody who looks back to a "golden age" is delusional or lying. That is why people can still yap about a "failed status quo" and not mean Michael Bloomberg's TWELVE YEARS of mayoral control. They are still harping on the perceived failures of the Board of Education, which is a phenomenon of the last century. They conveniently ignore the endless structural upheavals, the continual moving targets and the lack of any measurable progress. Mayor Mike and his chancellors have come up with an ever-changing and laughably complex calculus for giving letter grades to schools, teachers and principals. But they have issued letter grades to themselves based on their own purely subjective evaluations: "Things are goin' pretty well; I'd like them to be a little better. I think I'll call that an A-."
So we have had the attorney for Citigroup, a Justice Department attorney, a magazine publisher, and the president of the NY Urban League running our schools. We have not had a teacher. Carmen Fariña is a teacher. She was a classroom teacher for 22 years before becoming an administrator. She was principal of PS6 for ten years before she became a district superintendent. Compare that to Shael Polakow-Suransky, our current first deputy chancellor, who was put in that position as "an experienced educator" to compensate for Cathie Black's utter and complete lack of any experience in the public sector, not to mention education.
Shael was a teacher for six years, and assistant principal for a year, and a principal for two. He has been a senior executive at Tweed longer than all that put together. He is precisely the kind of educational leader who has no personal knowledge of the history of the system or of previous initiatives to improve the schools and how they fared.
The DOE is a huge and self-perpetuating bureaucracy. The endless forcing out of any senior people with institutional memory means that it is no longer so important for a successful leader to know the cast of characters. Right now, many of them, from principal up, see this as a short stop in their career, like Teach for America teachers who want to "do good" for two years before moving on to their real lives. That means we have principals, network leaders and deputy chancellors who are -- for all intents and purposes -- temps.
What has that meant for kids? I will give one quick example. Early in the Bloomberg era, Joel decided that off-campus suspension sites were a scam. He closed all of them. He dispersed their administrators and teachers -- the people who knew how to educate a rotating cast of kids who were in trouble and needed lots of extra personal attention -- into the other schools. The theory was that schools should hold on to their own suspended kids and keep them in the building. I don't need to explain why this is a bad idea because Chancellor Klein himself decided six months later that it would be a great idea to create suspension sites! Only now it had to be done from scratch, as if nobody had ever tried this before in the history of the universe, because he had squandered all the human capital the city of New York had amassed for accomplishing this task.
It is probably unfair to ask Carmen Fariña to come back and fix this mess at this point in her life. But if you do the math it is clear that an entire generation of leadership has been lost. A child entering Mike Bloomberg's school system as a kindergartner has now graduated high school having known thirteen years of endless structural upheavals, the continual moving targets and the lack of any measurable progress. (Oh, did I say that already. I can't say it enough.) But the same is true for a fifty-year old school leader. If they taught for 15 years before going into school leadership, they have now had to undergo 13 years of etc. see above. Oh yes. And threats to their livelihood. And enforced sycophancy. And -- all too likely -- scheming to meet numerical targets by any means necessary. They have been rendered unsuited to actually lead a school system of one million pupils.
We need courage. We need memory. We need a love of children and of learning. I think we have it.
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