DOE Legal + Crappy Pay = Grotesque Incompetence

A colleague of mine happens to be a lawyer. He doesn't work as a lawyer. He works as a teacher. He also has a doctorate, but you'd never know it. He doesn't use the title.

Like a lot of people, my friend often finds himself in need of money. I won't go into details, because they really are not important. My friend teaches at local colleges at night, and will take a sixth class if it comes up. I know how that is. I taught at Queens College for about twenty years. I only stopped when I became chapter leader, which kind of took over my life. I never take extra classes, because I have no idea how I even handle my current workload.

A few weeks ago, someone discovered by friend's law degree. That person reached out to him. Would you like to join DOE legal? This might be a key for him to reclaim his life. No more working nights at college. No more teaching six classes a day. It was simplicity itself.

So he went for an interview. It went well until he asked about the salary. It was $10,000 less than he was making as a teacher. Would they give him credit for decades in the system? No. We don't do things like that over at DOE legal. So he'd take a cut in pay, work more hours, have no chance of teaching the sixth class, and still be stuck teaching college in the PM. No thank you.

I have another acquaintance who used to work for DOE legal, but went the other way, into education. I asked her why the lawyers there disregarded the contract, and why, when UFT said one thing and legal another, that legal was invariably wrong. "They haven't read the contract," she told me. "They just do whatever they want."

That's just one reason the UFT grievance process drags into months and years. I may have written once or twice about the fact that I've got at least half a dozen step twos waiting on arbitration. How long will they wait? No one knows. My last step two hearing was around a month ago. From step one to two took almost a year. We're waiting on the step two ruling, which will certainly go against us because they all do. Our only chance at fairness is to get to arbitration.

This culture of indifference and unfairness pervades the DOE. It's pretty well-known that you don't get rich becoming a teacher. Law has a reputation, deserved or otherwise, as being a financially rewarding profession. When you hire lawyers and pay them less than teachers, what's the expectation of quality? I can only suppose that quality is not what the DOE values. What DOE values is defending principals at the expense of educators no matter what. Truth is of no consequence.

Thus, if you hire the lowest quality lawyers, perhaps you can trust they will not only disregard the collective bargaining agreement, but they will also not bother to read it, let alone consult it. You want to put a letter in file over three months after something happened, Mr. Principal? You want to put a letter in file without consulting with the teacher? You want to refuse to pull a letter after three years? You want to agree in writing to pull the letter, then pull it, then just put it back whenever you feel like it?

That's fine, Mr. Principal. Not only can you do all of that stuff, but we'll rule with you at step two. We'll say that the incident was not an occurrence, and therefore the three month window does not apply. We'll say you didn't need to pull the letter because you didn't feel like it. We'll say the consultation doesn't apply because the letter wasn't disciplinary, even though the contract provides for no such exception, and never mind the letter said if the incident was repeated the teacher might be terminated.

It must be great to have a gig where you can do any damn thing you feel like, ignore absolutely all rules and regulations, and sit around some air-conditioned heated office with a desk and a computer. It's like on The Sopranos, where a bunch of guys sat around a construction site in lawn chairs, drinking beer and watching the people who had real jobs working.

Of course we teachers are the people with real jobs. We get judged by junk science as DOE legal revels in their incompetence. In fact, if DOE lawyers prove themselves sufficiently inept, they seem to get promoted. That's who's advising our principals.

Some people wonder how someone like Ben Sherman rises to principal. I wonder how the ones who aren't like him manage to get promoted at all.

The Good Old (Snow) Days

Sure, I sometimes give Mayor Bill de Blasio a hard time. I mean, he left all those fanatical ideologues Bloomberg hired in place, and my job is just that much more difficult. He's done nothing to hold back all those insane lunatics Bloomberg's Leadership Academy trained in the art of insane lunacy. I'm still teaching in a half-room, my colleagues are in trailers and closets, and he doesn't give a golly gosh darn about class sizes.

This notwithstanding, he's been pretty good about snow days. It's nice to have a mayor who wants fewer of us to get injured or die on the road.

Do you remember waiting until 5 AM to find out whether or not school was open? Joel Klein would sit around, reading the tea leaves (or doing whatever it is predatory birds do to pass the time) and wait until the last possible moment to let a million kids and a hundred thousand UFT members whether or not they had to dig out and come in.

De Blasio is having none of that. It looks like there's gonna be a crapload of snow, so schools are closed. Not only that, but he tells you the day before. One day, after de Blasio visited the UFT Delegate Assembly if I'm not mistaken, Norm Scott and I took off to Luke's Lobster over on South William Street. Norm was drinking beer, but I had to go to work the next day and abstained. My District Rep sent me a text that school was closed, and all of a sudden we were both drinking beer. It was a great moment.

Before the announcement, I was playing around with friends on Facebook, saying maybe tomorrow would be a snow day. It seemed to good to be true. But I learned on Twitter from the chancellor that this was really a thing:

It’s official - school cancelled tomorrow due to snow storm. @NYCSchools

— Chancellor Richard A. Carranza (@DOEChancellor) March 3, 2019

 

Shortly thereafter, I stumbled upon the above UFT graphic, which I texted to every one of my colleagues whose phone number I happened to have, and then realized it made more sense to just email it to everyone on staff. I may be slow, but eventually I catch on. It's nice to be the bearer of glad tidings, something that happens all too rarely. I'm pretty happy. I'd almost certainly have gone in. Every snow day I think about staying home, but I don't think I ever have.

I remember, when Rudy Giuliani was mayor, driving up the Long Island Expressway, listening to him saying, "It's really dangerous out there. If you don't have to come in to work, stay home." I'm certain I posted that message on the board for the five or six students who were as crazy as I am, showing up that day.

New York is known for being ridiculous on snow days. My mother told me that once, when she was a little girl in Brooklyn, there was an incredible snowstorm and her parents sent her to school. The teacher was there, but she was the only kid whose parents made her go. The teacher sent her home. (I wonder whether the teacher went home.)

I wish you all a healthy, warm and joyous snow day! No one deserves it more than you.

The Ben and Juan Show--Episode 1 "Too Little Too Late at Forest Hills"

Superintendent Juan Mendez and principal Ben Sherman toured the school yesterday in an elaborate apology project. Evidently, they've been reading the mounting bad press. There is going to be even more, I hear.

They seem to have noted that the Forest Hills High School Parent Association has joined UFT in asking for the principal's removal. I can only guess by walking around the school and saying a few words of contrition they think that the school community will simply forget the last year and a half of failure and frustration.

It's always a good idea to admit when you make mistakes. Sitting on them and letting them build and expand rarely helps the situation. Nonetheless, the apology tour comes months and months after the alienation began. I'm betting the community doesn't buy it. Here's what Sherman said, in a letter to staff:

"I know you have been reading a lot about me recently.  I recognize there are many concerns.  I am against students using drugs, vaping, or smoking in our school.  I am against students loitering in the hallways, staircases, or other places.  I am not a perfect person.  I have many faults, just ask my wife.  I apologize for statements which have offended you, including saying 'because I am the Principal.'   I need to listen better to you.  If I have given anyone the impression that I am soft on crime or that I am permissive about drug use I apologize. 

It sounds good, on the surface. But is it a genuine revelation, or simply something you say out of expedience after the NY Post writes a few articles about you, and Jimmy Fallon makes you the target of a late-night joke? Call me cynical, but I think anyone with a modicum of self-awareness would have noticed there was a problem way sooner.

The unspoken request is that Forest Hills move back to square one, and that the community trust someone who has done absolutely nothing to earn trust. Norm Scott always says, "Watch what they do, not what they say," and that's apt here. While the principal, likely as not at the urging of the superintendent who placed him, has put out a few words, his actions say he doesn't care a whit about the school community.

To me, that's not a strong calling card for someone to lead a school. After a consistent pattern of abuse, of looking the other way, of refusing to own responsibility, a few words are less than persuasive.

As a teacher, if I ran my class the way Ben Sherman seems to have run his school, I'd almost certainly be up on charges for incompetence. It's funny how, here in Fun City, principals can just say, "I'm sorry," and have every expectation of plodding on in their gross ineptitude. Funnier still is, given the Leadership Academy, it's likely the city trained Ben Sherman to behave this way.

If the mayor and chancellor are serious about going in a different direction than that of Michael Bloomberg, they need to take decisive action. "Oopzie," simply does not quality.

English and the Fine Art of Crap Extraction

I'm doing one of my least favorite things this year--preparing students to take a standardized test. They don't graduate unless they pass it, so I don't feel like I have a choice. One problem is that half the class has actually passed the test, so those students aren't particularly motivated to study for it. I don't blame them. The NY State English Regents Exam, more than anything, is an exercise in tedium. It's exactly what I would not teach if I wanted to inspire a love of reading or writing.

Of course, I can't be bothered with such lofty concerns. The important thing is that they learn how to pick out appropriate support, spit it out credited, and explain it. I recently heard a supervisor say the only kind of writing done in college is argumentative essay. If that's the case (It wasn't when I went.), then I have little idea why we're even bothering with college. The current iteration of the English Regents exam is all about the crap we refer to as "close reading," or dredging through whatever to find particular points.

I speak to English teachers who tell me they're discouraged from teaching entire novels. Why not just teach excerpts so they learn how to extract crap from it? After all, what's more important--teaching a love of reading, or learning how to extract crap from fiction the same way you extract it from non-fiction? The more I look at the English Regents exam, the more I realize that crap extraction is the apex of Western Civilization, and we must therefore focus on it and it exclusively.

I'm old fashioned and unsophisticated in the art of crap extraction. I remember the first book I ever read. I think it was called The Little Black Puppy. I was fascinated when I cracked the code of sounds represented by letters. In elementary school, we were explicitly taught English usage, parts of speech, and punctuation. These are things we're not really supposed to focus on in high school, but I see a whole lot of students who can use help with it.

I'm thinking of two students right now who, in my unworthy opinion, cannot write at all. Their sentence structures are odd, likely direct translations from their first language that do not work in English. Both are in my advanced class, yet would benefit more from my beginning class. However, both have tested out of ESL via the NYSESLAT, which measures I have no idea what. Because the NYSESLAT is aligned with the English Regents exam, and the fine art of crap extraction, they've passed that too. One got 82, and the other got 86.

The insane concept of "college and career readiness" is somehow tied to the English Regents score. I assume that one or both of these students has reached that lofty plateau. I can tell you, though, with 100% certainty, that neither of these students is prepared to take English 101 in college. If they go to city schools, they'll take writing tests and be bounced into remedial courses. They'll pay thousands of dollars to learn what I could've easily taught them in high school.

Instead, they're sitting in my crap extraction course, which they need not at all. But common core has made the need for crap extraction a national emergency. Therefore our kids are done with fiction, finished with Shakespeare, rid of the need to interpret language, and set on a path of trudging through tedious crap and determining which of the crap is most important.

Multiple sources assure me it isn't only ELLs we're sending into the world unable to write coherently in English. Because NY State is enormously ambitious, we're failing native English speakers as well. I'm told that students with excellent overall grades cannot spit out a decent personal statement for college. This failure is even more shocking than the one we've presided over for ELLs.

We can serve our children better.. The overarching philosophy of Common Core, as stated by its illustrious founder David Coleman, is no one gives a crap what you think or feel. That's one of the most pathetic and cynical philosophies I can imagine.  It's anathema to anyone who's chosen to teach for a living.

How pathetic that we have so many so-called leaders who drink whatever Kool-Aid served them. While I'm actively involved in teaching kids how to pass one single test, and showing them skills that will likely be good for little or nothing more than that in the long run, at least I'm aware of it. Unlike a whole lot of people, I'm not going to pretend otherwise.