Life After the Rubber Room

January 20

2009-01-20T18:13:00.002-05:00

This weekend has been filled with lots of things about Barack Obama. Even a short piece on why the spell checkers complain about his name. The blog one thinks it should be Ba rack Obadiah. Seems like someone should be able to fix this.

As I listened to a lot of the Obama things I kept running into stories or people talking about what this day meant to them. These stories kept causing a lump in my throat. I realized that the sense of hope in me is very strong. It is really great to feel this way. I am old enough to know that it won't last forever, but damn, it feels good right now.

I know people who hate Obama. I choose to ignore these people. I can do this because they are marginalized right now. I know people who do not feel this sense of hope. These people are sadder to think about. These people are missing something profound that is happening in this country. They may have lots of really good reasons for holding back, but I can't help feeling that they are missing a rare opportunity to believe in something. It may never happen again in my life time.

Today we broadcast the inauguration in the auditorium. My school has a junior high in the building also. The auditorium had 500 kids from 5th to 12th grade. When Joe Biden took the oath they cheered. When Yo Yo Ma and Itzhak Perlman were anounced the kids fidgeted, but then listened. When Barack Obama took the oath they went crazy. When he spoke there was not a sound in the auditorium except for applause a few times and boos when he mentioned Bush. I do not think I have ever been in a high school auditorium this quiet or this attentive.

Last week I was in a lab and a black boy was walking by with his pants below his ass. I mentioned to him that Obama had said he didn't want to see this any more. The kid pulled his pants up. I feel a change is happening. I feel different today than I did yesterday. I have hope.

The odor of love.

2009-01-18T17:33:00.002-05:00

There seems to be some evidence that people are attracted to members of the opposite sex based on the odor the other person gives off. The person of the opposite sex may give off a smell that signals that there genotype will produce children that are more immune to disease than either person is. This makes a lot of sense from an evolution stand point.

Why we are attracted to a particular member of the opposite sex has always interested me. In some cases there is a clear logic, the other person has money, the other person fits what you think you should have, etc. But often the choice makes little sense. You fall in love and you are not sure why. Falling in love only makes sense if it is seen as necessary for the survival of the species.

This concept has made me reevaluate why people are healthier today then they were 100 years ago. They are healthier. The general consensus has been that there is better nutrition and more immunization. I am sure this is true. But maybe it is not the whole truth. In the civil war soldiers from cities did better than rural soldiers in terms of getting diseases such as dysentery. Dysentery was a huge problem. It weakened whole armies. The argument has always been that city people had better immune systems because they had been exposed to more germs.

What if this is not the whole story. It is possible that the fact that city people have larger choices of mates meant that they were more likely to find someone with a complementary genotype. City folk were breeding healthier kids. I find this appealing because it argues for a wide open mating market. A mating market free from the need to stay within an ethnic, religious or racial group. Maybe bigots produce less healthy kids.

Did George Bush save Social Security?

2009-01-08T13:39:00.004-05:00

When you think about it the total crash of the stock market has caused many people to delay retirement. This is exactly what Social Security needed. If no one can afford to retire than the system will save large amounts of money. So, thanks George.

In a few days Barack Obama will be President. This got me thinking about elections. I think that this country basically wants to vote for someone who is not too smart. I think the majority of people are nervous around smart people. This is why George was elected twice. This seems to be part of an American anti-intellectual bias. We want Clint Eastwood or Tommy Lee Jones to be our president.

Obama is not either one of these guys. The only way we can elect someone such as Obama is if he/she has an extra something. Obama is black, Hillary is a woman, Kennedy is a Catholic etc. The winning formula is to round up the people who want a smart leader (even though this is a minority) and add a block that will vote for someone in spite of their being smart (in Obama's case the blacks).

This may reflect the increasing divide in our country. My parents aspired to smartness for their kids. I think a lot of people in our country today are nervous about their kids becoming too smart and moving out of town and rejecting their parents life style. This is sad and needs to be addressed.

Unions

2008-12-15T14:34:00.002-05:00

The Republican, after totally mismanaging the economy have decided that it is not their fault it is the unions' fault. The senators screaming the most about the auto bailout are all Republican, they are all from right to work states and most of them have non-union auto plants. It is not enough that their states have subsidized these plants so that Toyata and Mercedes and Honda will have a competitive advantage. They seem to feel that they need to destroy the US auto industry to assure this advantage.

When this happens who will benefit. I imagine the power elite in these states will become rich. The overseas car companies will become rich, and the workers will become poorer. Do these guys realize that if workers keep getting squeezed that no one will be able to afford a car. Then what? As companies become more automated the idea was that workers would share in the increase in productivity. If a worker is 10 times more efficient today than in 1960 than the worker should make more money, this is called sharing the wealth. No one wants to talk about this anymore.

There is still talk of Joel Klein for the department of Education. I saw a great quote in The Times. This guy Fuller said that for Klein “It’s tough love without any love,” a perfect description. Putting someone into the Education department who is as anti-union and anti-teacher as Klein is a very bad idea.

None of this means that unions are perfect. But without them we will be back in the days of the robber barons. If you follow the money you will see this.

I also saw an article in the paper about a doctor who has been one of the main proponents of using psycho-active drugs on kids. This doctor is at Harvard school of medicine. When asked how much the drug companies paid him he said not more than a few hundred thousand dollars. It turns out it was 1.2 million. You have to always follow the money.

Catch 22

2008-12-08T12:51:00.002-05:00

I went to see Catch 22 last weekend. The play was not that great. All the lines were taken directly from the book, which meant there were some great lines. It was just that it didn't work as a play. There was a discussion by one of the characters about time passing. He was saying that time passed very quickly when you were having a good time, and slowly when you were not. The conclusion was to have a miserable time if you want to feel like you lived a long time.

Meanwhile there was an old guy (he said he was 107) who sat outside a whore's house in Rome. He gave a whole long speech about why Italy would win the war. His premise was that Italians were bad soldiers and therefore less likely to die. He also talked about welcoming the Germans than later welcoming the Americans. Whoever was in power he would welcome them. He was not trying to change the world. He did not want Italy to become the richest most powerful country in the world. He just wanted to be happy. He thought that that was winning.

This guy was very appealing some how. When I think about myself, I think I am not working that hard. I am teaching a class which I love doing. I am playing with technology with an expectation of whatever I do is great because no one expects much. I have no power. Usually a lack of power comes with a lack of control over your own life. In my case this is not true.

Maybe I should think like this old Roman. Whoever takes over, I should welcome them. Just relax and enjoy myself. I think I keep writing about this. The idea of slowing down and just letting life happen. If only I could sit outside a whore house in Rome drinking wine and giving fatherly advice to the whores.

Chavez

2008-12-03T11:09:00.002-05:00

CARACAS (Reuters) - Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said on Tuesday he expects the OPEC nation will vote in late February on a constitutional amendment letting him stay in office as long as he keeps winning elections.

"In February, at the end of February, I think we should be ready for the referendum ... on the constitutional amendment," Chavez said during a televised speech.

Chavez, a socialist, lost a similar bid to amend the constitution last year and will have to leave office in 2013 if he loses the upcoming vote.

Thank god I don't live in a country that lets it's elected leader change the constitution to meet their own agenda and desire for power.

Oh wait I live in a city that does this. Never mind.

Another Reason to Hate Republicans

2008-11-25T14:57:00.002-05:00

Mitt Romney was on TV the other day. He was talking about the auto companies. (Mitt should know something about them, his dad ran American Motors and was governor or Michigan)( I owned an AMC car when I was young. It got great gas mileage and the front seat went all the way back. A great feature when you were young and into parking with girls.) Mitt feels that GM and the rest should be allowed to go bankrupt. The reason he thinks they should is that it would allow them to get rid of legacy costs. To Mitt legacy costs include real estate and pension costs.

If you live in a town such as Lansing this is going to be awful. What Mitt's plan does is it means that all these people in your community with GM pensions are going to make less. It also means that all of the GM plants that have closed or been torn down in Lansing can be abandoned. GM will not be responsible for paying taxes and probably not responsible for cleaning up the brown fields they have left behind. The net effect of Mitt's plan is to shift many social welfare costs from corporate America to the government. Of course when the government steps in and says that they should help people or local government Mitt will yell "socialism".

I am not sure where Mitt thinks this will all end up. I am sure it will make real estate cheaper, which will be good for people with Mitt's kind of money. It will probably also lower the wages of servants. All in all a win-win for Mitt.

The Civil War

2008-11-19T11:23:00.002-05:00

For some reason I have lately become interested in the Civil War. I have read a bunch of books about the revolutionary war over the years but I was never that interested in the Civil War. It seemed something only southerners were interested in. Years ago I had read a book on John Brown by Arthur Penn Warren. I did this after I visited Harper's Ferry. A few months ago I picked up another book at the Strand on John Brown. This one is by David S. Reynolds. This led me to reading some Walt Whitman and then going to a lecture on him at the Tenement Museum where I bought a biography of Whitman.

Yesterday in the Times on line I saw a review of "The Grapes of Wrath". The reason this movie is getting press at this time is that people are drawing parallels between today and The Great Depression. Many commentators are saying that Barack Obama is going to need to be the next FDR. But Obama really understands who he needs to be. Obama is reading about Lincoln not FDR.

What the Republicans have done to this country is create a social situation more like what existed before the Civil War. The levels of rumors and false stories that surrounded John Brown and Abraham Lincoln in the southern press is not that different than listening to Limbaugh and Hannity and reading some of the blogs from the right wing. These people are going nuts with all of the awful things they say are going to happen. Karl Rove and company have created an us vs them mentality in this country. This has led to incidents such as the group of 3rd and 4th graders in Idaho chanting assassinate Obama. Or the white kids beating up a black teenager in Staten Island while chanting Obama. These are similar to the ruffians that existed on the Missouri Kansas border in the 1850's.

Obama is right to think that he needs to lower this type of partisan howling. This country can not thrive as long as this continues. Lincoln was elected on a platform of compromise and inclusion. Unfortunately it didn't work. The south became increasing set in their thinking. Lincoln was unable to change them and eventually this led to a war. Lets hope the politicians in Idaho or Texas or Louisiana decide that it is time to work together before we have a civil war of some sort.

* Limbaugh spell checks OK but not yet Obama.

Friday Stuff

2008-11-14T15:12:00.002-05:00

The paper today had an article about how much money the DoE was spending on accountability software. These types of initiatives have a tendency to become their own self fulfilling bureaucracies sucking up huge amounts of money for increasingly less useful results.

I was talking about atomic radius today and a kid asked what the abbreviation "pm" meant when speaking of atomic radius. I did not know the answer but I asked if anyone had access to the internet on their phone. One kid pulled out his Sidekick and looked up pm (it means picometers). I mention this because apparently cell phones have a use. My current school works on a don't ask don't tell policy with almost no bad consequences.

If I want to talk about Bill Clinton I will discover that the name does not get a red line under it. Apparently the spell checker built into Windows XP or Blogger or wherever it is is comfortable with Bill Clinton. If I type in Barack Obama I see red lines under both names. I wonder how long it takes spell checkers to catch up with the world.

I see my old school got its second straight F. This has to do with two things, the moron who used to be principal and the fact that it is a zero tolerance schools. Almost all zero tolerance schools close down within four years of becoming zero tolerance. You could look it up.

Joel Klein for Secretary of Education !

2008-11-13T09:25:00.002-05:00

I am not anti Joel Klein. I think he has tried to change a system that is certainly broken. I think in some ways he has focused on the correct thing. Good teachers make a good system. He has failed more than he has succeeded and this is his fault not Randy Weingarten's.

Joel comes from the law world. Big law firms manage large groups of creative people. They are not that different than education. Joel is trying to learn some of the lessons from this world. He supports performance bonuses. Of course performance bonuses in the law world can be hundreds of thousands of dollars, not ten thousand. If he thinks teachers are motivated by ten thousand dollars he is wrong.

In the law world if you really want an employee you wine and dine him/her until you convince him/her to work for you. In the ed. world you offer them a cellophane wrapped "danish" and a bad cup of coffee. You then have them sign a sheet of paper saying they were there so that you can get your money back for the snacks. Finally you tell the applicant you want to hire them but first there are a few hundred hoops they have to jump through. In the end you don't hire the black kid from Columbia University who grew up in a single parent household. Instead you hire the guy with the thick accent who hates American kids but has all the right credentials because he took the test so many times he had memorized all the questions.

Ultimately what hurt Joel Klein is that he became fixated on being able to develop a quantifiable way to measure teacher performance. Joel has spent millions of dollars creating computer systems to do this. I am not really against these types of systems. I think that they often give you a good view of what is happening in a big organization. But, when you use these types of systems as your main evaluation tool you just create a group of managers who are good at manipulating the system. You also become tempted to cheat the system yourself to show how wonderful you are doing.

The feds finally proposed a plan that says all states must determine graduation statistics based on how many kids enter 9th grade vs how many graduate 12th grade in 4 or 5 years. Isn't it amazing that this was not the way it was always done.

Elementary Mis-Education

2008-11-12T09:20:00.002-05:00

I am a high school science teacher. My ability to teach science is based to some extent on how much math kids know when they come to me. I also need kids who can read and analyze word problems. I think this is important work because I believe that we need to create a population with the ability to read and analyze complex issues. If we don't we risk creating an electorate that believes that Saddam Hussein attacked the World Trade Center.

Last week my wife went to a staff development day on math for 3rd grade teachers. The word problem was:

If Jane has 24 feet of fence and she wants to build an enclosure for her dogs what are the dimensions of a rectangle she can build with the largest amount of square feet.

The teachers not only could not do this problem, but when my wife said that two sides had to add up to 12 they couldn't follow why that was true. This means that these teachers are not smart enough to teach 3rd grade students. The reason they are not smart enough is that the education schools allowed them through. How can some one get a college degree and not be able to solve this problem by some method. My method might be very sophisticate. But these teachers should have some approach to solving this problem.

The nice thing about a depression is that it gives us the opportunity to recruit smart people to education. It is vital that we do this. We can not have kids coming through elementary school without learning any math or science. We can not afford this.

Is it a new day?

2008-11-05T21:26:00.003-05:00

It is Wednesday and I can't help feel that it is a new world. I have to say though that even though 40% of my students think he will not be alive 4 years from now no one seems to want to talk about it on television. My students are not alone in feeling this way. "Yes we can" until someone takes it away from you.

I received this email today from someone I know.

Comments from an Irish-American friend in Chicago:

They started rounding up the white women this morning for “reeducational meetings”. Initially there were calls of death to whitey but first they want to make sure they nationalize the malt liquor industry as well as pork rinds and chitterlins. Once the basic supplies are ensured who knows what will happen.

I am vaguely beginning to feel what it must mean to be a Jew.

Surprisingly no looting or riots yet

This type of anger existed when Kennedy was president. People cheered in a country club outside Dallas when they announced Kennedy was dead. We have made it past race but not hate. People hate Obama in very extreme ways. They make race jokes, but I think they hate the concept of government being for people.

I really want to believe in happy endings. Maybe we have one.

Killing Trees

2008-11-04T13:44:00.002-05:00

One of my favorite magazines at this time is Atlantic. I usually read almost all of the articles. This included a very long article this month by Andrew Sullivan on blogging. Of course I would never had read an article this long if the author had written it on his blog. Sullivan correctly states that blogs are meant to be short.

One of the gadgets I have lusted after is an electronic book reader (either a Kindle or a Sony reader, though I think the Sony reader has real advantages). The reason I want this gadget is that it seems cool to carry one around with a lot of books and magazines. In addition I wouldn't have to keep building book shelves. I also would do my part for ecology, not just the trees but also the trucks delivering books, the oil used in ink and the ability to get a book immediately.

Aside from the money the reason I don't get an e book reader is that if I check the last 6 books I have read to see if they are available as e books I usually find at best 1 book is available and usually none are. E books have not caught up with my reading habits. (I like to think this is because I am too smart for the e book world, but actually even some of my pop books don't show up.)

Today I was on the bus reading The Atlantic and thinking about reading this magazine on my ebook reader. I could do this. Then I realized that this would cause a large problem. My house is filled with half read magazines. Most of them have one or two articles that I intend to read. I feel guilty about not reading them, but after about six months I will go through the house and throw away all of the magazines I have not gotten too. A few weeks ago I threw away all of the July and August Magazines in my house. By doing this I no longer feel guilty about not getting to that amazing article on "The neurological implications of the sex drive in flat worms". If I had a Kindle I could save these magazines for ever. It is only a small amount of memory in the Kindle, but it is a large amount of guilt in my wetware.

I'm Not Dead Yet!

2008-11-03T14:37:00.002-05:00

When I started writing this blog I was sitting in the "Rubber Room" with 8 hours to kill each day. I thought it would pass an hour by, but then I discovered that writing is actually difficult. It some times took hours to write. This year I have been teaching a class so I have had less time. In addition working with kids has made me happier so I don't have as many grouchy things to say. Grouchy is always easier to write than hope.

Today I have hope because I think that there are huge numbers of people in the world who are going to feel a weight lifted from them after Obama wins. It is John Kennedy all over again world wide. Of course 40% of the kids in my school feel he will not be alive 4 years from now. But hope causes a lot of things to change, even before legislation catches up with it.

My sister voted early in Florida. Early voting means that you take a paper ballot an fill out the circles next to who you are voting for. You do this at a table surrounded by curtains so that your ballot is secret. You then take it over to another machine where a poll worker helps you feed it into the scanner. Of course at this point the poll worker gets to look at your ballot. When my sister said that she did not fell that this was right the poll worker said that she should be proud of who she voted for and not want to hide it. Gee, voting irregularities in Florida, who would have thought this would happen.

Dunkin Donuts

2008-06-09T09:04:00.002-05:00

Hear in New York City we now have a new law that says that restaurants need to post calorie contents on their menus. It would seem to be another example of big brother saving us from ourselves, but the law doesn't tell us what to buy.

Every day I go into Dunkin Donuts and buy a medium black coffee. It is a wonderful experience because everyone there knows me so all I have to do is get to the front of the line, grunt and stick out my two dollars and I get my coffee. My kind of morning communications. Occasionally if I am feeling sorry for myself I will buy a donut. I always feel guilty about this because I am a little chubby. (Actually the Wii fitness says I am obese.) Sometimes I will decide to be healthier and instead of the donut I will get an oatmeal raisin cookie or a poppy seed bagel. (Always poppy seed because of the opium) One of my favorite donuts is a Boston Cream. This is a delightful mixture of gently fried dough injected with a yellow gooey substance and than dipped in chocolate. It is so good it must be evil.

So, I went into Dunkin Donuts, and there on the rack of donuts and other goodies behind the counter is a label with the name of the item and the number of calories:
Boston Cream 280; Poppy Seed Bagel 370; Oatmeal Raisin cookie 470. Wow! Who would have thought that being bad had less calories than being good.

One Less Vote for Obama

2008-06-04T13:19:00.002-05:00

My daughter is going to vote for Barack Obama. Her vote used to count because she lived in Michigan. Everyone wanted her vote. Now she is moving to Massachusetts, no one wants her vote. Both Obama and McCain assume that Massachusetts will go for Obama, and because of the way the electoral college works, this means that Obama will get all of the votes in that state. He doesn't care if he wins by 10 votes or 10 million votes.

The reason the electoral college comes into the news is that it is possible to win the election and lose the popular vote. This happened in 2000 and it was awful. But this is not the worse evil of the electoral college. The worst part of it is that it distorts the campaign. Because of where the swing states are, you will hear a lot about NAFTA and immigration in this election. You will not hear about some of the issues that those of us in New York and Boston care about. The kind of issues that might get Obama 10% more of our votes. He doesn't care about that 10%. This means that we end up with a lot of issues that seem important, but are not as important as they appear.

One of the reasons we can't come up with sensible immigration reform is that the presidential candidates need to pander to the swing state. What if my vote counted and my daughters vote counted. I think that the debate would be seriously changed.

There may be a reason to keep some of the electoral college, but at the very least states should be giving out electoral votes in proportion to the popular vote. When you ask many politicians about this they seem to agree, but they do not protest enough about it. They don't because they are afraid of the difficulty and cost of running a national campaign. They like being able to pick states and figure out how to pitch to them. It's what makes the pros the pros. It is what makes the pundits the pundits. No one wants to lose this edge. No one really seems to care about the inherent distortion to the American political system caused by the electoral college. Those of us in the safely blues states should be mad. Those people in the safely Red states should be mad. We are disenfranchised.

After I wrote this I did some research and found that some states have passed legislation that says all of the state's electoral votes will go to the candidate with the highest popular vote. This legislation only takes effect if enough states also pass similar legislation. An interesting end around.

Principals Riot

2008-05-27T08:45:00.003-05:00

Douglas Avella was removed from his classroom at Intermediate School 318 after students handed in blank standardized exams to protest high-stakes tests last week.

This was the lead for a story on Saturday. What happened was that this teacher may have been involved in getting kids to protest a practice test. Here is Thursday's story.

More than 160 students in six different classes at Intermediate School 318 in the South Bronx - virtually the entire eighth grade - refused to take last Wednesday's three-hour practice exam for next month's statewide social studies test.

Instead, the students handed in blank exams.

Then they submitted signed petitions with a list of grievances to school Principal Maria Lopez and the Department of Education.

"We've had a whole bunch of these diagnostic tests all year," Tatiana Nelson, 13, one of the protest leaders, said Tuesday outside the school. "They don't even count toward our grades. The school system's just treating us like test dummies for the companies that make the exams."

There are a couple of things you should notice about the original article. First the teacher was not accused of leading a boycott of a real test just one of the many practice tests that schools think is a good idea, because they believe practice tests up test scores. Second virtually the entire class participated. No one can do this if there is not a clear grievance on the part of these students.

What we have is a teacher who does this amazing thing, he teaches kids how to find their voice. His reward is that he is quickly removed from the school and sent to the rubber room. Apparently he is considered a danger to students. But of course he is not a danger to students he is a danger to a principal. Is there even a pretense any more of the rubber room as anything other that a political gulag.

Today I heard a story of another principal sending the chapter chair and the UFT delegates to the rubber room on the same day. Another obvious political move. When I first started in the system this type of thing did not happen. People in the rubber room were usually pretty crazy, or had done something bad. I remember defending a teacher when I was chapter chair who was crazy, but who was never sent to the rubber room. The rubber room was small. I think that the local superintendents were hesitant to send people there. This acted as a restraint. Something has changed, and I am not sure what. I am guessing that the chancellor has been pushing this tool and that principals have been trying to prove to their bosses that they are tough. Sending people to the rubber room is a good way to prove how tough you are in today's environment.

The UFT is upset about the chapter chair and delegates being sent to the rubber room. When most of the teachers were sent their the UFT didn't care, but now they care. They have put themselves into this position now they need to suffer the consequences.

When I first joined the UFT it was an organization that was dominated by one party, but that had some dissidents on the executive board. The UFT is as undemocratic as the DoE so it drove them craze that dissidents were on the board. In a move that would make Joel Klein proud the UFT changed its constitution to make it virtually impossible for anyone to win an election to the board except the approved slates.

The problem the UFT has with the rubber room is that it thinks the same as the DoE. An organization built on power politics and undemocratic principals finds it hard to fight these same principals in the DoE. They are hoisted by their own petard.

Joe Stalin where are you now

2008-05-19T09:33:00.002-05:00

I appreciate some really well thought out comments on my last post. It has kept me thinking about the issue. When Stalin ran Russia he just killed people he didn't like or people who got in his way. After he died the leadership became more subtle. Instead of death they sentenced people to Gulags or another great Soviet institution the mental institute. If you disagreed with the leadership, you must be crazy. This approach to justice is one of the major things that separates the Soviets from the United States.

When this country was founded the leaders realized that people in power inevitably used their power to suppress dissent. This is why they created Habeas Corpus and the right to a speedy trial. In the United States you can not be held in jail for two or three months without being formally charged. If you give leaders the ability to do this you create a create temptation for leaders to say someone did something but not really charge them. With out the right to a speedy trial it becomes too easy for powerful leaders to keep someone out of the public debate indefinitely. No matter how much Bush-Cheney may argue that we are in a crisis and should suspend these rights most Americans realize that this is a dangerous thing to do.

Somehow when it comes to labor law we forget the constitution. The parallels are inescapable. The chancellor says we are in a crisis, he needs to suspend Habeas Corpus. He then gives principals almost unlimited power to send people to a gulag. Once there the prisoners are not charged in a timely manner and when they are charged they are not given a speedy trial. The justification for this is protecting the students and empowering principals to rid themselves of bad teachers.

The result of course is almost identical to the result of all other dictatorships. This power is used to rid the system of people who challenge the leaders or threaten the power of a leader. It is sometimes used to get rid of bad people but it is also used to get rid of good people who are a threat. This is a failure of some leaders, but more importantly it is a failure of a system with no constitutional guarantees. The drafters of the constitution knew that men would use power badly if not restrained by law.

All the News That's Fit to Print

2008-05-14T08:21:00.003-05:00

Lately the rubber room has become a hot news story. The big part of the story has been over the amount of money being spent to pay teachers who are not doing anything. Everyone is finally admitting that it is a broken system. Joel Klein feels the union is causing this problem, the UFT feels it is Klein and the principals who are using the system to get rid of people they can't get rid of legally. The Daily News seems to feel that most of the people in the rubber room are guilty so they should be gotten rid of. No one reports on how many people in the rubber room are ultimately found innocent. If they did there would probably be a bunch of statements to the effect that so few people are guilty because of UFT trickery and a bad contract that makes it impossible to get rid of bad people.

In general politicians blame evil lawyers for their own shortcomings. If police can't convict someone it is the defense lawyers fault. If corporations are forced to pay large claims for injured people, it is the lawyers fault. If doctors are convicted of malpractice, it is the lawyers fault. Of course cops plant evidence to quickly close cases, innocent people are sentenced to the death penalty, corporations hide bad things about their products to increase profits and almost no doctor is ever removed for being incompetent. Yet it is all the lawyers fault that these people are held accountable.

Government has deep pockets and can therefore often wins just because it can outlast individuals. It often doesn't matter that a person is found innocent if they are financially or psychologically devastated by defending them self. Teachers appear to be screened from the financial part because they have the UFT to defend them. Unless the UFT does a bad job.

The reason that the rubber room is in the news is that there are a group of people who have decided to sue the UFT for not defending them. These same people have reached out to NPR and have helped create a documentary about the rubber room. This is ultimately the only power that people have against government or large unions.

The part that no one seems to want to talk about is the decision to devote so little resources to solving the issues around the rubber room teachers. It takes months before you are even charged and then it takes months or years before a trial is even set. While you are waiting you go through a series of grievance steps that are a joke and that I would suggest should be eliminated except they do give you an opportunity to get out of the room for a day.

Most rubber room cases could be solved quickly if someone would actually investigate. No one is suggesting that teachers who endanger kids should be in a classroom, but in many cases this is not the issue. The first woman I met in the rubber room had been accused of falsifying a doctors note. This did not endanger kids and should not have been a reason to remove her from a classroom. On the surface this would seem to be a pretty easy case to investigate. You call the doctor and find out if the note was forged. If he/she says it wasn't the case is over. This took eighteen months to solve. In all of that time this teacher was kept out of the classroom. And yet it is the teacher that is blamed not the systemic failure of the DoE to resolve cases quickly.

I am outraged by the waste of money that is used to support the rubber room. But I know who is to blame, the Klein-Weingarten deal that created the absurd system now in place. Lets hold the people who created this system responsible for this waste of money.

Black like Me

2008-04-29T09:33:00.002-05:00

A few years ago there was a controversial study of heart patients that seemed to indicate that the type of medicine suitable for white patients was different than what was suitable for blacks. Specifically, beta blockers did not work well in many patients with black skin. This disturbed a lot of people. The idea of race based medicine seemed contrary to a lot of what we knew about genetics. In particular the extremely small differences between people based on skin color. No one was comfortable with this.

The other day there was a report that they discovered a genetic variation in people of African descent that accounted for this difference. It was not because of their skin color. It was because of some evolutionary quirk that gave people with this variation a better chance of surviving in Africa. This has always been the argument for why sickle cell exists in people of African descent.

The thing is, this genetic variation exists in only forty percent of people with black skin, and it exists in two percent of people with white skin. Skin color turns out to be predictor but not a perfect predictor. If you were trying to help people with heart problems you could use skin color and play the odds, or you could do a genetic test and really help someone. Don't forget two percent of whites also have this genetic variation. Those white folks are getting short changed if doctors are using skin color to predict who should take take beta blockers.

When you read a lot of education research you see a lot of discussion about why black students don't do as well as white kids. If you are using skin color to make decisions about students you are being lazy and creating a false system. There is no way that the small genetic variation that accounts for skin coloring accounts for intellectual variation.

Educators need to start figuring out what is going on with actual students and stop playing the odds. The odds are bad policy in medicine and in education. It hurts way to many people.

The Vision Thing

2008-04-28T10:22:00.002-05:00

As I think more about Joel Klein I get more upset. Klein has been a very long running chancellor. The longest I can remember. He has certainly put his mark on the DoE. When he was first appointed there was an issue with him not having an education license. (Notice that the same issue is happening with the search for a new building commissioner.) The mayor got an exception from the state legislature so that Klein could be chancellor. I do not think that the licensing requirements always point you to the best candidate, but I think that the person you choose needs to have a passion for the area and not just be a manager. Bloomberg succeed with his company because he knew what financial people needed. He was a good manager and an expert in his field.

The decision that Klein made early on was to create a group of managers who would approach schools as managers not as educators. The feeling was that schools were poorly managed. People with philosophy's of education were not recruited. The new DoE saw this as some how contrary to good management. Management people tend to like other managers. They want a certain uniformity to how things happen. They are not comfortable with having a group of great school leaders who lead based on the strength of their personality. These leaders are not easy to duplicate. Managers are easy to duplicate. People such as Klein are willing to sacrifice brilliance for easy duplication. They feel this makes a better overall system.

This seems to be the constant problem we all deal with today. It is the problem of the presidential election. Inspiration versus management. It may be that the best approach to the DoE is to find an inspirational leader who is smart enough to hire a good manager as second in command. There are a lot of people working in the schools who are just waiting for this inspirational leader. I hope the next mayor finds him or her.

Joel; Whats Up?

2008-04-24T14:00:00.003-05:00

I have never been a Joel Klein hater. I think that there was a lot wrong with the Board Of Education when he took it over and changed it to the DoE. HSST and ARIS are exactly the types of things that should have been done years earlier. They are not perfect. ARIS seems to be a semi-disaster. But it needed to be done.

I have recently been dealing with HR connect. And they are terrific. This is the type of thing that did not exist before Klein. The level of service was not even conceived of before him. Everyone always assumed that things did not work well, and that employees at 65 Court Street would be at best difficult to deal with. HR connect proves this does not have to be.

Last week Klein did something so awful that I have joined the ranks of those thinking it is time for him to go. One of the places I visited when I thought that my school was really going to break into houses, was Urban Academy. Urban Academy is a terrific school, that generally succeeds. The school is housed in the Julia Richmond complex. There are schools in this building that are very different from each other. The complex has figured out how to work. It is a model of how to do this. It is well known, and it should be celebrated for its success. Like all such combinations of competing visions it works based on a delicate compromise.

Hunter college decided it wanted the building and Klein decided to give it to them. He showed no concern for the schools, the students or the vision of this institution. He just saw real estate. It proves that he is a lawyer and not a visionary. It shows that he does not understand, in a fundamental way, what makes education work. For all of the positive managerial things that Klein has done, he is not capable of leading the DoE because he does not really understand education.

This is particularly sad, because we have a mayor who is a great businessman with a limited vision, a chancellor who is a lawyer and understands management, but has no vision and a head of the UFT who is also a lawyer and understands power, but also has no vision. We need at least one of these three key players to have a vision, maybe some day.

Application

2008-04-16T12:16:00.002-05:00

I have been dragging my feet about submitting an online principal's application for the DoE. I finally realized in the middle of the night that rather than write an application designed to get me a job, I should write an application designed to get me a job I would want. I decided to just say what I wanted to say. Here are the questions and my answers.

Question: Please describe one instructional initiative that you undertook that was intended to improve student achievement. Select an initiative where you were responsible for the results and had a significant leadership role. The endeavor could range in scope from a school-wide program to an initiative that you implemented in your classroom. Specifically address:

* The purpose and scale of the initiative
* The steps you took to start and implement the initiative
* Measurable student outcomes that resulted from the initiative
* How, during the course of the initiative, you overcame any unexpected obstacles
* How your leadership skills were further developed
* What you learned through implementing the initiative

In 2001 I was asked to be on the committee that would form small learning communities at Washington Irving High School. The purpose of this initiative was to divide a 2700 student school into small learning communities of approximately 500 students each. The feeling was that students would be held more accountable and that student outcome would improve.

By September 2003 I was the instructional leader of a 500 student community called Yalow house. This community had approximately 100 screened students and 400 unscreened students. Our mission was to increase the scores of our students and to stabilize the attendance data.

The great thing about running a small community is that you can program teachers to do the most good. To this end I put my most successful English teacher in the 11th grade and increased the number of students who passed the ELA regents. I created a strong 9th grade science program with the goal of increasing the number of students passing the Living Environment regents and I worked hard on the 9th to 10th grade math curriculum to increase the student’s success.

The first surprise I had was how difficult it was to program teachers. Programming is the key to a successful school. Developing master schedules is easy if you are not worried about having the right teachers in the right classes. But if you are it becomes very difficult. The mathematics of it is difficult and the politics is even more difficult. You want your best teachers in your toughest classes, but you also have to give them at least one great class that allows them to shine. This also keeps them happy and motivated. What I finally did was to bring in all of the teachers from each department, one department at a time and tell them what classes we needed to offer and then discussing how to break up the load. I found that good teachers were more willing to take on tough classes when saw the issues facing the house at large.

The purpose of our community was to create a school that respected teachers and students. This seems to be contrary to the current thinking of the DoE. What I see all over the city is principals being trained to manipulate teachers and students to achieve a "statistically significant result". I think statistics are important. The goal is not to create a student who loves school and has no skills that will help him/her succeed in collage or work. But the alternative of creating a school with out respect also fails at helping a student achieve his/her maximum potential. I sent a student to collage in Albany who did not think she wanted to go. I had dinner with her a year later and she told me she just came back from South America. She had gone there because she had received a journalism internship to go there. She had also been asked to write a column for the Albany city paper I know that she has succeed partially because I respected her and because I cared about her. If you go through my school you will find that there are those kinds of connections between most students and at least one staff member. Without these connections you are running an education factory, but not a school.

It is hard to measure what we did in Yalow. I recently started connecting with students from 4 or 5 years ago using Facebook. I am connecting with kids, who graduated college, are often going to grad school or have good jobs and generally seem to have blown by all of the immense obstacles put in their way because they were poor and often did not have very supportive families. These kids have succeeded in the ways that ultimately count. They are leading lives of hope. I am most proud of this.

Rashomon

2008-04-07T13:43:00.003-05:00

I think I have a different view of Rashomon. I think that the story often defines the past more than the truth. I think many people (particularly PBS intellectuals) find this hard to accept. In the world of photography there are photographs or bodies of work that define a time and a place. For example, turn of the century New York was defined by Steiglitz's photograph of the Flatiron building in winter, Brassai is 1930's Paris, Bill Brandt defined England in the 30's and 40's. Even people who are unfamiliar with these works are still influenced by them because other artists use them.

These are photographs that defined a time. Walt Disney and Ronald Reagan created this view of small town America that does not have a lot to do with reality. But their view has become reality for may people (Is this truthiness).

As a photographer I always was looking for the picture that would define a truth. What I see today when I look at people's pictures on line, now that cameras are digital, is that people will put 80 pictures of a party on line. 80 pictures do not get you closer to the truth, they get you farther away.

Since I started looking at kid's accounts on Facebook I see a lot of this random uploading of pictures. I would love to teach these kids how to edit to define what they want to say. I once had an argument with an English teacher about music. I felt that it was less than literature and he pointed out to me that music was a language as powerful as prose. He changed my mind. The same is true about visual language. Photography seems easy but without editing it is noise.

The photograph is by Bill Brandt, an amazing artist.

Onions

2008-04-03T17:07:00.002-05:00

I'm read this interesting book by Gunter Grass. It is called "Pealing the Onion". The book is about Grass' past. The idea is that looking at the past is like peeling an onion, where do you stop to get at the truth. The book is filled with lots of stories that may or may not be true, but that add up to who you are. When I talk to Alex about our first trip to Disney World, he doesn't really remember it. He has seen the photographs, but this is not enough. Disney World is part of his truth but not really a part of his personal story.

I have been scanning a lot of old pictures of my family into my computer. I am going to make a short video of my family history. Some pictures I look at and the scene is vivid. I remember the little girl who wanted to be my wife. She lived on the steep hill (not that steep when I saw it as an adult). I remember the back porch of our house, I remember sledding and riding my large tricycle very fast down the sidewalk until I hit a crack and went flying, cutting myself in many places.(Not the first time and certainly not the last time I did something like this.)

Of course not having clear memories of being 5 is not surprising. The problem is that I try to remember my years in San Francisco, and they are not that clear. I was 22 when I moved there. I am even having a difficult time creating a clear picture of my first marriage.

Maybe the idea is not to care about the facts of your past, the only thing that really matters is the story you tell yourself and others. This is really what defines you.

There used to be a group of photographers called the f64 group. These guys believed that photographs needed to tell the truth and not be manipulated. If they had a beautiful picture of a beach and there was a piece of garbage on the beach, they would never move it, because that would be dishonest. F64 is an f stop that gives you the greatest amount of depth of field. Everything is sharp. The photographer is not manipulating your attention by making some things in focus and some not.

Sounds good until you realize that the photographer pointed the camera at what he/she wanted to see, so that was dishonest. The aspect ratio was defined by the film manufacturer, so in this they were being manipulated by corporate America.

Today the argument is about Photoshop. Are you being dishonest when you manipulate a picture. I have seen many Photoshoped pictures that I thought were dishonest. They were manipulated to make a point about a subject with out regard to the subject. I took a photograph of two girls on the beach in Coney Island. There was a fire plug in the middle of the photo. I removed it. I also enhanced the colors to make them brighter. I do not consider this to be dishonest. I was trying to capture what Coney Island felt like that day and the mood of the girls. The colors as shot were not necessarily more correct. They were just a digital representation of what was there, not the truth of what colors were there. I was not trying to make a statement about girls on the beach. I saw two girls and I wanted to try and tell their story. Filtered through me of course. But I was trying to tell their story, not mine.

What can someone do. Give up on truth, because it doesn't really exist. That seems like a bad idea. Authors who make up parts of their autobiographies are reviled. We do not want people to go out of their way to lie to us. What happens if I tell you my life story and parts of it I believe in, but turn out not to be true. Maybe the little 5 year old girl did not want to marry me. Maybe I wasn't that great of a football player in high school. If you are a public figure every time you make a statement someone is checking out if it is factually correct. It makes it difficult to have your own personal story.

I am definitely not talking about people who create a myth around themselves for their own self aggrandizement. These are the people we are all mad at when they are exposed. My image of what I did in San Francisco forty years ago is part of my story. I am sometimes disturbed that I don't remember it with enough detail. But I am also willing to accept the fact that it is my story. What I remember defines me. Truth does not.

I am reposting the picture I am talking about.

The House that Ruth Built

2008-04-01T12:31:00.004-05:00

This is a picture of the House that Ruth Built. I have been there and it looks nothing like what is today called Yankee Stadium. Look out in right field. You will see a very short line (294 ft.) and a low right field fence. This is why it was the house that Ruth built. It was designed for a left handed pull hitter like Ruth and latter Roger Maris. Anyone who hits straight away was almost never going to get a home run. Center field was a very long way away (not to mention the monuments that were in play). One of the great things about going to Yankee stadium was being friends with someone in the box office who would get you seats that were not behind a poll. Of course when you got there they always were behind a poll (pole), but at least you felt the upper deck was not going to fall on top of you.

I saw both Mantle and Maris play. Roger Maris hit a lot of home runs that went 3 or 4 rows back over that low 294 foot wall. I do not think he would have hit 61 in the current Yankee stadium. Lucky for him he was playing in the "House That Ruth Built".

Alien Children

2008-03-25T10:50:00.003-05:00

One of my pet complaints has always been about the number of teachers I run into who choose to leave NYC because they do not want their children attending public school. I am not talking about those who leave because they can't afford to live in the city. I understand those people. I am talking about the teachers who feel that there is something inherently wrong with the NYC school system. Something that precludes them from sending their kids to a public school in NYC. I would include the people who send their kids to parochial schools or Hebrew schools or private schools to avoid city schools and not for deeply held beliefs. The only one of these three that is probably better educationally is the high end private schools. The rest are usually understaffed and the teachers are usually under paid.

The reason these people bother me so much, is that they often reject the hope that New York could ever create a good school or provide a good education for their kids. If they reject this than whatever they do in a school doesn't really matter. It becomes a job that only matters in how it affects their personal happiness, not in how it affects the students they are supposed to serve. They tend to see anyone who cares about public education as slightly crazy.

I've run into cops that feel that anyone living in the city must be crazy and probably criminal. The views of the alien teachers is that any child who goes to school in NYC is either crazy, a criminal or someone to be pitied for not having the economic clout to get out. What NYC students never are is similar to their children.

Of course the opposite is not necessarily true. Teachers who live in the city and have their kids in public schools are not necessarily good teachers. This is not the sole criteria for being a good teacher. I do think however that anyone doing hiring in the city should ask the person they are interviewing about how they view city schools in general. We have lots of problems in the DoE but we need people who believe in public education to work on solving these problems.

The picture above is of Death Valley in February. Death Valley gets almost no rain and is often above 110 degrees in the summer. In winter it may rain once and all these yellow flowers bloom. Amazing.

Top Down

2008-03-21T16:14:00.003-05:00

Education is not alone in dealing with the phenomena of top down vs. bottom up managers. I think that this is endemic in American Business. I do think that it may be more prevalent in government jobs. The reason is that people are often rewarded more for not screwing up than they are for doing something positive. The key to succeeding in government or education is to gather job titles and move on as quickly as possible. The way you do this is to come in push people around and then get out before your staff morale drops to zero.

In order to make it in education most of us start as teachers. Many teachers like to control their class by intimidation. When these people move up they continue to feel that they can control their environment through intimidation. And they are often right in this assumption. My observation of teachers is that many of them make a lot of noise and then are unwilling to stand up and be counted. Tenure was invented to keep teachers from being subjected to the political whims of administrators and politicians. It should have made teachers feel free to express their opinions. It has not done this.

In my tenure at my old school there was two top down administrators. The first one was very bright and had a clear vision of what he wanted to accomplish. He stayed too long. He accomplished a lot the first few years, but he never created the school wide buy in that a more bottom up manager would have. The second administrator seemed to only care about power. She had no vision of what things should be and she lacked the intellect to actually accomplish anything. She constantly used the word insubordinate to express her dislike of anyone disagreeing with her. The union loved her when she started because they felt they could manipulate her in ways that they could not with the previous principal.

Like many not bright people the principal reacted negatively to any conversation started by the union or most of her AP's She did not react negatively because she disagreed with others. She reacted negatively because she often did not understand what people were saying to her and so she assumed that they were hustling her. The union thought they could manipulate her, instead they discovered an administrator that made random decisions, lurching from one direction to another. This is a hard person to work with. This is why the relationship between the union and the principal is so poor.

The comments about the APO and the Principal being at war are certainly true. In most schools the relationship is strained but not nearly as negative as the one in my old school. I think things started to fall apart when the two of them chose to live in a world of wishful thinking instead of just dealing with the good and the bad. As an example, every APO I have met looked at the average number of sick days their staff had each year and set aside money to cover this. If they could lower the number, great, if not they were covered. The power structure at my old school decided they would lower the number by intimidation and threats. Of course it did not work, and so they blamed each other for the failure of an absurd policy and the resulting budget cris. Neither one of them is capable of looking at the policy and altering it to fit reality. Both of them in their own way want reality to alter to fit them.

I was at my old school to listen to a guy named Will Richardson talk. He writes a blog at http://weblogg-ed.com/. Take a look at the March 13th entry in which he talks about what being in the school was like.

Another Principal

2008-03-03T14:11:00.002-05:00

I received an article from a friend about a Principal who was suspended by his superintendent because he supposedly did not do enough observations. My friends comment was, "They must have an underground newspaper that tells them how to get people". Actually I think the most interesting part about the article was that the suspended Principal was very bottom up in his management style and the Superintendent was very top down.

So the superintendent gives the Principal a letter on Friday suspending him, the guy even changes the locks on the Principal's office doors to "protect the Principals stuff". The students walk out on Monday and the sup says he can't comment because it is a personnel issue. I've been there and done that.

I figure these guys are around my age. Probably went to college in the late 60's early 70's. My guess is that the Principal was a demonstrator and the superintendent was one of the guys on the other side, either condemning the loud demonstrators or actively throwing rocks at them. This is the way it has always been. These top down management jerks willing to do what ever it takes to suppress the participatory democracy people.

I think that education (particularly high school education) has always attracted two types of men. One guy is in it because they get a thrill out of helping kids achieve something. They love teaching and they love pushing kids to move beyond the world that they seemed to have been born into.

The second guy likes pushing people around and being dominant. Because they don't have enough guts to push adults around so they choose to work with kids. Kids are much easier to push around.

SDS

2008-03-03T13:15:00.004-05:00

I started reading a book on SDS by Harvey Pekar. The first part of the book is a history of SDS. This was fun and nostalgic because I knew a bunch of the players because many of them went to Michigan. But after this trip down memory lane there were individual stories of what it was like to be in the movement in those days. One of the first stories talked about looking at the people on the other side of the line and seeing hate in their eyes. Wow! Not such a fun image. I remember that.

There was a lot of hate. Beside the obvious cases of police shooting at me or the national guard lobbing tear gas at us, there was the day to day hatred. I remember asking for directions in San Diego and no one being willing to answer me because my hair was too long. I certainly made a decision to drive from San Francisco to NYC through Canada because I had doubts about what would happen to me, my wife and my 4 year old daughter if I tried to drive through the middle of America.

This all made me realize that all of the red state blue state split and the upstate downstate split here in New York are not new and maybe not as bad as we make them out to be. They are certainly there, but are they as mean spirited as they were in the 60's and 70's. It may be that I don't see the hate as much because I am old enough that people don't perceive me as a threat.

Survival

2008-02-20T12:35:00.001-05:00

I’ve been thinking about survival a lot lately. I’ve been thinking about it because in the past few months I have read three books about survival. One was “We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families” and one was “A Long Way Gone” and the last one was “Peeling the Onion”. These books are about wars that overwhelm everything around them. “Peeling the Onion” is about World War II” and seemed to have a level of sophistication about how this “modern” war was fought. Of course we all know how “modern” the Germans were. The Germans did not murder Jews with the kind of passion that the Rwandans or the Sierra Leone’s used in murdering their fellow countrymen, but they still did. Grass was 17 when he was given a gun and told to go and start killing people. He was not 12, but by the end of the war the Germans were pushing the boundaries.

There has been an argument made that Rwanda happened because of famine: that the survival mechanism that was really at play was a desire to eat. This type of war seems to be part of the history of the world. You read the story in “A Long Way Gone” and the kid talks about essentially sitting in a tree in a forest for weeks afraid to move because of the wild animals, and surviving on some type of fruit he could not identify but that he hopped would not kill him. There was nothing noble about what he was doing. He just wanted to stay alive; he wanted to stay alive because his genetic programming demanded it. I don’t believe it was even a conscious choice.

When you read books like this you become horrified by the level of brutality that people are capable of. Ishmael Beah in “A Long Way Gone” never really says what he did. He talks about kids around him but rarely directly about himself. It is hard to admit what we will do to survive. In modern day America no one is feeding cocaine and heroin to large numbers of 12 year old boys and encouraging them to kill whole villages. But we face survival questions every day. Homeless people spend every day figuring out how to survive. Homeless in NYC particularly need to work hard to avoid freezing to death in the winter. For those of us walking by them we must wonder how far we are from this life. It colors everything we do.

I am not sure you can ask yourself how far you would go to survive. I’m not sure you have as much control over the instinct to survive as you think. I would certainly never be a guard in a concentration camp. In “A Long Way Gone” the kid is put in the situation of being asked to cut the throat of a villager he knows will have his throat cut even if he refuses. The only difference is if he doesn’t do it then both he and the villager will die. He chooses to survive. That choice leads to an amazing book.

Agendas

2008-02-04T09:08:00.000-05:00

I like the fact that people have written about what is happening in my old school, even when it has nothing to do with anything I have written. Keep it up, writing is a good outlet and does keep you sane.

I do agree that there are many agendas in the DoE that we find hard to comprehend. I think the corruption that exists is the type of deep cynical corruption that existed in most Soviet countries. This is part of the structure of this type of government. It is caused by the same structural elements in the DoE and it has been exacerbated by the current administration and the UFT. It comes from very centralized power and very little accountability.

Keep up you writing.

Is the story of the bull whips really true?

Hard Ball

2008-01-30T17:07:00.000-05:00

I am glad that so many have responded to my Bob Durkin post. I want to make some more comments because I think he goes to the core of what leadership is about, a good thing to discuss in a presidential year. Bob went to college with Rudy Guiliani and they seemed to share some similarities.

Bob became principal after a string of people had been at the school for a short time. The UFT became used to having control. There was a hard core group of teachers who liked to control the school. Some of them were excellent teachers and some of them were not.

One teacher in particular became his instant enemy. Bob wanted to make changes and she was one of those people who would talk against almost all change. She was grouchy and she didn't particularly like the kids. One day this teacher, we will call her Ms P, was teaching a class and a student asked to use the bathroom. She refused his request and he then stood up and urinated into a waste basket.

Whether this actual happened is not really relevant. The student did report to the principal that he had been forced to use a waste basket in Ms P's class to urinate because he could not hold it. The principal could have seen it as a troubled youth acting out in class and tried to deal with the student. He did not. He choose to look at it as a teacher who forced a poor student to use a waste basket rather than allowing him the dignity of a public restroom. The teacher was removed to the rubber room and then reassigned to a new school.

I don't know if Bob destroyed her career, but he tried. The question is was he justified in doing this. This was not the only time I ever saw him do something like this. He understood who the bad teachers were, and he understood who is enemies were and he went after both groups by any means necessary.

While Bob and Rudy were in college learning to be tough vindictive people I was sitting in coffee houses in Ann Arbor discussing "Franny and Zooey" and New Morality. New Morality says that the ends can never justify the means, because the ends and the means are indistinguishable. The problem with the New Morality is that you have to deal with times when you must make hard decisions. Sometimes you are forced to do something you are not proud off, or something that bends ethics.

I think really great leaders feel bad when they push against the ethical boundaries. Lincoln seemed to have suffered greatly when he was president. Robert McNamara has come to publicly regret much of what he did in Vietnam while he was Secretary of Defense. It is hard to imagine Richard Nixon or Rudy Guiliani or Bob Durkin loosing sleep over the moral implications of decisions they made. They were more likely to loose sleep because they felt people were after them or they had lost a battle.

I guess the bottom line is that I feel that affective leaders can be Machiavellian people, but great leaders are people with a strong moral sense who are occasionally willing to bend their morals, but always feel bad about it and who always try to find their way back to a moral center. A good quality for a president.

I see that there are a group of people who started a law suit over the rubber room. The UFT does not support the suit, what a surprise! I think Randy is probably lacking a moral center.

You need to see this.

2008-01-17T20:35:00.000-05:00

I have added a link on the side or click here to a documentary on the rubber room. You need to see this. I am trying to decide if I should contact them. This would most likely finish me.

Homo

2007-12-31T15:31:00.001-05:00

I read an interesting article in the Economist recently. They were comparing school systems in different countries. One of the criteria they used was the differences between the highest and lowest functioning schools. Countries such as Germany and Japan have the highest difference. Poland had one of the lowest. ( This is the link to the Economist article, good reading.)It turned out that Poland has done one of the best jobs in increasing the educational levels of their lowest students without hurting their top students. Homogeneous (I meant to say heterogeneous,an unforgivable error for a science teacher) schools seem to raise the bottom without hurting the top.

This is a hard thing to deal with in NYC and probably most other places. We are in many ways an elitist country. Not as bad as the Japanese but not that far away. I think that the principal of my old school and her security general were of the elite is good school of thinking. My feeling is that it is really hard to figure out who is elite. Kids come to us with many different attitudes and problems. It is our job to believe in all of them.

I was talking to a student the other day. He said he wanted out of the class he was in because the teacher was disrespectful of him. I never saw it, though I think the teacher is frustrated that the class is not learning fast enough. I was thinking about a teacher I supervised she had a large number of complaints from kids who felt that she put them down. So I said to a kid who was complaining about her, "I'm always calling you dumb." and the kid responded to me that that was true, but I didn't mean it. And the truth is I never did mean it. Even the kids the farthest behind had something to offer.

The rumor is that my old school is going to be broken up and the current principal will become principal of one of the small schools. I'm sure she will want to take the elite academy. It will be great to see what happens with that. She used to run this academy on the basis of throwing kids out if they did not perform, and forcing kids to stay who did not want to do the work they were being asked to do. This will not be an option as an autonomous school. Of course if she ends up with the elite kids she won't have to worry about the lower third, unless no one wants to go to her schools and she has to take kids that are not that great.

As I've said in the past, you need to have a certain percentage of overachieving kids to provide a leadership in a school. But a school should teach compassion and concern for others. In this way you encourage kids to help each other. There is nothing more powerful than this.

Bob Durkin

2007-12-31T00:35:00.000-05:00

I went to Bob Durkin's funeral last weekend. I have been trying to figure out what he meant to me. I know when I heard that he was dying it really hit me. Part of the reason was that he was only one year older than me. But I think part of the reason was that he was a significant person in my life. I am trying to figure out why.

One of the things Bob did, was he inspired a bunch of people. He also had a bunch of people who couldn't stand him. I was friends with both groups of people.

Bob Durkin never slowed down. It was always full speed ahead with him. He wrote large grants, he courted business partners, and there was a steady stream of visitors to our school. Working for him made you feel as if you were in the center of the education universe. This was an exciting place to be.

On Bob's casket was the sign that was on his desk, "It is all about the kids". I think that this was always true. I know that Bob would go to the crack house in the neighborhood to drag students out. I remember the day when a girls father was getting out of jail. ACS was going to send the kid back to her father, even though he was abusing her. Bob spent the evening on the phone trying to save this girl. I think he would have called the president if he knew his number. He would not give up until he had solved this problem. He really did care deeply about the kids.

I don't think Bob had a happy childhood. I suspect that he found it difficult to have fun with his kids. Every year I would have a fight with Bob over taking kids to Great Adventure for Physics Day. The first year Bob ignored my trip because he was sure that the superintendent wouldn't approve the trip. It was approved after I convinced the superintendent that the Board of Ed. approved of this trip. The next year Bob convinced the superintendent to say no and I appealed. The trip was approved as the Buses were parked outside. Bob was livid. I think that what bothered him the most was the fun aspect of the trip. I think Bob had a hard time with fun.

Bob did things his way. He believed, as I do, that good teachers make a good school. He worked really hard to get rid of bad teachers. He did this before it was something the Board of Ed. approved of. This may have been the beginning of the superintendent hating him. What I think happened sometimes with the superintendent is that Bob was willing to do his job and he wanted the superintendent's office to do its job. All they wanted to do is keep peace. I don't think Bob ever thought of his job as keeping peace.

The UFT hated Bob Durkin. They hated him so much that they probably still hate him. They did everything they could to get rid of him. They hated him because he kept asking teachers to do their jobs. They hated him because he did not believe in the game of shuffling bad teachers around the system. He wanted to get rid of them. Some of their complaints were valid. He was often heavy handed when he didn't have to be. He had some people he hated and he went after them with a vengeance. Some of the people he went after were not bad teachers, they were just not the type of teacher Bob liked. He should have known to back off sometimes. That said, the hatred of the UFT was way beyond rational.

Bob was always in the middle of things. He was a star, but he could have been a superstar. He blew some great chances. He pushed the idea of turning a large high school into houses. He inspired some of the Ap's to think of themselves as mini-principals. People came from overseas to visit us. He could have turned the school into mini schools with bunch of principals with Bob as a quasi-superintendent. I feel that if he had made that move he would have become known all over the country. He could have spent the next few years giving speeches around the country. But he couldn't give up the power. I think he was afraid of not having enough to do or enough control. This may have been his fatal flaw.

Bob was the first principal I knew who understood statistics. He collected them and he used them to make decisions. He was the first person to show me the incredible differences between good and bad teachers. He pulled statistics on how many kids good teachers passed (always more than bad teachers) and how many kids passed Regents tests (always dramatically more than bad teachers).

The bottom line about Bob is that he always felt he could solve the problem of urban education. He believed he could succeed and he inspired people around him to believe they could succeed. He believed kids could succeed and he created a school that encouraged that.

I assume the current principal did not go to the viewing. I am certainly glad I did not see her there. I think it would have been more than I could have borne. I think I need to come back to this again in a month or so.

Standards

2007-12-30T23:34:00.000-05:00

I think the part of the principal's memo that disturbed people the most is his comments on how hard the kids lives were. This type of comment always comes across as condescending. I suppose that almost everyone can be looked at as having a hard life. I imagine that the Astors wonder how I can survive on my small salary. They must think I have a hard life.

Of course many of our kids do have awful lives. While poverty does not cause alcoholism, child abuse, or drug addiction it does increase the percentage of families who suffer from these problems. I have known many cases of kids who came from situations that made me wonder how they survived. As educators we need to help kids deal with these problems. Years ago it became obvious that we couldn't teach kids if they were hungry. This is why free lunch and breakfast programs were started. It is just as true that a child from an abusive home or who lives in a different home every month will have trouble learning. We need to do what ever we need to to help them.

Having said all of this. I will also say that we can not excuse kids for having tough lives. Each kid needs to be dealt with as if they are capable of greatness. We must always demand the most from them. I think that on a really basic level kids need to be dealt with this way. They need to feel that we believe in them. For some of them it may be the most important thing we can give them. The chance to be treated like normal kids.

The person you never want to hire as a teacher is the person who tells you they are becoming teacher to help the poor unfortunate kids. These people almost always fail.

One of the interesting things I have observed is that the kids who did well at my school did well in college even though by "objective standards" they probably did not learn as much as a kid in a better high school. Their success had more to do with being successful than it did with how much they learned. Sometimes they had a hard time when they first got to college, but they were always able to work up to what was expected of them. This is one of the reasons I don't believe in "objective standards". I do believe in pushing kids to work harder than they think they can. This is what builds the capacity necessary to succeed in life. When I teach Chemistry I make sure I ask more of the students than they think they can give.

The first year I taught I was in an 8th grade class. I had the highest level class and the lowest level class. My school was in to dividing kids up this way. I remember thinking that I could not tell the difference between the two extremes. Then one day the high level kids were driving me crazy and so I told them that if they thought they could do a better job then they could teach the class. They did and they did do a better job than I was doing. I realized that they were much smarter than I thought. I was the cause of these kids acting dumb, because I did not demand enough.

It is hard to get the level right. All teachers need someone to come into their class and help them figure out the level. I need someone to do this myself. Self fulfilling prophecies are an occupational hazard. So is a rigid belief in thinking you know what a kid should learn. I very strongly feel that the most important thing we do is build capacity to learn. We have no idea what these kids worlds will look like. I'm a wiz at WordPerfect. I know all the shortcuts and F keys. Does anyone care anymore? But I did learn how to read a manual and even more important how to hack my way through a program. This is why I am fairly technologically sophisticated. As a matter of fact it is my ability to hack my way through programs that has helped me the most. My father and probably most of my high school teachers would have been horrified at the concept of just figuring something out by educated trial and error (hacking). This is not how people learned in the 40's, 50's and 60's. But it is an important part of learning today.

What we need to say to kids every day is, you can learn, you can figure things out on your own, you can be a valuable member of society. We need to say this every chance we can because there are lots of people saying just the opposite to these kids. Even more important than saying this, we must believe it. To stand in front of a student and tell them that we are proud of them when they did nothing to deserve our pride will destroy credibility, probably for ever.

The picture above was shot on Sixth Avenue and Fourth Street. The reason I took it is that the look is school girl uniform. Do people push school uniforms because they think it will make kids better behaved or is it just one of the great male sexual fantasies. I put my money on the fantasy.

Winter

2007-12-15T20:21:00.001-05:00

My wife hates winter. The last week has had bad weather and I can see that she is not happy. The problem is that she doesn't go to Lowe's. This is where the true rhythm of nature is played out. If my wife spent as much time in Lowe's as I do she would see the world differently.

Today I walked into Lowe's and all of the Christmas things were on sale. Most of the isles of Christmas decorations had been eliminated and the merchandise had been consolidated into one isle. In place of Christmas things there were hoes and rakes and barbecues. Lowe's understands that spring will be here soon and we better start getting ready.

The girl above wanted to marry me.

65 %

2007-12-14T10:37:00.000-05:00

The big education news here in NYC is the principal who wrote a memo to his staff telling them that if they were not passing 65% of their students that they needed to take into account how difficult the students lives were and to redesign their classes to allow more students to pass.

Everyone seems shocked by this. The interpretation is that he is suggesting that his teachers dumb down the classes. If you are a teacher, than I would hope that you are adjusting your classes to the students in front of you. Good teachers do this all of the time. Bad teachers hide behind a concept that there is an objective level that all classes should be taught at. Certainly if you are a chemistry teacher there is a state curriculum with a certain scope of learning. But the amount of room within this scope is huge.

As a supervisor you often see two different types of teachers. One has "standards" and even if no one in the class understands what they are talking about they plow ahead. This makes them efficient deliverers of information and bad teachers. These are the equivalent of the adult who talks to you about music in such technical terms that you can't follow what they are saying and then sneers at you for being ignorant. If it wasn't that equal amounts of men and women teachers teach this way I would make a comment about the size of their genitals.

The second one adjusts her teaching to reflect the class. The problem this teacher often has is that she keeps adjusting down and the kids get lazier. What supervisors should be doing is walking into the classes and pushing the teachers to demand more. This state of lowered expectations seems to be inevitable. It is hard to get the level right without an impartial observer watching what you are doing.

I've talked a lot about whether we should care about kids home lives, but I will talk some more about this next time.

I was reading a review of the new Coppola movie. It said this move is rated R for language, sexual congress, and metaphysics.

Mellow

2007-12-05T17:23:00.000-05:00

I have been scanning old pictures and ran across this picture of me. I actually built the set I am sitting in.

I haven't written in a long time because my life seems to be on autopilot and so I don't get as angry. I come to this school everyday and I sit in the server room trying to get server 2003 to work. I have no one to talk to if I can't get something to work. I have to admit that there have been times in which I have felt that I would never solve this program. I would read the same instructions over and over and not understand what they were saying. But I have finally figured it out and I think my server and backup server are up and running the way I want them to be.

This has been an interesting exercise in literacy. The difference between me and many of our semi-literate students is that I keep at it until I figure it out. I feel like giving up, but I don't. Why is this true? I think that whatever is inside me that kept me going is what we need to put inside our students. This is really all they need. The rest is details.

Two funny things since I last wrote. There was a short news article that the first 5 seasons of Sesame Street were on DVD. They came with a warning saying they may not be suitable for children. Apparently Oscar is really grouchy and Cookie Monster eats cookies. Maybe this explains what is wrong with my kids. Do you think I could sue?

The second interesting thing is that Joel Klein sent an email to me and every other teacher in NYC who checks their DoE email. The letter spoke about how some of the recent test results were disappointing but that they were not a good measure of how well the city was doing. This is strange. It is strange because Klein loves testing as an instrument to use in judging individual school performance. It is also strange that he felt it necessary to send a letter to everyone. Of course the problem is that the city and the state have manipulated tests to give them the results they wanted. But you can only do this for so long and then you have no more room. Klein should have been smart enough to get out before he ran out of room.

The next guy should come in, give very hard tests to show how awful the schools are and then spend the next few years manipulating results to show improvement. That's how you "succeed".

Aw C'mon

2007-11-09T12:11:00.000-05:00

I have to respond to a comment I received on my last blog. The author says I am being simplistic. I am. I am saying that simple is where you start. The reason my old school received an F is they could never master simple. I now get assigned to other schools and I do not see the types of problems I constantly saw at my old school. Generally these schools have money for supplies. Generally these schools have minimal programming problems.

The author of the comment talked about my department. I did not have a department for 4 years. I had a house, but those in power never seemed to get this. The easiest way to move out of the F world is to move the bottom third of the students. You do this in a house, not in a large school. This is what houses were designed for. To talk about my department a year after I left and 4 years after the school changed is ridiculous.

This is where programming comes in. When the previous APG ran programming there were maybe a dozen kids that did not get classes in there house. In my house there were at best 2 kids who did not take lab with their science teacher and these were seniors. When I left there were large numbers of kids not programmed in house classes and a large number of students mis-programmed for labs, even ninth graders who should be the easiest kids to program. This kills science scores and it kills houses. I do not believe my old school will last much longer, but the principal should be honest and kill houses. The only current reason for the existence of houses is to provide a mechanism to blame AP's for the ills of the school.

The first year I was science AP I made sure that my teachers were appreciated and that they had what they needed to teach. I provided a buffer between them and the administration. My scores went up 30%. This was not that hard considering how low they were. I also realized that that was the easy part. The second increase in scores would come from intense staff development. This is much harder and I failed. A few years after I became science AP we switched to houses. My roll was that of consultant to other houses on science issues.

One of the houses in my school put all their labs at the end of the day. The result was predictable, few passed the labs and most of their kids were ineligible for the Regents. Bad programming has bad consequences.

The grades a school receives is based to a large extent on graduation rate and how well you do with the bottom third of your class. One example of the stupid decisions made by my principal is that I had a double period math class that was designed for the lower third of my kids. The class was held in a room that had math posters all over it. It was 50 feet from my office. The principal decided the class should not be in this room. She moved the first period to a computer room that was totally unsuited for the class. Students could hide behind computers. This class was on a different floor from my office. Then she moved the second period to a room On the other side of the building. The one group she should have been putting resources into, she was taking them away. And of course blaming me for doing a bad job of programming. She was upset that she had to fix my error! She had no problems punishing students for my supposed misdeeds.

The second thing I noticed about these kids was that they were not in school very much. When they did come to school they got in trouble and were suspended. Again, the group we most needed to help we created an environment that worked against these kids. My old school had a huge number of suspensions. My college bound kids were not getting suspended. The kids who probably could have missed school and not been harmed were never suspended. The kids who needed every minute we could give them, they were suspended. The school had chosen to emphasis "safety" over academic success for our most needy students. The school chose to see the problems these kids created as moral failings on their part, rather than the inevitable fall out of academic failure. By suspending so many kids we create more failure and more behavior problems.

I am not on a "high horse". I am a person who fought against this every day I was in the building. I ultimately lost and was banished. But I hope that while I was there I did some good. I have been in the trenches.

Random Education

2007-11-07T09:48:00.000-05:00

I saw a woman and her kid on the train the other day. I would guess the kid was in second grade. Mom had the kids math workbook. It had addition problems. The mom was working hard to finish all of the problems before they reached their stop. The kid was doing nothing. How can we get the message across to parents that this is a really bad thing to do. I would assume that the mother would rather do the work than get a call from the teacher yelling at her for not making the kid do his homework. (Another unintended consequence of homework). If the teacher uses this homework to evaluate the kid she/he will of course get a false sense of the students abilities.

So, I see that my old school got an F on its report card. This may be the final nail in the coffin. I don't see how a program, such as the one I used to run can possibly recruit students. I have said before that my definition of a good program is one that has a mix of good students and more challenging students. It is a delicate balance. If you fall below a certain number of good students then you are in trouble. You find that there is no leadership. This is very bad.

I feel that the F came because of a lack of leadership in the school. This doesn't mean that all of the teachers are wonderful, but so many of the not good teachers were hired by the current leaders that they must be blamed. Running a school is easy, you hire great teachers, you support them and you leave them alone. My old principal hires teachers out of desperation, and then often hires nice middle class kids who can't teach or she hires someone because they are all that is available that day and she would rather have a body in a classroom then wait for a good teacher.

Resources in my old school went first to security and then to classrooms. Always a bad decision. Supplies were hard to come by, coverages for trips or staff development were discouraged, and most importantly the programming was abysmal. I found the programming one of the most discouraging aspects. Each student is unique. How you program them is critical to their success in school. If you force the student to fit the school and not the school to fit the student you are creating a situation that keeps students from doing their best and therefore gives you an F.

How does she survive?

2007-10-30T09:54:00.000-05:00

I know that one of my faults or "charming quirks" is that I get upset about too many issues. I fight over things that I know I will loose. I should keep quiet until I have a chance of winning. Effective politicians do this and do it without loosing their integrity, though sometimes they do.

I always remember Everett Dirkson, a politician who I did not agree with. But when it came time to deal with Richard Nixon he said, enough, the constitution matters and he was one of the most vocal prosecutors in the Senate. He played realpolitik most of his career and then when it counted he drew a line and stood up for principles.

In the Sixties the two biggest things going on were the war in Vietnam and the Civil Rights movement. Unions choose to support the war and they chose to effectively deny civil rights. The antiwar movement was to a great extent an issue of style. A generation was saying that they did not buy America no matter what. This generation grew up with a basic anti-union attitude. An attitude that is still hurting the unions today. Particularly when they go to organize white collar workers.

The Civil Right movement was even more serious. It was obvious that blacks had been seriously discriminated against in obtaining good paying union jobs in America. The unions took the position that it was not their problem and that seniority was the most important factor. They denied that they needed to do anything to address past abuses of a large number of people. They wanted jobs for those who had them and for their children. This was a great moral turning point for trade unions and they failed. I think that ultimately this hurt the union movement. When unions started they had the moral high ground. They were helping workers get a fair deal. In the 60's they lost this and I don't think that they have ever recovered. Their leaders took the popular route with their members. This helped define the mid-west today and hasten the movement of people out of the area and to the coasts.

In the 30's unions worked hard to provide workers with good working conditions. In 68 and 69 when I went on strike for the UFT I did it for more money and for better working conditions. The UFT promised they would work to provide me with a work place that treated me like a professional. In the end the UFT settled for more money and for gutting the civil rights inspired community control of the schools. The UFT obtained a great deal of power. The workers only received more money. The state of the UFT today is reflective of these decisions. We are well paid and are treated like crap. We have almost no relationship with the communities we work in. The UFT treats us like crap and so they don't really get why we are upset when administrators treat us like crap. The UFT powers make very large amounts of money.

Today I was getting off the subway and a very stunning woman passed me on her way to the train. I usually don't see anyone on the train, but I noticed her. While I was going up the steps I heard a commotion. I kept going up and as I got to the top I turned around and saw this stunning woman coming up the stairs yelling and screaming about something that was not clear. It reminded me of the concept that if you see someone who you think might be better than the woman you have forget it. You would probably just trade for something that was even crazier. Might as well stay with the craziness you know.

The Midwest

2007-10-23T16:06:00.001-05:00

My daughter is currently living in Michigan and counting the days until she can move to the east. What got me thinking about this was the current issue of the Atlantic. There were two articles that particularly caught my eye. One was on Reinhold Niebuhr and the other was on Saul Bellow. It turns out that Niebuhr got his start in Detroit. Of course Belows is from Chicago. Both these guys were great thinkers. They did there most important work before 1970. I left Michigan in 1969. Not that I am at all equal to Niebuhr or Bellow. But the dates are significant.

In 1962 a bunch of people who would soon become my friends got together in Port Huron Michigan. They wrote a document that is still interesting today. If you have never read it take a look at the Port Huron Statement. The people I knew at the University of Michigan were often the kids of union organizers, one kids father had fought in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. The dads were generally doing well but when we needed bail money to get us out of jail after some protest they could usually be counted on to help out. They were generally proud of their kid's activism. This was the exciting intellectual world of the Mid-West.

While Michigan was never New York, it was something. So was St. Louis and Cleveland and Buffalo and Minneapolis . People lived there with great ideas. The union movement attracted large numbers of intellectuals who felt that they could change the world. In fact they really did change the world but they never went far enough. They settled for high wages and no change in the basic structure of industry. They came to do good and stayed to do well.(Sounds a little like the UFT and Albert Shanker)

So when I got to college a lot of their kids decided it was time to change the world. I imagine that we did change the world, just not as much as we wanted to. In the end we were not that much different than the union organizer fathers of so many of the SDS kids.

What is most sad about all of this is the fact that the middle of the country seems to have lost its intellectual core. Today when you think of most of these places you think of reactionary thinking. People who are anti homosexuality, abortion, immigration, evolution and almost every thing else.

The middle of the United States once elected a socialist to congress, they founded the Grange and the Farm Workers Party. The mid west was home to the Cleveland Symphony and the Detroit Opera. Artists did not leave as soon as they could. Is this still true? Actually I know that it is still true to some extent. There are still small theater groups in Buffalo and Minneapolis and I am sure lots of other cities. There are lots of smart people out their but they are slowly but surely being pushed out.

I think the current immigration debate is a symptom of something that has been building for a long time. The desire of too many of the Mid Western politicians to push everyone but their constituency out. Often people with different ideas were are part of this unwanted group. The reason the coasts have done so well is that these unwanted people have moved there and many of them turned out to have something good to offer. Taking in the unwanted is what places like New York have always been good at. The problem is, can this country prosper with this type of division? It is sad that Michigan is going to loose a liberal voice.

Rules and Regulations

2007-10-18T11:08:00.000-05:00

Years ago I remember reading a book called Hawaii. This was a fictionalized account of the founding of Hawaii. One of the things that happened was that when the missionaries arrived they realized that the Hawaiian people were have too much intercourse. They did not like this. They wanted to push the idea of marriage and of course the missionary position. They thought that they might create a law that forbid all the types of congress that they did not approve of. They realized that if they did this that this would just give the Hawaiians ideas on things to do that they had not thought of. So this is the law they came up with:

any other species of lewdness be committed, such as is not mentioned in this law, the judge shall consider it well, according to the best of his knowledge, he shall pass sentence in accordance with the general spirit of the law. Thus shall he punish that crime

In other words, we aren't going to tell you what is bad, but don't do it.

The SEC years ago decided that if they specified all of the illegal things that banks and stock brokers should not do that they would provide a gold mine for lawyers looking for loopholes. For instance there is a section of the tax code that says you should not do any financial maneuver just to avoid taxes. This is much better than telling you what you can't specifically do. It relies on the reasonable interpretation of good behavior.

I have been reminded of this with all the controversy surrounding the memos written in a Queens high school about what to do in case of an emergency. It would seem that the part that is missing is to do what makes sense in the situation. If you are looking to create a series of rules to govern behavior, sometimes less is more.

Of course you need guidelines in any organization. You need to tell people the clear chain of command, but then you have to trust people to do the right thing if the chain doesn't make sense. The memo should have started by saying that everyone was expected to do what is appropriate if they feel someone is in danger and then go on to describe what to do if they are not. All these explicit memos do is feed into the control mentality that too often governs schools while avoiding making people responsible for their own actions.

Do they always win?

2007-10-15T10:18:00.000-05:00

About 6 months ago I decided that it was time to get on with my life. I signed an agreement that I did not love, but which at the time looked like it was the best I was going to do. The idea was that I could move on. Not true. I forgot, and apparently so did my lawyer that bureaucrats can almost always win.

In terms of my "career" with the DoE I was left with the prospect of finding a new job. I did not object to that. Clearly I should have done this years ago. I logged on to the DoE web site and noticed immediately that the majority of available Assistant Principal jobs were for AP organization (APO). This is not a surprise. Small schools usually only have one AP. The old model of subject matter AP's is quickly disappearing in NYC. The problem is that in NYC you need what is called a certificate of eligibility(COE). This is a concept that makes sense for subject matter AP's, you should know something about a subject if you are going to be an AP of that subject, but for an APO this seems kind of silly. There are no extraordinary qualifications for this job. You just have to do what the principal needs you to do. Usually this has to do with money but not always.

For most AP's the process for getting a COE to be an APO is you pay the board ten dollars and you make sure your fingerprints are up to date and you don't owe child support. But this is not how it works if you are me.

In early July I applied for the proper COE to be an APO. But I didn't get it. What I got was a letter asking me to come to 65 Court St. I did, and they told me that because of my record of evil doings they would have to investigate me. Would I like to add anything in my own defense. I did and then I heard nothing. It is now October 15 and I have still not heard anything from them. As far as I know my application is just sitting on someones desk. By not acting on it they have essentially stopped me from getting work.

This is what bureaucracies are good at. They are good at doing nothing and by doing nothing hurting people. This is why they win. Doing nothing is usually a more powerful act then doing something.

It's a nasty group of people

2007-10-11T15:40:00.000-05:00

Two interesting and I feel related articles appeared on October 10. The first was in the Times. If you are interested in the whole article it is at http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/10/education/10education.html?_r=1&oref=slogin This article was by Samuel Freedman, a guy I exchanged emails with last year. He is the Times' education writer. Some how or other he managed to spend three hours in my old rubber room on 7th Avenue. It has gotten worse. teachers are no longer allowed even the small amount of dignity they used to have. Here is the quote from the Times;

The room in question was about 1,100 square feet and on blueprints submitted to the Fire Department was designed to hold 26 people. On this day, it contained upward of 75. It had no windows, no land phone, no Internet access, no wall decorations, not even a clock. Any personal belongings left overnight were removed by custodians.

This is like it was last year, but know listen to this;

Still, the stultifying atmosphere of that rubber room is not simply the opinion of its unwilling, disgruntled residents. I spent several hours there last week observing the listless routine, and what I saw confirmed the complaints I had heard privately from teachers before my unannounced visit.

Until this year, teachers could at least keep some personal items: a seat cushion, a tin of tea. A teacher with a damaged leg who needs a support dog was permitted to sit at a table just outside the rubber room. A physical education teacher even held fitness classes in the hallway.

All that has ended. The department supplied new chairs and tables at the outset of this academic year, but also stopped allowing any of the personal touches.

The room has always been punitive, but now it is a nightmare. The bureaucrats at the DoE think that this is great. They assume that you must be scum if you are there, they never allow the possibility that the scum might be the principal who sent you there.

The second article was in the Daily News. Here it is in its entirety;

A Manhattan gym teacher facing 27 counts of misconduct allegedly threatened to kill the arbitrator presiding over his case, authorities said.

Theodore Smith, 46, who taught at the Museum School in Manhattan, allegedly said he was going to "kill that f---ing arbitrator" and "break him in half," according to a report by Special Schools Investigator Richard Condon.

The Education Department will continue to seek Smith's termination, a spokeswoman said.

What is amazing about this is that if you asked the DoE to comment on an ongoing investigation they would tell you that they could not, that there were confidentiality issues involved, even if the teacher being investigated was willing to wave his/her rights. But on the day that the Times breaks a story on the rubber room suddenly the DoE releases this story. That hardly seems a coincidence. As a matter of fact the release of this item would seem to violate the DoE's policy. Maybe somebody should investigate them. At the very least this guys union should file a suit against the DoE for giving out this information.

My mind

2007-09-27T12:33:00.000-05:00

One quick comment on my last post. We seem to live in an era of privatization. Here in NYC the mayor believes in privatizing and so does Joel Klein. There is this mantra that private is better. I think that the Iraq war is the first privatized war. I think that history will show that it was one of the most inefficient corrupt wars ever conducted. I would hope that private contractors will eventually be held accountable. We also are faced with making some serious decisions regarding health care. No candidate seems to want to propose a government run health care system. This is despite the fact that the feds spend 3% of medicare money on administration and the private sector spends 15%. Privatization can work sometimes, but I think we need to be careful when we assume it is always better.

I am reading this book entitled "I am a Strange Loop" by Douglas Hofstadter. The book is about the mind and in particular what I means. Hofstadter wrote the book after his wife died suddenly. I think he is arguing against what he calls the Cartesian version of I. That is you are who you are only in terms of what body you are in and where that body is located. He makes an argument that all of the I's in the world are somehow connected. Therefore the I that was his wife lives on in some small way inside him and his kids. He sees the I as something that exists beyond the physical and chemical makeup of an individual.

I am not really going to go into explaining what was in this book, because I know that I often read books and then distort them to fit into something inside me. I am not a good reporter of books. I use books to change my thinking but not always in the way that an author intended. I am "famous" in my family for doing this.

This is the point I want to make about this book. I am who I am because of the books I have read, the people I have loved and the experiences I have had. But I do not feel that I retain any of this. I feel that I have taken all of this in and so modified it and distorted it as to make it unrecognizable.

Hofestader really wants to feel that the I that was his wife became a part of him, he wants to feel that he knew her in a profound way. I look at the people I know really well, my wife, my kids and I feel that in a really serious way I have no idea who they are. I have gotten better at guessing what they are thinking or what they want or like, but this is just a skill I have acquired. This skill is similar to getting better at hitting a baseball. When you are little you miss all of the time, but if you practice you learn to make small adjustment that allow you to occasionally hit the ball. You are never able to hit it every time and you are never really aware of where the ball is. You just become better at reacting and reading visual cues.

Of course the study of I can also be the study of the soul. If you are religious this is the easy term. Hofstadter uses another term élan mental which I like a lot. While I believe in élan mental I do not believe that it survives or is transfered in any meaningful way. My father was a major figure in my life. But even thought he affected me and even though some outside people might say I have some of his habits or thought processes I do not believe that any of his soul still exists.

Talk Back

2007-09-19T09:23:00.001-05:00

I have received two comments that I think deserve a response. The first one spoke of how wonderful the UFT was. I have been a chapter chair and I will say categorically that the UFT is not a democratic organization. When I was chapter chair the representative from the Manhattan High Schools was not part of the ruling Unity party. This apparently bothered the UFT leadership so much that they changed the way people vote. They used an old trick used by segregationists in the 60's. If you were afraid that a minority group would elect representatives you switched to an at-large system. If you had 10 house representatives and 20% of your population was black you changed the way voting was done to have the representatives elected at large. This almost assured that all of the representatives were white.

The UFT used to have proportional representation, but it changed the ballot so that people now vote on a party. it may still be possible to split a vote, but it is very difficult. The end result is that all of the elected officials are now Unity members. I think that this is actually bad management. I think that you need someone in your organization that has an opposing view. If you don't have this person than you loose touch with your members.

The CSA doesn't change because the majority of its members don't think that the CSA is relevant to them. They don't believe that there is any power in this group so why bother spending any time thinking about who to vote for. The young principals don't care about the CSA at all, they probably see the CSA as something that gets in their way. If the CSA doesn't deal with this quickly they will become even more irrelevant than they already are. By sending the same tired old people around to talk to new principals they are assuring themselves of continued irrelevance.

The second comment I received was someone asking my if I thought the DoE owed me something. This is of course one of the large divides between Joel Klein and the unions. The unions argue that we sacrificed low pay for stability. I'm not sure that is as true today as it used to be. The unions also bring up issues of academic freedom in protecting us, but I don't think there are people in New York City being fired for teaching evolution or even communism.

So, what is wrong with just firing someone. Why couldn't my principal just tell me she didn't like me and that I needed to leave. Actually she probably could have done this, and while I might not have listened to her, I might have.

I think we have to look at teachers and administrators as civil servants. I know that this term has bad connotations today, but you need to examine why civil service was created. At one time every change in administration meant that everyone was fired and replaced with people loyal to the new administration. This created chaos and meant that jobs were filled with people who either had no experience or who were to dumb for the job. Government could not function this way and therefore the civil service was created.

The DoE is attempting to create a situation in which civil service protection does not apply. This will ultimately cause a system filled with connected people who are not good at their jobs. It will also destroy the sense of continuity and family that good schools have. This is already evident in the constant shuffling of principals, if you add AP's to the mix I do not believe that you will help schools.

I don't think that anyone owes me something. I just feel that the politics behind what has happened to me and other AP's is destructive to the schools. Being good at your job should not be the main reason for firing someone. Civil Service rules keep this from happening.

CSA Forever

2007-09-17T13:44:00.000-05:00

Alice Roosevelt's grave -Greenwood Cementary

The person who is supposed to be my union rep stopped by today. I know that there are a bunch of people in my district and she should not have to remember everyone's story, but I am in a rather unique situation and I have been asking the union for help for the past year. You would think she would remember something about my situation. She knew nothing at all. She talked to the principal behind closed doors for ten minutes and then she asked me how I was doing. She knew nothing about me or my situation. Evey question I asked was answered by saying email Bob. Of course I have done this almost every day since the end of August.

Unions were created to help their members. Somewhere along the line they seemed to have lost sight of this function. Service is not something they seem to care about. They run all these seminars that give the appearance helping their members. They are just noise. The seminars exist to tell you things you could figure out on your own if someone would take the time to write them down clearly.

My union feels that any problem I present to them is not worthy of service. Most of the people say they will look into my problem and then they stop returning your calls. If I was managing the type of problems Bob is supposed to deal with I would have a list of when I inquired about the problem. If I did not hear back from the DoE in a certain period of time I would call again. I would certainly get back to the member periodically to tell him what was going on. I would at least have a secretary email him and say the problem is still being worked on.

Of course the problem is that unions in the DoE are monopolies. I can't take my business elsewhere. This would be OK, because all governments are essentially monopolies but unions are also structured in such a way that there is no opposition and almost no chance to elect opposition members to the union governing body. This takes away the one thing going for democratic institutions. The throw the rascals out ability that usually exists.

We have a new leader of the CSA, it is time for him to clean house.

Quality Review

2007-09-10T10:10:00.000-05:00

This weekend I managed to wander on to the DoE web site. I followed the links to my old school and then I looked under the category "statistics". This led me to something called the school quality report. I have to say I was amazed by what I saw. Statistically you see a school that has not really gotten better for the last three years and you see the following statement under what the school does best:

The principal, who has good capacity to effect change leads and manages a complex organization well, so that it functions effectively on a day to day basis and is improving the quality of its work with students.

What! How did they figure out the principal has a good capacity to effect change. Who did they talk to?

The next bullet said:" The school has taken great strides in recent years to implement an effective discipline code, so that students are safe, secure and able to learn."

Now I see how it is going. The principal is great, the AP security is great. I wonder who else is great?

Guidance and counseling are efficiently managed and, through strengthening links with the school discipline code, are increasingly targeted and focused on students with the greatest needs.

I guess the AP of guidance is really great.

I wonder what this school needs to do to improve. These three people are great I wonder if some people are not so great?

What the school needs to improve
Continue to develop the capacity of the school's cabinet both individually and collectively, to ensure that the school's goals and objectives are met.

Wow! There it is. The source of all of this school's difficulties. It is the lack of capacity in the rest of the cabinet. Take a look at the summary. This says it all.

Overall Evaluation
This is a proficient school.
Significant steps have been taken over the last few years to establish an environment in which students feel safe and secure. This is helping to lay the foundations for continued improvements in the students' academic as well as personal development and in their attendance. Improved links between the school's discipline and guidance and counseling systems are producing a more rounded view of students and enabling more focused packages for their support.

The principal works hard to maintain the balance between the benefits of small learning communities in terms of the knowledge of individual students and the problems that arise with scheduling and the curriculum that can be offered. The impact and effectiveness of this work, however, are being limited by variations in the quality of implementation. The principal has recognized that the key task for individual members of the school's cabinet is to ensure the effectiveness of their teams, both individually and collectively. The principal's task is to ensure the same for each member of the cabinet.

What the DoE evaluator is saying is that the principal the AP security and the AP guidance are doing a great job and their work is being "limited" by the "quality of implementation". I suppose I was one of those people limiting the quality of implementation, I suppose all the other AP's are limiting the quality of implementation.
How come the evaluator doesn't talk about the fact that the other AP's spend at least 50% of their time trying to undo the damage done by the AP security and the poor scheduling done by the AP guidance with the full cooperation of the principal. As a matter of fact, did this evaluator even go above the second floor. Did the evaluator even talk to anyone else in the building.

I hate not having my teachers and my kids around me. I hate doing no significant work for over a year, but I do not hate working for a woman who constantly feels that everyone is letting her down. I do not hate sitting in endless cabinet meetings with no leadership. If I was still an AP at this school I would certainly be very annoyed by this quality review. Come on Ms Principal, take some responsibility for the school.

I ain't going to school with them folks.

2007-09-07T12:37:00.000-05:00

I see in the paper today that schools in the US have never been so segregated. We know this in NYC because we have all seen it. The city created a bunch of specialized schools throughout the system that allowed middle class parents to send their kids to "good" schools. Of course the affect was to segregate the schools.

In my neighborhood there were always big hustles going on to get kids into non-zoned schools. I did it and so did many other parents. Before these specialized schools were created there was much middle class flight. Some parents left the city, some parents went to parochial schools and some parents chose private schools ($20,000/ year)

I remember a family that I was friendly with. Their boys played with my son. As soon as the oldest kid became 5 they sold their house and moved to the suburbs. This was a common New York story for those people who could afford it. This is not how you build a strong city.

What happened was the city, in order to stop white flight, allowed parents to manipulate the system and allowed schools to become increasingly segregated. The emphasis that Bloomburg placed on education was very smart. The people you want in the city are people who care about sending their kids to good schools. The problem is how to do this without creating a de facto segregated system.

My kids went to public school in New York City. I thought this was important, but I did figure out how to get my kids into the best possible schools for them. I did not want my kids in schools where no one cared about knowledge, or kids did not allow anyone to see that they were curious about the world.

The house I ran seemed to always have more white kids than the school at large. Still, they were a minority. I was always faced with the issues of tracking students. We had three cohorts and even if you did not believe in tracking the cohorts would still be tracked by the third year. They would track because one group would be taking things such as physics and math B and this would create a schedule that forced them to be together in English and social studies.

One of the things we did was to take kids that seemed to be working hard and showed curiosity and a desire to do well and move them into our honors track. We never looked at their reading or math levels. We made judgment calls about them based on who they were. What I think we were doing subconsciously is tracking kids by desire.

This was an interesting way to track because it gave you all of the good things about heterogeneous classes. The best thing I saw was good kids helping kids who were having trouble. This bred compassion and it also reinforced learning among the better students. Teaching someone else is the best way to learn.

It may be that if we change admissions standards for elite schools to account for desire than we may see these schools become more integrated. Minority kids have a real disadvantage on standardized tests. Their vocabulary is not even close to my own kids' vocabulary.

I am not sure how to test for this desire. Teacher recommendations are only good if you know the teacher. Teachers tend to recommend kids who gave them no trouble. What I think you need to find is kids who are curious. You want to find kids who have the resiliency to not know something and to work to figure it out. Give me a class full of those kids and I don't care what their color or grade level is I can do great things with them.

I have added a new link to a science teacher's blog who is at the beginning of being forced out of her school. I don't know her but the process is informative. It can happen to anyone. Asking any teacher, but particularly a science teacher to travel is such bad policy that I have no comment.

Joel Klein wants to fire me.

2007-09-06T09:14:00.000-05:00

Last year the DoE decided to get rid of district 79 schools. They were going to close some of the programs and merge some of the programs into other schools. To do this they decided to fire all of the teachers and make them reapply for their jobs. In the process of doing this a bunch of teachers did not find new jobs. The union contract would not allow these teachers to be fired so they are now replacing per-diem substitutes in many schools. When asked about these teachers the chancellor replied that if he had his way he would fire all of these teachers.

At this point in time there are a bunch of assistant principals who do not have assignments. The new contract does not allow these APs to be fired. I know that Joel Klein's desire is that we all be fired. He can not do this at this time.

I remember reading an interview with someone from Ohio who was having his house foreclosed. He had worked in an auto factory and then the factory had closed down. He was talking about how he had done everything that was asked of him in life, worked hard, married, bought a house, had kids etc. and then the job just left him. Joel wouldn't have any sympathy for this guy. Joel would only care about the auto company being profitable.

The DoE is full of people who are not great at their jobs. I would guess that Bloomberg L.P also has a bunch of people who are not good at their jobs. The world we live in today seems to feel that these people should be cut loose. Unions are a good thing because they keep bosses from doing this.

I am not sure that this is a good way to run the world. I have fired people and pushed people out. Generally I did this to people who wanted to manipulate the system and refused to try to do good work. I had two lab assistants who complained every time I asked them to do anything and who only did the minimum all the time. These were not good workers. I do wonder what happened to them, but I do not feel sorry for them. I have also allowed people who are not good at what they do to continue working for me because they seemed to care a lot about their job. I am sure this is a weakness on my part.

I don't really get people who don't try. It may be that in some cases they are just in the wrong place or working for the wrong person.

Because I got in trouble when I went to apply for a new certificate to become an AP organization my application was sent to investigation. The reason I applied for the APO license is that the majority of jobs available call for this license. I did this in July and I have not heard anything from the DoE. In other words the DoE wants to fire me because I can not find a job on my own, but the DoE has made it impossible for me to find a job on my own. This is a real catch 65.

Of course I let the union know about this right away. Of course the union did nothing as usual. I think I don't understand what they are supposed to do.

My Summer

2007-08-30T12:42:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I put a picture on my page. This shot was taken in Canada from a moving car. It is one of the few good pictures I took this summer. I went to upper Michigan and I went Cleveland and Virgina. I just didn't seem to do as much good photography as I did last year. I have been wondering why.

Last year I was in the west and the west is always inspiring. I don't think this totally explains my lack of output. I think that part of my problem was not going off by myself. Usually I get up early and go out by myself. This year all of my vacation time was with people. I did not have very much time by myself.

I'm reading the biography of Teddy Roosevelt. He was a social guy. He had to be to become president. Roosevelt also owned a ranch in North Dakota and he spent months alone at this ranch, particularly after his first wife died. As I was reading this I realized that I needed some of this. I think spending 3 months a year in the Dakota's is not something I need. When I go to Las Vegas I usually get up at 7 and R gets up at 11. this gives me 4 hours by myself. This gives me a great opportunity to wander around take picture or just do nothing.

I am good at doing nothing by myself when I am home, but somehow this does not lead to creativity. I may actually be grasping at straws but this summer was not very creative for me and I want to figure out how to change this.

I went to Greenwood Cemetery yesterday to visit Alice Roosevelt's grave. I found the family plot but I could not read most of the head stones. This very rich, very powerful family had a modest plot and used stone that did not survive even 100 years. I wandered around with my camera and saw very few good photo opportunities.

Blue Wednesday

2007-08-29T12:59:00.000-05:00

I have been sitting in a school for the past few days. Because I am an AP I started on Monday. I have helped fix the office and get things working, but there is really nothing serious I can do because I am here only because no one knows where I should be. I could be gone tomorrow.

This has left me a little down but then I started thinking about all the people I left in the rubber room. I can not imagine what it would be like if I was a teacher sitting at home today knowing that tomorrow I would be going back to that awful place. When you first go there you are in shock and usually surprised so you have not had time to think about it. The first few weeks you are involved in trying to figure out how to get out of there. It is only latter that the depression sets in. By that point you are getting used to it. People can get used to anything. If you ever read "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" you can see how someone can adjust.

If I had all of the summer off, and you was able to lead my life with dignity and now it is Wednesday and I know tomorrow I will be once again thrown into that awful place I am not sure what I would feel like. I suppose I would start feeling bad at least a week ahead of Thursday. I know I did not have a great weekend mentally knowing that I was in limbo.

If any of my fellow prisoners are reading this I want to say that I feel for you. I am not sure if you can ever really recover from last year. I do not feel that this type of trial makes you a better person. I do hope that you will find the strength to survive.

One of the participants in the Abu Ghraib jail just finished his trial. He was acquitted of impropriety at the jail, but he was found guilty of talking about it. In other words you can torture prisoners contrary to the Geneva Convention but don't talk about it. An important message to get out to the troops. We wouldn't want someone to talk and possibly blame the generals for this stuff.

SHH! It's a secret

2007-08-28T12:46:00.000-05:00

The Daily News has run a series of articles about a judge in the Bronx named Marian Shelton. Judge Shelton is being investigated for misconduct. The judge took the unusual step of publicizing the charges against her. I am sure that this is driving a lot of people crazy. This all sounds familiar.

The judge is probably not a saint. It sounds like she made some statements that were not always well thought out. I am sure she is not alone in this. As you read the case it does become apparent that people are after her. Her strategy is partially to go public with the charges. Exactly what I did.

The federal government uses national security as an excuse for secrecy all of the time. What is interesting is that every time they lose a freedom of information suit it is apparent that most of the secrets the government keeps are designed to cover up the governments failings and have very little to do with national security.

I keep asking myself if this type of behavior is unique to government or if it exist in all large industries. Con Ed wants to send their own inspectors to look at the steam pipe explosion site. Are they there looking for the truth or are they there to cover up the truth, particularly if the truth is not favorable to Con Ed.

There was a funny report out of London that 40% of married women have lied to their husbands about how much an article of clothing cost. This is a funny story, but it may expose a basic human trait to spin the truth.

Husbands and wives can deal with each other as they see fit. Governments and corporations need to constantly resist the desire to classify actions as secrets. When they give in to this desire they are badly serving society and often badly serving themselves. Mattel may try to keep the lead paint issue secret, but they know that if it gets out they can risk the whole business. Secrecy has a price for them that may be greater than honesty. This is not true of government or public utilities. It is important that we hold officials accountable. Honesty and openness really do matter.

Carl Rove

2007-08-18T09:00:00.000-05:00

I see that Carl Rove has resigned. I guess that Carl was the master at telling lies and therefore convincing a proportion of the population that the lies were true. I think something like 40% of America still thinks that Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9/11. I suppose in some small way that this happened to me. The principal was able to file charges against me that were lies. The lies were thrown out of court, but a certain percentage of the population believe them and never let go of their belief.

I was reminded of this recently when someone commented on my blog about me being investigated for fixing Regents grades. This never happened, but I suppose it is the lie that matters not the truth. I sometimes feel that I am a boy scout when it comes to things like changing grades or lying about other people. I find it hard to even imagine doing this. I am always shocked when I hear of others doing things like this. It just seems like something you should not do. It would never even think of changing a Regents grade. I suppose I talk about grades because I would rather change the system than change a student's grade.

My argument with grades is with the attempt to make them precise. Regents' grades are given in discreet numerical units. The problem is that people see this as an accurate measure of a student's abilities. Even the people designing the test would not claim that this was so. I doubt if these grades are repeatable closer than 5 or 10 points. In other words if you gave a student 2 chemistry Regents would they score the exact same score or would they just get in the same range.

If I get on a scale this morning and I weigh myself I will get a clear number. If I go to the doctor an hour from now and weigh myself again I will probably get the same number (assuming the two scales are working). This happens because scales are scientific instruments capable of accurately measuring a persons weight. Regents do not work that way and never will. Regents only give you a range. (For my science readers I realize that the two scales will never read exactly the same number. Even scales have errors)

When we tell a student they received a 72 on a regents we seem to be making a statement that is not true. There is probably no difference between a 72 and a 77. We need to stop pretending that teaching is an exact science. This is why I feel that we should go to a system of letter grades. It will change the way we think about kids intellectual abilities. We should be grouping kids into much broader categories.

Teachers have always used class participation as a factor in grading. This is a huge factor in creating grade inaccuracy. If we are making a statement about a kids ability to succeed in life or to do something brilliant you can find that almost all research shows that we consistently miss the most brilliant students. This happens partially because of this class participation component. Class participation usually means who fits the teachers model of a good student. This model rarely has anything to do with what really brilliant kids do.

The bottom line is have grades helped students realize what their abilities are or have they hurt kids by either giving them a false sense of how good they are or by convincing them that they are failures when they are not.

The image on the top was taken with a camera I just built. The camera takes stereo digital images. If you want to see it in stereo and you look at it while crossing your eyes so that your right eye looks at the left image and your left eye the right image you will see it in 3-D.

Grade Change - Part 2

2007-08-08T15:32:00.000-05:00

The second issue in the August first Times’ article was the fact that the principal had given the student a second math test which she passed and then changed the grade to allow the student to graduate. The article quoted the mother as saying something about not being able to afford a second prom. The affect was to trivialize the real concerns that many parent feel about their children’s educations. I think this was a cheap shot.

If you look at this kid you can see that she spent 5 years in high school. Her attendance seemed to have been spotty, but she did stay with it even after her cohort had graduated. The kid clearly had problems in math. This is too bad. We should make sure that kids leave high school with enough math skills to survive. I see people in stores all the time getting into arguments with cashiers because they can’t follow what is happening and they feel cheated. This is a sad way to lead your life. You are either being cheated or you think you are being cheated.

A kid who has failed many courses and has taken five years to finish high school is not going to get into Harvard, they are not going to become doctors or pilots or pharmacists. They may work in a restaurant, or in a grocery store. When we give them a high school diploma signed by the principal and bearing the seal of the New York State Board of Regents we are not saying anything more than that they have survived high school. This is an achievement, but it is not that strong of a statement about their intellectual ability. Any college or employer is going to ask how they did in high school. This girl’s transcript is not going to say that she did well.

When we refuse to give a kid like this a diploma we are being arrogant about what high school is. We are putting a barrier in her way to starting her life that has no meaning. Why would we want to do this? Are we really afraid that someone will misinterpret this document? Do we think that some employer will call us up and yell at us for giving a girl a high school diploma even though she is not very good at algebra? The world understands what a high school diploma is worth. It says something about a kid’s ability not to give up. This is really all it says.

I love teaching high school because I can facilitate the transition of a kid from lost to having a direction. It is the direction that is the most important thing. I send the kids out into the world with the statement that this kid does not give up. When they get their first job they will impress their boss or not. If they go to college they will thrive or not. They will start creating the transcript of their life. This will be more important than the high school diploma. High school can be very important, not the diploma. Give the kid a break, let her get on with her life. Mr. Math Teacher, you were being a jerk.

I guess the point is to not think of grades as an objective measurement of students, they are not, but to think of them as a statement about the student’s readiness to move on. It would be great if we could personally testify to each student’s abilities like they do in elite private schools. I doubt if that type of grading will ever be practical in a large urban school system.

On a personal note; I received a 98 on my Algebra Regents because I did not check a problem even though the directions said to show the work and show that I had checked my work. I did not forget to check my work. I though it was stupid to check it. The problem was easy and I knew I had gotten it correct. Checking it would have involved adding 3 numbers together backwards from the way I had done it in the original problem. I thought this was stupid and chose not to do it.

Grades part 1

2007-08-07T19:14:00.001-05:00

On August first the Times education section ran an article on a math teacher who had had his grades changed by his principal. He had failed a fifth year senior and he was upset that the grades had been changed. Usually I support teachers that do things like this, but I don’t think I support this guy. Of course I do not know the whole story. I do know the principal and she probably handled the situation badly.

The math teacher and the Times made a big deal over the fact that 45 is the lowest grade you can give someone. They should get over it. No one seems to be upset that you get a 200 on the SAT’s for spelling your name correctly. Why should they be upset that 45 is the starting grade? In college you can only get an A, B, C, D and fail. This doesn’t bother anyone. I suspect that the people complaining weren’t complaining about the fact that the average grade in a college is no longer a C. It was when I went to college. 45 is just a number. It has significance in the New York City system only in that it indicates a student who not only failed, but also missed a lot of school. It is not an average. Teachers need to stop thinking of it this way.

The problem is that many teachers feel that they can create an objective way to measure students. Math and science people are particularly susceptible to this kind of thinking, but I have seen English teachers who work that way also. What happens is that a teacher creates an elaborate system of homework, attendance, tests and class participation. Each activity is scored and then weighted. The numbers are then added up and a concise numerical grade is given. This allows for the possibility that a student could have an average of 30 or 10 or 87. This would seem like science, but in truth it is bad science.

You need to answer the basic question about grades. What do they mean? What do they measure? On a very basic level when an institution gives a student a grade it is saying that the student has achieved a certain intellectual level. At this moment I am on my way to Albany to help write the Regents Exams. Students take a Regents and get a precise grade. I remember that I received a 98 on the Algebra Regents. It is amazing that I remember this because it was 46 years ago. Does my 98 means that I was not as smart as someone who got a 100 but smarter than someone who received a 95. Of course not. It does mean that. I forgot to check one problem and my teacher took off 2 points. This is not a precise measure of my intellect. Certainly I knew more algebra than someone who received a 65, but the student who receives a 95 was at least my equal and may have actually known more of the whole curriculum than I did.

I think that New York City might be better served if we switched to a straight letter grade system. I would encourage teachers to think of student in a more holistic way. Putting a number on something does not make it a measurement of anything significant. Numbers are just numbers.

Candy Bars

2007-07-27T17:59:00.000-05:00

I was on the train yesterday and a kid gets on and announces that he is selling candy bars. He says that he could be robbing people but he thought selling candy bars was better. Of course the implication was that if selling candy bars didn't go well he would start robbing people. If I asked you to identify this kids race do you think you could?

Of course you could, only a black kid would use this line. Do black kids actually feel this way or are they just using a public perception. Either way this is a bad thing. We need to move beyond this. I didn't buy any candy.

I got a comment about my last blog that was interesting. First of all Macinac is in Michigan, not upstate New York. I suspect the folks in Michigan hate New Yorkers almost as much as those in upstate NY, but I find it hard to believe that someone would know I was a New Yorker and purposely have their dog take a dump in front of me. It wouldn't work anyways because like all New Yorkers I walk around looking at my feet.

Dogs will be dogs

2007-07-19T15:41:00.001-05:00

I went Macinac Island last week. Two things happened that I found strange and disturbing. (My wife thinks I’m getting crazy.) The first happened before we got to the island. We were waiting in line for the ferry and the line was kind of long. It went up one side of the dock and then it turned. We were standing right past where it made a U and there were about 20 people behind us. One of the ferry company employees asked us to move the line and make it straight instead of a U. A request that has happened to me in the past. No big deal.

Most of us started moving in an orderly fashion, keeping the integrity and order of the line. The 3 people behind me decided to cut the corner and end up in front of me. I told them that I thought it was not nice to cut in front of us. One of them looked at me and smiled and didn’t move. I repeated that it seemed that they were being selfish by cutting in front of us. They ignored me. I then did nothing. I did not pull out my gun because I do not own a gun. Actually as a city person I expect people to respect lines.

Many country folks (these guys looked like country folk) probably feel that lines are kept in order in New York City by an unwritten threat of violence. I do not think that this is really true. I think that people in New York have learned how to live with other people. This means how to stand in a line.

The second thing happened while we were on the Island. Macinac is this cool place that has no cars. Everyone travels by bike or horse and buggy as well as walking. The downtown is kind of crowded and very touristy. I was walking down the sidewalk and this nice middle class white lady with grey hair was walking her small poodle down the middle of the sidewalk. The poodle decided that it was time to take a dump, and so it did in the middle of the sidewalk. The woman tugged the dog’s collar and continued to walk, leaving behind a small pile of dog feces.

All of us New Yorkers have seen this type of behavior in tourists in our city. People stand in front of subway doors; they block intersections and many other behaviors that break the public order. I think that this is part of the split that has happened in America. There are people who can live with others and there are those who do not know how to do this. I don’t think this is a moral failing on their part. I think they have just not evolved. They think that cities are moral cesspools. We are actually much better at living with other and not doing unto others than the country folk.

Rock and Roll

2007-07-05T09:26:00.000-05:00

R and I went to Cleveland the other day. We went to see the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. This is a really cool museum. Once again we are faced with the concept of people in their 50's confronting their rock and roll past. Rock has always been raunchy and sexual. People who went to rock concerts did not wear pinafores. So how does one approach the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

What we saw was families of tourists dressed in tourist clothes walking around looking at the exhibits like it was Cooperstown. Except it wasn't. Here is my imaginary overheard conversation. Mom, Dad, Bud and Kitten are walking around the museum. Dad and Kitten wander over to the Madonna costume exhibit. Dad says: "Look Kitten, that's the exact same bra that Madonna wore on her 'Like a Virgin' tour. The one with the pointy tits. It's amazing to be in the presence of such history." Meanwhile mom and Bud are walking down the history of rock and roll display cases. They pass the Beatles, Van Halen and then they finally get to CBGB's exhibit. Mom turns to Bud: "You know Bud, I used to go to CBGB's all the time when I was young. My favorite group was the 'Sex Pistols"'. One night Sid Vicious invited my back stage. What an amazing night. Boy was I sore the next day."

You see the problem. The museum is a legitimate museum of the history or Rock. The problem is how can you make it work for the family group. You can't.

Cleveland is a cute city. They are trying really hard to re-make the downtown area. They are converting some great old buildings into condos, and opening clubs and upscale restaurants. Of all the mid size cities I have been in Cleveland seems to be doing the best. I don't know it it will work. If it doesn't work in Cleveland, if the young keep leaving, then it may not work anywhere.

Can't We All Just Get Along

2007-06-26T13:13:00.000-05:00

I worked in the building I am currently in about 10 years ago.I was fed up with teaching and I saw a job in a foundation doing technology education. I applied and got the job. It started on July 1 so I could start and then decide latter if I wanted to go back to teaching or not.

This job had some strange draw backs right from the start. These guys were outside staff developers with almost no classroom experience. This meant that they felt they knew more about teaching than any teacher did.

I am kind of a local merchant booster, the first day I stopped at this funky coffee shop near the school and bought a cup of coffee. The coffee sucked, so the next day I went across the street to Starbucks and bought my coffee. (I love good coffee.) When I got into the office I could see that everyone looked at me askance. I was trafficking with the mega-enemy.

The foundation mostly ran on Mac's with one PC. I had never used a Mac. This was OK with everyone because they found PC's difficult to use and the fact that I wasn't good on a Mac did make them all feel good. The problem was that after about three days I had figured out how the Mac worked and was having no problems. This did not make people feel good.

By the beginning of August it was obvious that this gig was not going to work. I went to the director and told her that I thought things weren't going well and that I felt I should leave in two weeks. She told me that she was so unhappy with me that she was willing to pay me for two weeks if I would just leave. I have to say I was sort of shocked. I had never had anyone dislike me that much. I never saw myself as polarizing like that.

I guess I'm wrong.

Customer Service

2007-06-25T11:07:00.000-05:00

I read two interesting articles lately. They both came from Washington, DC. The first one was an announcement that the mayor had taken over the school system, fired the chancellor and installed a woman who had years of business experience but essentially no experience in education. This woman was recommended by Joel Klein.

The second article was on research done on the voucher program that exists to some extent in D.C. The researchers had discovered that the parents of students who had received vouchers reported that they were very satisfied with their children's school. They felt their child was safer and was learning more. The children according to the researcher were not in fact learning more, and the kids themselves did not feel safer.

I think that these two articles are related. First of all they tap into a great deal of dissatisfaction with the educational system. Politicians have been saying that the solution to education is to privatize it or at least use private techniques to gain control. What they have realized is that there are large numbers of people who are not satisfied with the schools. This is particularly true in cities. The voucher research generally proved that parents who perceived they had a choice were more satisfied.

The school I am currently in has a very vocal, very active PA. Students need to apply to the school to attend. My guess is that parents are generally satisfied with the school because they feel they have a voice. They are the kind of people who are used to being listened to and the principals need to listen even when it is not pleasant. This school has good customer relations.

My last school probably falls into the category of schools in which parents are not satisfied. I am actually not completely blaming them for this. For one thing the parents come in with the feeling that no one will listen to them so they don't really try. The system has spent years essentially telling them that they don't matter. In general the school system has treated them badly. The schools have done a bad job of explaining what was going on in the schools. When we change how we teach kids we rarely talk to parents about it. Most of our contact with parents is to tell them how bad their kid is. We rarely have an honest conversation with them about the issues surrounding their children. Open school night is filled with discussions about how much homework a kid did, or how they did on tests. It is not a discussion on what there kids need to work on, what there deficits are, what their strengths are.

I sat in a meeting once in which the mother of a student accused of some offense was defending her daughter. After the meeting the teacher mentioned to me that she was surprised that the mother would defend her kid. I told her that I thought that that was the mother's job. NYC teachers are not used to dealing with middle class parents with middle class attitudes. We are very poor at customer relations. If we were running a business we would no longer be in business. It would not matter if we had a good or a bad product. Our perception is so bad no one would believe us if we were doing a good job. Ford recently did a survey in which it discovered that people thought the Ford Focus was a great car. Those who compared felt it was better than a Toyota. The same people also said they wouldn't but the Ford. Ford knows it has years of doing badly to make up before people will trust it. Educators have the same problem.

Todays Quiz: What shirt am I wearing in the above picture?

Astrology is good enough for Me.

2007-06-19T15:20:00.000-05:00

Principals are not really held accountable for science scores in their schools. It sort of counts, but not as much as math and English. If they personally don't think much of science then basically the science department is screwed. The only thing that saves it is the state mandates. I received a call from one of my old science teachers who is no longer at my old school. She seemed very dissatisfied because her principal had eliminated labs and gone to a 5 day a week science schedule. This is of course borderline illegal.

I think science pisses off principals for a number of reasons. 1)It costs money for supplies, some of the supplies are even icky. 2)Science teachers laugh at people throwing around terms such as "reptilian behavior" that have almost no basis in research. 3)Science students often fail because they do not have enough lab minutes and are therefore banned from the Regents. 4)Science is perceived as being hard. 5)High school science meets 6 times a week, this messes up the nice neat boxes that make principals and programmers happy.

The part of all of this that I find the most disturbing is the elimination of lab periods. The state says that all students need 1200 minutes of labs before they take the regents. The separate lab period provided our students with more than 1200 minutes. Those students who were absent on a few lab days could still pass lab. The motivation for eliminating these labs is programming. The idea that programs should fit into these nice square boxes is the product of people who are not good with numbers or patterns. Exactly the same people who were probably never good at science. Decisions about programs are made for administrative purposes and not student needs. This is sad.

The other thing about labs is that science needs to be hands on. Teaching theory without doing experiments short changes students. In my last school we had 43 minute lab periods. Most of the time the labs were far away from the class, the students were often not the same as those in the class. This was devastating to the science program. Teachers often did cookbook labs, not discovery labs. The past few years it was hard to get anyone to listen to my complaints about this. Bad scheduling changed from being the exception to being the norm.

When you think of it, the idea that knowledge can be divided into little discreet units of 43 or 45 minutes is absurd. The idea that if teaching math five days a week is a good idea than teaching Spanish five days a week must also be a good idea is equally as absurd. Some principals just want the programming to be easy so they can concentrate on instruction. This is a bad idea. Programming often defines instruction. To think otherwise is wrong. You can not ignore programming in a high school.

Good teachers are always number one, but they are followed by good programming. Programming is the way you support teachers and students.

Old folks

2007-06-19T08:12:00.002-05:00

My kids gave R and me a weekend at a B&B in Massachusetts and tickets to a Stevie Nicks concert. Stevie Nicks was a young kid when she sang with Fleetwood Mack in 1971. This means she is no longer young, though she looks pretty good. She was born in 1948.

The tickets we had were in the front row of a section. In front of us was a walk way. This was great because it allowed us to watch people walking by. Stevie Nicks fans run from late 20's to people who grew up with her. Those people are getting old. This brings up the issue of what to wear to a rock concert when you are an old fart.

For me and most men this wasn't a big deal. When we were 21 we went to rock concerts in jeans and T-shirts. I looked good in jeans and I could wear a tight T-shirt easily. Sometimes I wore a blue work shirt. The uniform for us political people. Today most of us old guys came in jeans and a loose fitting shirt. In my case the old guy uniform, a Tommy Bahama shirt. This is not a big change from the 70's.

If you are a woman this is a much harder problem. Going bra-less with a flimsy top and a short skirt is not a good option for most women over 50. The 70's tops are very popular now but only if you are under 30. Some women showed up in their lavender polyester pants, some got crazy in flowered Chico pants. Both solutions are sad in my opinion.

R chose to wear a modest length skirt and a black top with long flowing sleeves. This seemed to be a popular solution. We saw one women in fishnets and what looked like an Elvira skirt. Not a bad look. There was a women in a low cut red one piece that came straight out of Fredericks of Hollywood. The back came down low enough to catch a little butt cleavage. Not a pretty sight. But she was high on something. A good rock and roll look. A significant number of people were having difficulty walking, but not as big a number as in the 70's.

My parents never went to a rock and roll concert in their lives. My mother did not need rock and roll clothes. But 50 and 60 year old women do go to rock concerts. The women's magazines need to address this burning issue of what to wear. It's only rock and roll but what you wear still matters.

2007-06-19T08:12:00.001-05:00

Tenure

2007-06-15T09:10:00.000-05:00

When I was young I thought that tenure was something teachers received so that they could be free to speak their mind. Teachers needed to be a voice that spoke the truth without censorship. I still believe in tenure, I have just changed my thinking on why I think it is necessary.

I think that tenure has become more like civil service protection. In a system that has ever changing waves of politically motivated people and radical changes in philosophical approaches to education, civil service protection becomes a necessity. This type of protection creates a stability that serves the educational community. Schools are not like businesses. They can not easily become bankrupt and go out of business. The affect of what a 2nd grade teacher does may not be immediately apparent. If I design a line of shirts that no one wants I know it in less than six months. Not true of teaching.

Teaching is also subject to the type of budget balancing that needs to be controlled. A mayor with a fiscal crisis may decide to chop off the top 10% of salaried teachers. Tenure keeps that from happening.

This is of course a self serving argument. I an still gainfully employed because of tenure protection. I do feel that I was a political prisoner for the past year. It is not that I believed in evolution when the school board didn't. I would love it to be that noble. I do believe in doing what ever is necessary to help students. This is a small political point, but it got me in trouble.

I hear that my ex-principal is trying to get rid of another AP. I guess getting rid of me did not cause a dramatic improvement in her school. I wonder how many AP's she will have to get rid of before someone in the DoE realizes it is her.

Testing

2007-06-09T10:42:00.000-05:00

Testing always seems to be in the news lately. The latest thing is that the chancellor is considering paying kids who do well on tests. Actually he will pay every kid who takes the test, but believing in merit pay, he will pay those who score highest extra money.

This story is not as simple as it seems. It turns out that the empowerment schools do not have to use these tests. They can develop their own preliminary test instead of buying the ones created by McGraw Hill. Many of them chose not to buy the McGraw Hill tests. This seemed to upset the chancellor and so he decided to pay kids to take the tests and therefore coerce the autonomy schools into giving the tests. (Do you think Joel will be working for McGraw Hill after he leaves the DoE?)

The story is not about assessment, the story is really about using one particular form of assessment. The one you had to buy. It took a mother quoted in the Daily News to really get what the problem with all of this was: "In my mind, kids will cram to do better on a test, but what knowledge will they gain?" she said. "I never say if you get an A on a test I'll give you a reward.... What if maybe you're working really hard and you get a B? I'm trying to reward the learning."

The rule in politics and espionage is always follow the money.
Here are the two Daily News Articles
Empowerment Schools aren't giving the tests.
Quote by Mother

Observations

2007-06-07T11:38:00.002-05:00

Yesterday I had the pleasure of sitting in on a demo lesson given by a 7th grade science teacher. This lesson was amazingly good. The teacher engaged the kids, varied the activities and made some really good science points. I was impressed and would have hired her in a second.

After the lesson everyone went back to the office to talk. A couple of teachers had sat in on the lesson and some other people. There were a lot of questions or points of the; why did you do this, or do you think it would have been better if you did this, variety. It was the typical discussion that happens when supervisors or people who feel they have input, have with other teachers. There was nothing particularly bad about the conversation and ultimately the teacher was offered the job.

The reason I am writing about this is that I wonder if this same group would have sat with VanGough and told him that maybe he should add a little more blue to his sky. I suspect that they would have. The reason that they would have is that they feel they have to say something and they have to find something wrong. There is a famous story about a commercial illustrator who was hired to paint a picture of 50 couples dancing on a ship's deck. When he turned the painting in and everyone was looking at it someone noticed that one of the women had a hairy arm. The client pointed this out and the illustrator apologized and took the picture back to correct his error. When asked by someone how he could have made that mistake he said that he had done it on purpose. He explained that if he had not done it then the client would have asked him to do some other change, such as rotating all the people 30 degrees.

Of course supervisors do what they think they should do, which is supervise. No one thinks that if they start messing with great teachers that they may make them worse. No supervisor ever thinks that the teacher they are observing is better than they are. We have all been trained to criticize and not praise. This needs to change.

How I Got Here

2007-06-04T21:13:00.000-05:00

Some people have asked how I got out. It is not really that pretty. To recap events; my principal and the DoE's lawyer laid out their case against me. As is usual for this principal no matter how hard the lawyer tried the principal was confused and evasive. After they laid out there case then my lawyer had an opportunity to cross exam. My lawyer started cross examining and got the principal to contradict what she had said the day before. At this point the arbitrator asked the lawyers to talk to him outside and suggested we settle. I was very anxious to do this.

I was anxious to settle for two reasons. First, if you let a trial go to the end it is always unpredictable, I would rather control my own destiny. The second reason is that to play it out could take a long time. Both reasons turned out to not be what I thought they would be. The DoE jerked around with my stipulation for so long that I could have gone through the whole trial. I also should have gone longer to provide a record of even more of her lies. Now I don't have this record.

At the time it seemed like the correct thing to do. So the DoE sent me the stipulation that I published as being absurd. We sent it back they spent a couple of weeks sent a new one which was somewhat better and I decided to sign, we sent it back to them and it took over 3 weeks for them to get two signatures. So here I am. When they gave me the letter in the rubber room reassigning me it took me less than 15 minutes to pack up and leave. I loved many of the people I met there, but I did not love there.

The stipulation includes me paying the DoE $7500. This is to show me that I was a bad boy. It seems to be common in these things. The stipulation cleaned up some of the more obvious stupid things but not all of them. I am somewhat worried that if some one is truly out to get me then I have given them the tools to do this. I hope that no one is out to get me that badly.

The bottom line is that I am free now. My principal has cost me and my family over $20,000 in lost income between my penalty and my lost summer school income. She can afford leather skirts, I am saving up to buy a new belt.

I just received the transcripts of my public trial. I will publish some of them as soon as I get a chance.

Tenure

2007-06-03T12:42:00.001-05:00

I will probably write shorter blogs now that I am actually working. I will probably make more grammatical mistakes because I won't edit as carefully as I did. One of the things I discovered while sitting in the rubber room is that writing takes work and that it often works better when you put it aside and then come back to it hours latter. I still missed some obvious mistakes but I often rewrote things that didn't make sense or were ambiguous when I re-read them. I usually do a better job of explaining what I mean. Time is a good thing.

Klein has made a big deal about tenure lately. I have to say that I agree with him. A big part of why we have too many bad teachers is that tenure has always been something a teacher got unless they were so bad that a principal was willing to make a big stink. The one time I tried to deny someone tenure I discovered that if I had not spent three years carefully documenting how bad this guy was that the superintendents office would not back me or my principal up. I felt that this was absurd policy. Joel Klein wants to blame the UFT for this, and possibly the superintendent was afraid to the union, but it was the failure of administrators to not back up principals and AP's that caused this.

It is not that hard to figure out who is a good teacher and who isn't in three years. I would hope that the new DoE policy will keep the bad and the truly uninspired people out of teaching. After tenure I think the issues change dramatically.

Now What?

2007-05-31T16:32:00.000-05:00

OK, I hope people are finding their way to my new site. I have now done 1 1/2 days at my new school. It is certainly a different place from my last school. Teachers are not all totally happy, they sometimes tell me teacher complaints. But, they are generally happy to be where they are. They all believe that kids should have input into what happens in the school. The kids are allowed out for lunch and the administration put limits on how far they could go. This was done mostly out of a concern for the kids safety. The problem was that a favorite Chinese restaurant was past the boundary the kids put petitions on the wall and kids signed them. The kids felt that they would actually be listened to. This sure beats the get out the dogs and water canons approach of my old school.

The ridiculous thing is that I signed the agreement that got me out of the rubber room three weeks ago. There needed to be two signatures on the document at the DoE, my LIS and the head of legal. Why should this take thee weeks. At the end of week two I sent an email to my lawyer and told her we must have a big problem, I could not believe that the DoE was that inefficient. Last Saturday, May 26, I received a letter from the DoE saying that they had dropped the charges and that my supervisor would tell me where to go. The letter was dated May 22. There was no mention of who my supervisor was or when they would tell me where to go. They had sent this letter regular snail mail. So it took four days, who cares. Of course it cost the DoE 41 cents in postage, you would think an email would save them money. Of course then I would have know right away.

I knew where I was going, because I had negotiated this. The old Ed would have gotten the letter and just gone to my new school. The new Ed went back to the rubber room and waited for the DoE to figure out how to give me a letter assigning me to my new school. The old Ed would have done what was sensible. The new Ed plays by the DoE rules and doesn't do anything until someone tells him.

Sad.

The First Day of the Rest of My Life

2007-05-29T08:49:00.000-05:00

The DoE wanted me to close down my other blog. This was a ridiculous request but I have to say that the title of my old blog is no longer accurate. It is time for a new start. I have included an archive of my old blog as well as the last few entries I wrote. It is possible that when I start working I will not write as often. I will try for a while.

Statistics

2007-05-29T08:38:00.000-05:00

The DoE reported its new statistics the other day. They apparently went down in the early grades. They then spoke about why this was true. I actually agree and don't agree with them. The truth is that No Child Left Behind has created a bizarre testing program that penalizes NYC and other cities with large immigrant populations. It seems as though the NCLB people are attempting to keep cities from cheating and have created an even worse situation.

The DoE and in particular the principals of elementary schools are notorious cheaters. They have been guilty of classifying large numbers of kids as ESL kids and then keeping them out of the tests. The NCLB decided that every student had to take the test after one year in this country. The existence of a rule is a good idea. The problem is that one year is not enough time. Three years is a much better number. As I wrote about a long time ago when I was placing kids in the Bronx smart ambitious principals fight to keep ESL kids out of their schools. What the feds need to do is create a clear and fair rule.

One of the rules the feds want to use is the one about graduation rates. The feds want to count who graduates and divide this against who starts the ninth grade. The DoE doesn't like this one either. They want to add in those who graduate in August. This is not a terrible thing to do. I actually think the DoE is correct in this. August doesn't stop a kid from going to college in the fall. Lots of kids screw up something and need that final summer school push to get out. This should not be held against the schools. I also think we need to have a 5 year graduation rate statistic available to us. In NYC this may be the most important statistic.

I understand that the Newsweek choice of 100 best schools is flawed. It uses AP tests and IB tests as a benchmark. Principals find they can cheat the system by putting lots of kids in AP classes. Still, this may not be so bad. In my ex-school the last principal had pushed to create AP and IB courses. On one level it would seem that we did not have enough students to fill these courses. This was true. We did not have enough students working on a high level. The reality was that putting kids in classes that were beyond them on paper motivated kids to work to a higher level. This is a great thing.

Hello Kitty

2007-05-29T08:37:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I was coming home on the subway. Sitting in the seat next to where I was standing was a cute woman with blond hair and blue eyes. She was using a hello kitty calculator to correct tests on "Julius Caesar". Of course I started talking to her. She said that she was a teacher at a small school in the Bronx. We started talking about what she was teaching. She was not in love with the books she was teaching. I asked her how much input she had in the choice. She said none. That seems strange. Why would someone who had been teaching high school for eight years not have any input into what she taught. I said she was blond, not dumb.

Recently there have been people writing about what is wrong with the military. One of the things they write about is a system that does not encourage people to innovate. Eventually you end up with leaders who aren't innovative. I think this starts at the bottom. I think that the DoE starts out dealing with teachers as if they are not capable of making decisions. They do not dialog with teachers. Eventually they end up with leaders who don't know how to make decisions. The DoE also ends up with leaders who treat teachers like idiots because they were treated that way when they were young.

Newsweek has a list of the top 100 high schools in the country. Their conclusion is that these schools got that way because they had strong committed principals. This is probably true. The DoE seems to recognize this on one level. The problem is that they interpret strong as anti-teacher. When my daughter was in fourth grade she had the best teacher I have ever met. She was truly awe inspiring. I later saw her as a principal. She was a tough principal who had lots of grievances filed against her. She also had an incredibly loyal staff who adored her. This seems like a contradiction but I don't think so. I think she respected teachers who did good work and had little tolerance for the coasters. She eventually became a much loved district superintendent and then the head of curriculum for the DoE. Her name is Carmen Farina and she only lasted a short time. She retired and was replaced by a guy with a law degree who had only taught for a few years. I guess Joel is more comfortably surrounding himself with lawyers than educators. Particularly those who love education.

Saint Edward

2007-05-29T08:36:00.000-05:00

I actually never did this, but someone said I shouldn't consider myself a saint, so I decided to look up Saint Edward. For you Jew folks, or others who don't know how it works, all us Catholic babies have to be named after a saint. Anyway there are apparently two saint Edwards. One was called Edward the Confessor and the other was Edward the Martyr. The confessor was a nice guy who gave money to poor people and and eventually in his 40's was asked to marry a woman called the virtuous Edith by his subjects. He agreed but only if he could live with her as if she was his sister because he had made a vow of chastity.

The second was Edward the martyr. He was sitting on his horse drinking mead when an assassin hired by his step mother stabbed him. He was a defender of the faith and so a light shone on him when he died and he became a saint. Obviously this is the Edward I was named after. I'll take mead over chastity any day, though I do seem to have problems with evil step mothers.

Of course I am not a saint. The person that keeps pointing this out to me is correct. This person also thinks I didn't do all my observations last year and that is a total lie.

I do feel that their are rational ways to deal with bad teachers. There are certainly ways to deal with them when they are just starting. The hardest thing I have ever done is to fire someone. Particularly when I liked them. But some people should not teach, or they should not teach at that point in their lives. I have also been guilty of pushing bad teachers out to a different place instead of working to get them to stop teaching. This is not something I am necessarily proud of.

To get back to management. The problem with the formal observation is that it quickly becomes formalistic. It does not serve anyone. When I was a young Catholic boy I would go to confession. I was really too little to have sinned, but you had to say something to the priest. So you made up some little kid sins. I disobeyed my mother 3 times, I said bad words. Stuff like that. This happens in observations all the time. Not just mine, because I have read other observations and I have sat in on post-ops with the principal. You have to say something, so you do. You sit there and act like the expert. This is absurd. This is education. Some of us know more than others, but almost none of us can be called experts. The principal thinks she is an expert, the AP security thinks he is an expert, but the truth is that they are just two voices among many. We need to stop dealing with experienced teacher as if we are "the" expert. We need to start having a dialog.

Management

2007-05-29T08:34:00.002-05:00

The new DoE seems to be begging for new ways to run schools. It is possible that there are many sincere people involved in this. The DoE has created a school to teach people how to manage schools. I then hear from people who work for these new principals and they are often very disappointed with the level of management. I wonder why.

My masters program emphasized management. We read books about how the best organizations were managed. It was an interesting program. It did not emphasize managing schools. It emphasized managing people. Klein seems to have fallen in love with Jack Welch. Welch talks about getting rid of the bottom 10% of your workers to make things efficient. This would seem to be a sensible approach to management. The problem is that we are dealing with public employees. These employees are more about politics than management. If you look around the rubber room you will see that people here are not the bottom 10% they are the people who the principal has a political agenda against.

There are teachers in my school who are spectacularly bad. AP's are after some of them but most of them are not attacked. If they pass the kids the AP is happy. The AP's grumble but they are not motivated to go after these poor teachers. The system is not designed to do this. Everyone complains about how hard it is to do. But it is really a matter of the will of the higher ups. They need to stop complaining about the contract and learn how to work within it. This is the same as the DA's office complaining about the constitution. If they wanted to eliminate the bottom 10% it would mean that there would be 5000 people in the rubber room, not 600+.

The first year that I was an AP I went to a meeting at the superintendent's. There was a power point presentation. They were sketching out how we were going to increase the math scores. They had a 5 year plan. At that point only 20% of the kids were on or above grade in math. They said that the next year we would increase the number to 23%. This seemed like a good increase and doable. The year after we would go to 25%. This seemed like it would be much harder to do. I was starting to wonder how we were going to pull this off. Then we would go to 35% then 50% then 80%. I thought to myself, these guys are crazy. They did this with a straight face.

The point of the above story is that the way you manage in the DoE is to promise something modest for next year and then something amazing for 5 years later. This makes you look like you are going to achieve great things. The institutional memory of the DoE is so short that you never get caught. Meanwhile everyone sees you as a visionary.

I have added another blog to my list of links. It is called Education Notes Online. It seems to be written by someone who is active in anti-unity UFT politics. My kind of guy.

Stupid in America - Call me John

2007-05-29T08:34:00.001-05:00

I was watching the 20/20 show by John Stossel called Stupid in America. I was watching it on Youtube. If you are reading this in a DoE school you can't watch it because Youtube is blocked. It is also blocked to US troops in Iraq. I was watching it because he apparently mentioned the rubber room. Stossel started off by saying how it was impossible to get into a New York City public school to film, he then spoke about how in Washington DC the schools would only let him see the best classes. This is not a surprise. I remembered when I was in advertising that if we wanted to shoot an ad in a school we always went to the Catholic schools because the city would take so long to give you permission that you could never schedule an ad.

News shows such as 20/20 always have an agenda. The agenda in this particular show seemed to be that competition in education will make education better. That all students should have a dollar amount attached to them and be able to take this money any place they want to. In other words, vouchers. I have certain reservations about vouchers. I do not want to see a school system become segregated. I believe that public education is an important element in democracy. Having said that, I probably work in one of the most segregated school systems in the country.

Toward the end of the show, past the 30 minute mark, Stossel starts talking about the rubber room and what a waste of money it is. He says that the DoE will not let him go into one of the rubber rooms. He then turns around and interviews Joel Klein. Klein tells the story of a teacher accused of sexually inappropriate emails to a students who spends two years in the rubber room and is eventually sent back to his school. Stossel listens intently and shake his head in disbelief at how the UFT has corrupted education. Come on John. You said that Klein wouldn't let you into the rubber room and now you are willing to sit and believe everything he is telling you. Why didn't you ask him why he wouldn't let you into the rubber room. Why didn't you insist that he let you in before you would air his views. I like you John, but this is very sloppy reporting and you know it.

One of Stossel's points was that schools waste a lot of money on unnecessary things. The rubber room is considered a waste of money. John, everyone here agrees with you. If you want to talk to me I'll talk to you. I'll even get a bunch of other people in this room to talk to you provided you disguise us the same way you would disguise a Mafia informer. The DoE is probably more vindictive than the Mafia.

My name is Ed, this is different than Ed. with a period at the end. I seemed to have made this mistake on a previous blog. I was quoting from a blog called Ed. Blog. I think I forgot the period.

My wife accused me of ranting in my last blog. I may have been. I do feel passionately that the DoE has created a system that makes it difficult to be a good manager. The observation rules are just the beginning of this. There are a million things that the DoE asks us to do that leave us little time or energy to do what we should be doing. I believe that the really good managers in the system ignore many of these requirements.

What's wrong with Ed

2007-05-29T08:32:00.002-05:00

Ed does stupid things that get him in trouble. But I am not sure that these really are as stupid as some people make them out to be. One of the major issues in my incompetence hearing revolves around my inability to do observations. Last year this was not true, because last year the observations were designed to evaluate my staff. Last year we were supposed to observe tenured teachers one time and un-tenured three times. My understanding is that the principal is proud that this "nightmare" is over and that they are back to five observations for un-tenured and two for tenured.

I believe that we have created a system that does a bad job of allowing us to manage people. Observations are part of this system. The first time I was observed I was an over 40 year old new teacher. My science chair came in to watch me and afterward I sat down with him. I thought that we were sitting down to discuss what I had taught and that I would speak about what I was trying to do and that he would help me achieve my ends. Not true. What I got was a standard observation spouting some NYC teacher wisdom. It was filled with words such as "aim" and "do now" that only exist in NYC. It did not take into account my contribution to the teaching process. It was designed to tell me how to teach as if there was one way to teach. It was not a dialog. This was over 16 years ago and I remember thinking that it was a joke. I was really disappointed. I never read another observation he gave me. If it said satisfactory, and it always did, I signed it.

Last year one of my science teachers who I have known for years admitted she never read my observations. At first I felt hurt, then I thought to myself that this really spoke to the fact that the format of these observations are sort of useless. What I say to these teachers, or how we plan together is very important. The observations are usually useless.

There is an exception to observations being useless. If you have a really bad teacher you can use observations to build the type of evidence you need to get rid of this teacher. This is the only reason for observations. Instead of observations we should be in young teacher's classes trying to help them figure out how to teach, not telling them. With older teachers the observation is even more useless. If I go into my English teacher's class room on the second week of school I have technically fulfilled my obligation. What I should be doing is talking to him about what he wants to do this year and then doing a year end review. The point of the year end review should not be to punish someone or tell them what they are doing wrong, but to formally state your opinion of what is happening. There is a value to doing this formally because it forces you to be more honest about your opinion than you might be in a less formal setting.

At my pre-trial with my lawyer she pointed out that this type of attitude should probably not be stated out loud. I am sure that she was correct in this because it would hurt me. I can be accused of breaking an absurd regulation and I must defend myself by accepting this regulation, showing why I didn't break it in some cases and being contrite about breaking it when I did. At no point was I to talk about the absurdity of the approach to management.

New York City really is a strange place to teach. The students are the same as other places but the bureaucracy has developed a view of education that almost no one else in the US has. The weird thing is that they seem to think that everyone else does things this way. I think we should create a fund to send a bureaucrat to another city to see how other people teach.

The innocence project

2007-05-29T08:32:00.001-05:00

Someone sent me a great article. It is at http://tinyurl.com/3dg9ns. The article is in ed news. My blog has seemed to have sparked a nice debate about who is responsible for what happens to us.

I was a chapter chair and have always considered myself a good union person. I went to CSA demonstrations and was the CSA rep at my school. (I wonder if there is a CSA rep now?) I do think however that there is a complicity between the UFT and the DoE when it comes to the rubber rooms. The DoE thinks it is saving the schools and the UFT thinks it is saving jobs. Both sides are doing this on the backs of the over 600 teachers and administrators stuck in this system. At no point does either side think about these people as human beings.

The question that must be constantly asked is, who benefits from the existence of the rubber rooms? I have tried to figure this out and have not been very successful. I would like to throw out some possibilities.

It could be just a bureaucracy run amok. Someone was given a mandate to deal with teachers accused of things and developed a system that is a joke, but because no one really cares or because the top people in this system have power, the system just continues. It does provide employment for a lot of people.

It is possible that Joel Klein likes having these big numbers. This allows him to go to parents and tell them that if it was easier to fire bad teachers than the DoE would not be forced to waste all of this money and the money would be available for their kids.

It is possible that the UFT likes being able to go to its members and show them how they protect them from the evils of the administrators. The UFT can say how they fought for these teachers for years and kept them from being fired. The fail to mention that the years happened because they didn't work very hard to help the teachers in the rubber room solve their problems. Even the UFT benefits from the assumption that we are all guilty. If we are all guilty and so few of us get convicted it must be because of the genius of the UFT representatives and lawyers. If we are seen as really innocent than this argument doesn't work.

The ACLU has been running a major campaign to restore Habeus Corpus rights. If the UFT were to insist that teachers have the same types or rights the rubber room would not be the kind of place it is. The number of people sitting in this room who have never been charged is only surpassed by the people in Guantanamo. Unfortunately we are treated the same way. The concept that seems to have permeated America is that guilty people need to be kept away from the general population. The fact that no one can prover they are guilty is of no concern to the majority of Americans. We seemed to be fine with the appearance of guilt being enough.

If you did not read the comment to my last blog regarding Kathy Blythe you should. The comment brings out the best and worse of the system. Kathy got caught in a dispute with what seemed like a lunatic parent. Lunatic parents want to blame everyone. Good principals learn how to deal with them without capitulating or without antagonizing them. Good principals keep their teachers from taking all of the heat from these people. That is what supporting teachers means. It does not mean sacrificing teachers to preserve your job and avoid conflict. This is what the principal institute should be teaching new principals.

The second guy spent 7 1/2 years out of 10 years in the rubber rooms. This is the bad side. This teacher probably did not deserve to be teaching. He seemed to have had multiple supervisors who thought this and pushed him from school to school. The problem here is that the supervisors have not learned how to create a good case for removing these teachers. Anyone who has supervised knows about these teachers. They can be removed if you work hard enough and if you have the support of the principal and superintendent. At first other teachers are upset when you go after these guys. When they see that attacking incompetent teachers is not a threat to them then they get over their fear. Other teachers know who is bad and know that their life is better when there are fewer bad teachers.

We are all Innocent part 2

2007-05-29T08:29:00.000-05:00

I have been speaking to a lot of people in the room lately about why they are here. There are the older people who seem to be here primarily because their principal didn't like them and figured out how to get them. My school had the famous case of the teacher who allegedly told a student that if they needed to go to the bathroom they should pee in the wastebasket. This women was no more guilty then any other teacher. She was guilty of being old and annoying, so the principal waited and then pounced. I don't know every ones story but a lot of them sound like this.

The young people are here because they do young things. They get caught with dope, they drive with suspended licenses or they get caught with someone who has drugs. These are the kids that fall into the category I call, "there but for the grace of god go I". If any teacher thinks that they have never done anything illegal then they have probably forgotten.

Then there are the sex cases. Mostly these are young male teachers who are accused of having inappropriate contact with female students. They are almost never accused by the student they are supposed to have been with. They are accused by other students or by a parent.

We work in a world where kids, particularly girls, get into fights for almost no reason. Barbara Walters came to my school to do a special on girls and violence. I think one of the biggest surprises she had was how much violence seemed to be random. It was not based on long standing disputes. Violence often happened just because one girl decided that they didn't like another girl's sneakers or t-shirt.

Given what happens between teenage girls in our schools it is no surprise that young male teachers get accused of all kinds of things. If they are good looking they become objects of all kinds of rumors. Students who have it in for the teacher or another student make accusations. This is not a surprise. What is, is the reaction of the DoE. One teacher told me that the investigator on his case told him that it did not seem to be a big deal, and that he would be exonerated in a few weeks. This was 4 months ago. Why does it take so long. Is it a lack of investigators or is it a lack of DoE lawyers. From the DoE's point of view it is easier to throw someone into the rubber room and forget about them. Rather than figure out a rational way to deal with these cases the DoE and the UFT has let them fester and has let good teachers get destroyed.

I think that one of the ways to make the rubber room really a place to hold people who have seriously done something wrong is to somehow penalize people for making false accusations, particularly Principals and AP's. It is not good that these people can make accusations with almost no downside. The UFT needs to go after students who make false accusations and Principals who do a poor job of investigating these accusations. The DoE takes the position that as long as you are being paid than you can not complain. The truth is that we have moved to a situation where you are guilty until proven innocent. This is not right.

One of my comments about my blog about the Las Vegas culinary unions disputed my facts. My facts came from Hal Rothman's book. The strike at the Frontier hotel was certainly the countries longest strike. It happened because the individuals who controlled the Frontier chose what they felt was a "moral" position against the union. This is what happens when people do that instead of making business decisions. The UFT and the DoE keep making these types of decisions.

If one of the goals of the DoE and the UFT was to create an environment in which teachers liked what they did then the whole system would change. You do not create teachers who like what they do by making less work, you do it by making it more rewarding. You do it by respecting good teachers. I was trying to make the point that the UFT has to think about more than just salary and job protections. The UFT needs to think in terms of job satisfaction. I would like to point out that it was an ex chancellor who unilateral got rid of teachers punching a time clock. Somehow it never dawned on the UFT that punching a time clock was a bad idea.

End Game 2

2007-05-29T08:27:00.001-05:00

I am reading a book entitled the Neon Metropolis. It is about the development of Las Vegas. Las Vegas is now the most unionized city in America. This is amazing considering that Nevada is a right to work state. How the culinary union became so large is an interesting story. What the union was able to do is create a situation in which unionized hotels made more money than non-union hotels. In Las Vegas money is how you keep score.

The culinary union created a blue collar work force that had a possibility to enter the middle class and create a better life for their kids. This is what the coal miners union and the auto workers did in the last century. This is what America has been missing for the past few years. The fact that the culinary union fought for high wages is not surprising. This is what unions do. The fact that these workers made hotels profitable is what is really amazing.

The culinary union realized early on that it needed to act as a hiring hall. It had a vested interest in providing high quality workers and screening out psychotics and drug addicts. It also convinced hotels that happy workers who were treated well were better employees. The union worked with and sometimes fought with hotels over working conditions. The end result is that hotels who think about bottom lines loved the union. Hotels such as the Venetian who took a "moral stand" lost money without union workers.

Today a bunch of people were late because there seemed to be a problem on the subway. The secretary who acts as our jailer came into the room and announced that if we were late because of a train delay that we needed to call 311 and get a letter from the transit authority. We then needed to attach the letter to our time sheets. This is so we can be excused from the essential work we do here.

What is wrong with the DoE. It treats employees like children and it wonders why they act like children. What is wrong with the UFT. It treats all teachers as paychecks and then it wonders why they act so self centered. If we looked at Las Vegas and started feeling as if we were all in this together we might find that the whole system worked better.

Most teachers I speak to want to live a comfortable middle class existence. Beyond that they are crying out for good working conditions. They want to be able to do their job well. They want to be respected. If they can't find a working copier, a working elevator, a bathroom with toilet paper they feel bad. Teachers who feel bad are not good teachers the same way that hotel employees who feel bad are not nice to the clients. When I first became a science AP I told everyone all I had to do was support teachers and I could raise scores 10% and I did.