Bored-o-Ed: Require All Students to Have Physical Education Daily

If I were Queen of the New York City schools--or Chancellor, even, my first initiative would be to require all students to have Physical Education daily. If I could change one thing alone, it would be this.  Currently, most New York City Public School students have Physical Education twice a week.

The very first thing I learned as a classroom teacher was that like puppies, young and adolescent children need to run--crap over everything, chew up your favorite shews and wreck the joint. An investment (money, time and inspiring, sensitive personnel) in training Physical Education teachers to truly educate would pay off immediately. At present, even at the best schools in New York, truly excellent Physical Education instruction is rare.

What if, in struggling schools in neighborhoods compromised by poverty and crime, first period were basketball. What if the instructors were gifted athletes, retired perhaps, who raise sports to something of an art form instead of time-clock punching City workers who preside over immense, dull, humiliating "gym class?"

What if we taught Yoga, Tae Kwan Do, Fencing and Hip Hop in school? What if students had Physical Education electives during the school day. What if we had Physical Education electives taught by inspiring teachers especially designed to accommodate psychologically and otherwise, students who are battling overweight? What if we were to deem it proper to nestle substantive nutrition curricula into Physical Education classes?

Like the Greeks did. (Only less naked.)

Every September for a dozen years, I have sat in one of my children's September Curriculum Conferences and listened while some smart parent raised her hand and asked: "Why are the children getting gym only twice a week?" The answer was always a variation on the notion that more "instructional time" for academic subjects was needed.

This logic is entirely dunderheaded. Cutting educational time to make way for engaging physical learning would increase the value of instructional time. Cut ten minutes off of all academic subjects to make time for genuine physical education, and you'll see academic performance improve almost immediately across the proverbial board.

I was 22 and looked 14 in September of 1981, the year I became a teacher. I was hired a week before school by a desperate principal/nun to teach all subjects--Math, Science, Social Studies, Reading, Language Arts and Religion--in the self-contained sixth grade class in a Title I (read: poor) school in the Bronx. I had no certification, no classroom teaching experience, no education coursework, and no advanced degrees. I would have no teacher's aid, no student teacher, and no prep periods. As for recompense; I'd work for a salary low enough to render me eligible for food stamps--at least under a 1981 Congress. With 42 students in latency and entering puberty I had little choice but to find ways to contend with restless students.

That first year, I played Jackson Five "tapes" allowed those aforementioned 42 sixth graders dance in the rows between units. When on rare occasions, I resisted the urge to make time for this, I tended to regret the decision. Perhaps because I grew up with three brothers, I came to classroom teaching recognizing that boys, more often than girls, need to run around. More Physical Education would go a long way toward putting an end to the pathologizing of boys, and reduce the number of children who require medication for attentional disorders.

The bottom line is fat bored kids make lousy learners.

In a September, 18, 2013 online piece in The Atlantic, "The Case Against High School Sports" Amanda Ripley reports on the evolution (or devolution?) of high school sports. She points out that, historically, it was immigrants and poor children who first joined sports teams; this as a way of keeping them out of trouble. Small business-sponsored neighborhood club teams, religious youth organizations and PAL (Police Athletic Leagues) took (mostly male) children of many backgrounds off the streets and taught them teamwork, provided them workouts and provided reinforcement in the areas of fine and gross motor development; sequential thinking, problem solving and focus.

One would not want to replicate these programs exactly; there were abuses, and still are--pervert priests, drunken coaches, sicko football fan fathers living through their sons--but a 14 year old fat kid sitting in an empty apartment playing virtual "Grand Theft Auto" is abusive too.

I toured middle schools about eight years ago when my twins were completing fifth grade, I wound up not sending my children to the one school that impressed me in teh district where we live. Why did this one school impress? The principal knew the name of every child in the school. Not just that: when we dropped in on a dance class in which an actual dancer was teaching, we touring parents and prospective students found an actual dancer teaching, an actual dancer who had managed to get adolescent boys, a few of them a chubby, a few of them what we in Brooklyn describe as "street," to (and happily so) dance.

I didn't need to see anything else. #DoingItRight.

9/23/13 Michele Somerville, NYC

NYC's Charter School Smackdown: Who Are The Real Panderers?

On May 17th, the 59th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Ed, the New York Daily News reported this question Harlem Success Academy founder and charter schools advocate Eva Moskowitz put to Public Advocate and mayoral hopeful Bill de Blasio:

We're glad Bill de Blasio recognizes the great work of our schools, teachers and students, so it begs the question why he repeatedly vows to stop us from serving these very children if he becomes mayor... New York's schoolchildren need a leader, not a panderer.

The truth is that de Blasio praised the students in those schools not the schools themselves. But Moskowitz's question is a good one, the answer to which begins with the recognizing that it can be difficult to know exactly who the villains and heroes are in the charter school dispute, because the grey areas are muddy and the ground keeps shifting. One navigates a steep and labyrinthine learning curve when aiming to fathom the problems besetting our school system. Issues and opinions change with each academic year. On one hand, we have the desire for all children to receive the education they deserve; on the other, the hope and expectation that the New York City public school system might function effectively, lawfully and justly.

An educator and a NYC DOE parent, I have tended to occupy a center position on the matter of charter schools. I have praised the work of Eva Moskowitz in the past. She appears to have a and a gift for pedagogy and a formidable intellect (This, despite her erroneous use of "begging the question" in the afore-cited soundbite.) Unfortunately these qualities are all to rare in todays public school teaching force. The I learn about what I have come to see as the the great white hope of "privatization," the more alarmed I become.

Still, it is easy to see how people who actually care about children might be seduced by the great white hope of privatization, but as this solution takes hold, it increases the quotient discrimination in an already profoundly corrupt and institutionally racist NYC DOE (New York City Department of Education). It also sends some pernicious political messages, "un-American" ones: separate but equal education ought sometimes be tolerated; unions are to be scorned and disregarded.

I am no UFT apologist. Certainly there is no doubt that the UFT (United Federation of Teachers) is responsible for waste incompetence in the schools. But selling New York City schools to the highest bidders is at least as disgraceful as any malfeasance that might be attributed to the UFT.

Certainly charter schools have rescued many children, many of them poor students, many of them Latino and black. But to embrace and implement a solution that savages the schools New York City's poorest students attend is a to throw down with a type of "ends justifies the means" logic for improving our schools.

The charter school movement is often characterized as racist. Although I'm not convinced it is, I do find creepy Moskowitz's penchant for trotting out a cadre of black and Latino parents the NY1 (local television news) truck rolls up. This public relations version of "Some of my best friends are..." offends and misleads. That some parents of black and Latino children rendered desperate by a racist, corrupt, ineffectual and dumbed-down school system find themselves persuaded to proffer laudatory pro-charter school soundbites does not mean that the Eva Moskowitz solution is a just one. Charter school supporters are quick to remind us that its colocation neighbors receive matching funding for any improvement exceeding $5,000.00, but benefactors and new school beneficiaries find ways to circumvent this.

In 2010 a small, so-called "selective" high school--not a charter school (but worse, in my estimation) was planned in secrecy and abruptly "colocated" ((DOEspeak for thrust into a building in which other schools operate) in John Jay Complex, a gargantuan public school in Brooklyn in which three struggling schools with chiefly black, Latino and English as a Second Language students were enrolled. ere ope. The new school's founder and principal was appointed and engaged in hiring a staff even before the Panel for Educational Policy even convened to vote on whether to "colocate" the school. The school opened with the help of private funding which is available to newly "articulated" schools alone. Students staff and parents of students attending the schools already operating in John Jay were blindsided, but they were promised many improvements to the school building, and that the four school communities would share extra-curricular programs. The "selective" school opened amid much criticism. The principal admitted enough students of color to ensure that the nickname "Apartheid High" would not stick. (The school is 36% white, 19% Asian, 26% Latino and 22% black.)

Two years later, the shiny new school soon has an extensive after-school program, makes use of the building's pool, and boasts pristine classrooms with state of the art equipment.The English class in which I worked, in that same building, in one of the floundering schools, had an excellent and engaging, teacher, a great assistant principal, but not enough paperback copies of Othello for the 50% of students, almost all black, who showed up for first period Senior English. Not that it mattered; few could of them could read anywhere near well to get through the play.

I loved the students I came to know. They were, by the way, quite intelligent. However I was demoralized each time I departed the building, going from the mayhem of the "black kids'" school (as neighborhood children still call it) to the educational oasis that was the "great white hope" school established to serve Brownstone Brooklyn students unable to find places in New York's "elite" public high schools. To say it was like "night and day" is as much an understatement as it is a cliché. Every time I passed the new school's lounge well-appointed with carpets and non-municipal-looking furnishings, I was appalled to find it empty. Every teacher I saw through a classroom door window was white. "Separate but Equal" in living color. Or not. I have no problem with shiny white teachers; I was one in my youth. Yet, I wonder what kind of message that sends, and puzzle over the shiny white school's apparent preference for white teachers.

One of the things I do very much admire about Eva Moskowitz is that unlike so many DOE NYC fiefs who "found" these "separate but equal" programs, Eva Moskowitz is not black student-averse. I give Moskowitz "props" for making her bones in Harlem. She knows that there is nothing wrong with the minds of students like those I with whom I worked a bit, last spring. They can't get through Othello because they are victims of race-based cumulative educational malpractice. Moskowitz knows how dangerous social promotion is, how the problem ramifies, thrusting unprepared students through a system like pork through a grinder. Eva Moskowitz knows what is wrong with a system more dedicated to graduating students fraudulently than to educating them. In my own brief incarnation as a public school English teacher I saw up close how the sausage got made. I was disgusted by this on a daily basis, the the biggest problem facing the New York public schools: institutional racism.

The second biggest problem--which relates quite directly to Moskowitz's appeal--is that the pedagogical brain trust of the DOE is woefully deficient. Principals, teachers, superintendents and those writing curricula and assessments are neither as intelligent nor as well-educated as teachers ought to be. The public school system has immense difficulty retaining intellectually gifted educators. Thus, emerges an Eva Moskowitz as a breath of fresh air with her degree from University of Pennsylvania and doctorate in History.

Moskowitz has some great ideas about how to educate children--but privatization as a solution to the crisis in our public schools is not one of them.

The schools Moskowitz runs require parents to be heavily involved in their children's schools. Certainly this is optimal. I took immense pleasure in being involved in my childrens' schools. However, I learned while working as a teacher, and later, through my work as an activist working with children at risk and struggling students, that not all children have the luxury of involved parents. The charter school movement discriminates against them, despite that these are the children who most need excellent schools. Homeless families, families without computer access, very young parents, and non-English speaking parents are unlikely to even know about the existence of lotteries for the schools Eva Markowitz opens. Furthermore, children who are poor, challenged by learning disability, and already failing to make progress often wind up jettisoned from these dream charter "success" schools. Where do they go? Back to the very schools the charter school movement is currently engaged in savaging.

A civilized public education system takes to heart its obligation to educate all of its children, especially those who are struggling. Every time a charter school opens, some weak school in its district--or even in its own building--takes a hit. The best of the poor The cost of a "separate but equal" solution will be dear down the line, a boost for the corrections industry (which is an industry) but not for much else.

Not long ago, New York City once had excellent public schools in which poor people received quality education. Something began to happen, fifty or sixty years ago, to the public school workforce, something from which the system never fully recovered. The advent of Feminism changed things. Forty years ago an intelligent woman interested in medicine was more likely to become a nurse than a physician. Fifty years ago a woman with a knack for reading, writing, philosophy, research and advocacy became a teacher instead of a lawyer. The public school system bled out, in a sense, and teaching wound up dumbed down. The drying up of the supply of intellectually gifted women coupled with the (relatively speaking--for a professional) low pay teachers recive gave way to a troubling dependence on teacher education programs lacking in rigor and an intellect deficit among teachers and administrators. Teacher education programs, even ones operating out of reputable universities, pour a plethora of mediocre and terrible teachers into the void feminism created every year.

This, at least in part, resulted in a public school system which is a massive swirling maelstrom of bloat, ineptitude and waste. "It's no wonder there are "50,000 students on waiting lists for charter schools," as Eva Moskowitz says. She's right; it is no wonder. And it's no wonder privatization sometimes looks like an answer. But citizens, the mayor, educators and those who run schools need to remain on the high road. Bill de Blasio is right.

We need a better think tank to dream up a better system--not more charter schools creating the need for more charter schools.

Moskowitz implies that Bill de Blasio is pandering in desire to support the UFT and in his disinclination to support charter schools, but it's actually the privatization-mad informers who are the panderers, slavering after the privatizers.

5/18/13 Michele Somerville, Bklyn

Separate But Nowhere near Equal in Brooklyn

This feature article, which appeared in the December 3, 2010 edition of a Brooklyn newspaper the Spirit Gazette brought tears to my eyes: 

There are many negatives to this so-called “proposal” but some positives. When M2 does arrive, the building will get the repairs it needs. However, the majority of the money will be given to M2 because they are a new school and need that money to start up. This also includes an extra $120,000. That extra money will be used for their purposes only. This also goes deeper than money. Think about the feedback that this school will be getting from this neighborhood. They are obviously going to prefer this “elite high school” (as said in the Daily News) than the schools that have been here for many years with a “checkered reputation”.

In this piece, Cheidy Perez a reporter for The Spirit Gazette, the school newspaper for the Secondary School for Research, which is housed in the John Jay building in the heart of Park Slope, Brooklyn, comments on the DOE plan (Department of Education) to establish a new school. Millennium 2, within the building in which she attends classes. Although just recently announced to the community of John Jay schools, this clandestine plan has been in the making for some time. 

Read the article in its entirety. Out of the mouths of babes. In this case, out of the mouth of one very thoughtful and intelligent student who offers a rather chilling portrait of the NYC DOE at its most venal. 

I wrote a piece last week using the Cathie Black appointment as a means for discussing my concerns about the way the education “system” crushes innovation and rewards mediocrity in students and teachers. Some misinterpreted —or I was not sufficiently clear. Good teachers are never the problem. Education hacks are the problem. They go backwards when they should go forward. They crush good teachers. In my opinion, there is no one smarter than a really good teacher. The only problem with good teachers is that Education “system” likes to eat them alive. It punishes the best and rewards the political panderers. Further complicating this educational malpractice is that many of the finest teachers are drawn to struggling schools — because that’s where the need is greatest. That’s where the teaching is most challenging and exciting. Too often teachers in struggling schools are not given time and support adequate to enable them to bring about change. 

While touring Brooklyn middle schools a few years ago, I met a principal who made a great impression on me. He knew the name of every child in his school. During the school open houses he emphasized his choice to accept children who receive low scores on the statewide tests along with those who excel on them. He knew those tests only told part of the story of a child’s potential to learn. As a former teacher, I marveled over the fact that this principal was turning away students with 3’s in order to accept students with 1’s. Such educators are the cream of the crop. 

It is relatively easy to identify a group of well-prepared students and to open a program for them — especially when middle-class parents inclined to get involved in fundraising are clamoring for one. Inheriting the children of this demographic is sure to make the most mediocre administrator shine. Because there are not enough choices for New York City public school students, opening an “elite” program is low-hanging fruit for any ambitious Tweed hack looking to move out of the classroom and scratch his or her way up the salary/pension ladder.

But the good teachers working slowly and steadily in schools like the Secondary School for Journalism, the Secondary School for Law and the Secondary School of Social Research are the true gems of the system, the diamonds in the rough, if you will. They are the muscle, the a heart — and most important — the conscience of the DOE. They deserve more. 

My first response to the Spirit Gazette article by Cheidy Perez was to tear up. My second response was desire: a fantasy of being back in a classroom where I might enjoy the privilege of working with students like her. 

Many “Brownstone Brooklyn” parents parents were delighted to hear of the new school, Millennium 2, due to open in Park Slope next fall. I was one of them — until I heard the plan. 

A most unctuous plan it is, as unethical as it is thoughtless. The DOE (Department of Education) plans to roll out the red carpet at the school popularly know as “Thug High,” for a crop of white (mostly) well-prepared, white local middle-class students from “Brownstone Brooklyn.” This plan was hatched under cloak and dagger conditions without input from parents and teachers of children who currently attend the three schools in the John Jay building. 

I don’t know where Cheidy Perez lives, but it is unlikely she lives near the school. Park Slope is a safe, clean, prosperous and stylish neighborhood; children from Park Slope do not attend schools in the John Jay building. “Brownstone Brooklyn” families tend not to send their children to schools that require students to remove their belts and pass through metal detectors each morning en route to first period homeroom. It is easy to understand why “Brownstone Brooklyn” parents don’t want their children to be subject to metal detectors each morning. No parent wants this for his or her children. 

I’ve visited a couple of schools with metal detectors within the past two years. Once you’ve seen an 85-pound 5-feet tall baby-faced peanut of a ninth-grader pass through one, you gain an all too clear sense of all that’s wrong with uniform guards and scanners at school entrances. While phalanxes of uniform guards and scanners may, in some cases, protect some students from physical harm, police presence does psychological and spiritual harm. It demoralizes students and communicates negative expectations. My father, a NYPD lieutenant with 20 years “on the job,” often advised my brother and me that the presence of police was a sign that one should leave the scene. In schools where scanners and guards greet students first thing in the morning this message is conveyed: “You and your school are dangerous.” 

Most of the students enrolled in schools residing in John Jay building live in neighborhoods like Bedford Stuyvesant and Red Hook which rank among the poorest and most dangerous in New York City. Their schools should offer sanctuary. Perhaps this is parents of students in the three John Jay Schools were so hurt as they were blindsided a month ago when word leaked out that a new “selective” school would open in John Jay building in the fall of 2011. 

Millennium 2, which (according to Perez) the New York Daily News characterized as “elite,” will admit only students who had achieved a score of 3 or higher (the range being 1 through 4) on the (NY) state-wide Math and English Language Arts tests. Even very intelligent students from schools in poor neighborhoods and troubled school districts often fare poorly on these tests as a consequence of the cumulative effects of years of educational inequality. 

Perez speculates in her article that the DOE may rethink the aforementioned metal detectors. This is interesting because it suggests a the possibly dramatic reduction in the need for metal detectors has recently taken place. It suggests that John Jay is safer now. If the building is now safe enough to warrant the removal of scanners, can we not infer that significant progress in the school is under way? If the schools currently housed in John Jay are improving, perhaps it might be more just and proper to redirect they ought to redirect the the budget currently reserved for earmarked for Millennium 2 to the schools already in the building.  

There are many gifted educators who have been walking through metal detectors, working through the mire of bad public relations, persevering in buildings in dire need of repairs, trying to educate and empower a student population that has been failed by the education system and walks through a neighborhood whose local residents and business owners regard them with scorn, now these teachers must they contend with fallout of an unjust bad decision to push a shiny new elite (more white) school into their building. 

The way Millennium 2 has been handled by DOE brass is emblematic of so much that’s wrong. It reminds us of the support and recognition the best of these teachers and administrators currently working in John Jay have had to manage without — for years. Were these schools to inherit the Millennium II budget today, there would be no need for Millennium 2 by the time fall of 2012 came around. 

And if a selective school must be opened in John Jay, why not put one of John Jay building’s own in charge? What an act of good faith that would be! This would go a long way to easing the tensions which have surrounded this development thus far. Would those currently attending the Schools of Journalism, Social Research or Law feel as betrayed as they do now if one of their own were creating this new, more rigorous school? 

I’m not sure Park Slope will leap so quickly (as the DOE hopes it will) to send their children to Millennium II for many reasons; at the top of the list is that Millennium II threatens to turn John Jay into a segregated school building. Perez notes that discussion about the elimination of metal detectors has included the possibility of creating a separate entrance, at John Jay, for Millennium 2 students. The school may be called Millennium 2, maybe it ought to operate in the third millennium! More than half a century has passed since Brown v. Board of Education. Separate entrances for blacks and whites? That’s certainly an idea whose time has come. And gone. Let it stay gone. 

In an astonishing display of grace under pressure, some educators at the Secondary Schools for Journalism, Social Research and Law are attempting to put a hopeful analysis on this shift. These teachers deserve extra credit. The children currently attending school in John Jay have been informed that there may be an upside to the advent of Millennium 2 (an ironic appellation given its determination to hearken back to a 50’s view of things educational). 

Because the “elite” students will require building improvements, the putatively less elite students may reap the benefits of a paint job and long-needed building repairs. This begs this question: Why wasn’t the dignity of students like Cheidy Perez sufficient to compel the DOE to make these improvements in the John Jay building before the impetus of an influx of white students presented itself? 

Rahsan Williams, an ELA teacher at the Secondary School for Research spoke to the Spirit Gazette, on the record, about this: 

“the building is in such bad shape and is need of repairs. This should happen without a 4th school coming in. Students here deserve to have those improvements and it is a slap in the face to our current black and brown population if it takes a new school to get these improvements.”

If I were in charge, I’d have Rashawn Williams on my short list for principal of a the school. Integrity matters, because whatever else John Jay may be, it is not some educational black hole for black kids. It is the educational home of many. Each school in John Jay is someone’s future Alma Mater — and that does not mean nothing.

Though Millennium 2 is a done deal (and I do mean “deal”) it may not be too late to arrive at a plan which offers more respect for the community already making its educational home in the building. 

The DOE still has a chance to render this arrangement less volatile, safer and more just. 
It can do the following would help: 

• Design a plan to recruit general education students from neighborhoods that have traditionally sent students to the John Jay building. 
• Assign a principal with secondary school experience, who has demonstrated that he or she can turn a struggling school around; or someone already fighting the fight in that building — someone who has the depth, decency and intelligence to shepherd the new John Jay community through the inevitable (and possibly dangerous) tensions which are likely to ensue once Millennium 2 occupies the John Jay Building next fall.
• Listen well to the parents, teachers and children who were insulted and degraded by the cloak and dagger approach those who designed this plan adopted as they hatched it. 
• Abandon the dunder-headed public relations strategy of announcing the creation of an “elite” school. For one thing, “3’s” on those state-wide tests are not all that “elite.” Many of the strongest students zoned for Millennium II won’t even put a school residing in “Thug HIgh,” on their lists.
• Drop the plan to house an ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder) Nest program in John Jay. An ASD program at Millennium 2 would, under the current plan would be an abomination. “Brownstone Brooklyn” parents won’t send their “elite” children to “Thug high” to study in n Collaborative Team Teaching classes with autistic children, (More on the ADD piece to come.) 
This is a local education story, but what Perez describes in her Spirit Gazette article is emblematic of what goes wrong on a larger scale all too routinely. The bigotry piece must not be ignored. Cheidy Perez sums it up perfectly, thus: 

Instead of sugarcoating it, let’s call it what it is: An attack on under-privileged students. 

What she said. 
And If Cathie Black is really smart, she will get that Citizen Perez on the phone and offer the kid a job. 
Read the article by Perez in its entirety. 

12/15/10 Michele Somerville, NYC

The New NYC Schools Chancellor Learned All He Needs to Know (to Fix the Schools) in Kindergarten

I was not quick to jump on the anti-Cathie Black bandwagon when she was first appointed as chancellor of schools in New York City, but I believed a shakeup was needed and that a DOE (Department of Education) insider was the worst possible candidate, so for a brief desperate spell, I did jump on. Shortly thereafter, I jumped off. There's a new chancellor of NYC (New York City) schools now; Dennis Walcott, is both an insider and an outsider, but he has two mighty credentials; he is a black man who was educated in New York City schools, and he worked, for two years as a kindergarten teacher.

I never worked as a kindergarten teacher, but I taught first grade for a year, so I know how a year of teaching very young children can serve as a boot-camp, or crash course in classroom management. A good teacher of early readers and pre-readers rapidly learns to make frequent use of art, music, movement and humor in the classroom.  Children at the pre-reading and early reading stages provide abundant information about how people learn, and a smart kindergarten teacher quickly learns that imagination plays a critical role in education.

Unfortunately imagination is currently in short supply in the NYC DOE.

It should come as no surprise that a system so inclined to devalue imagination would rely upon the closing and "truncating" of black and brown schools as its most effective means of solving the problem of "failing" schools (failing being a transitive verb in this, the direct object of which would be "students").  It should come as no surprise that a system that devalues imagination along with scholarship should allow educational malpractice to run amok in poor school zones as it strains to hang on to the children of affluent families by increasing the number of  "screened," "selective," and "elite" schools. It is no accident that less experienced educators wind up working in poorer schools, nor that poor children are most often victims of social promotion. It should surprise no one that even before the looming threat of budget cuts and "last in, last out," top university graduates were not much interested in becoming New York City public school teachers.

Formulaic assessment and instruction predominate in NYC DOE classrooms, and pedagogic ingenuity has taken a back seat to methodology. Unfortunately teaching methodologies are only as effective as the educator who employs them, and over-reliance upon prescribed protocols and rubrics creates the illusion of teaching expertise where it is wanting and while too often masking incompetence.  A teacher's bag of tricks should indeed be filled with educational tools -- but like a good musician, a good teacher knows when to "throw away the sheets."

When I worked as a classroom teacher, I never worked without a conventional lesson plan, but the best lessons were those whose direction I could never have predicted beforehand.  Paint by numbers teaching crushes ingenuity.  When teacher ingenuity is crushed, students suffer, because what supplants it is the cookie-cutter, test-mad steamroller of mediocrity.  So dependent on this reductive way of looking at all things educational have select educrats "manning" the system become that they now yearn to extend this approach to include the grading of teachers.  I'd be all for the grading teachers if I thought there were educational experts in the DOE capable of fashioning a proper metric -- but the Bartleby Tweed hacks lack the sophistication to pull this off.

The most dangerous aspect of the devaluation of imagination is the increase in prejudice that accompanies it.  Prejudice in all its forms is a failure of imagination.  The DOE's lack of vision (imagination) keeps its endemic racism -- and tendency to discriminate on other bases - in place.  The worst problem facing NYC schools is discrimination.  So pervasive is discrimination (on both bases of race and disability) that teachers, administrators and students often appear inured to it.

Black and brown students are widely and flagrantly discriminated against in our (NYC) public school system.  "Gifted and Talented" programs and tracking systems throughout the city fail to recruit and enroll children of color.  Teachers who have the talent for converting "street smarts" (in struggling students) into "school smarts" receive inadequate support for this exciting, difficult and invaluable work.  I've been working as a poet for more than 30 years with a focus on how sound works in poems. I've studied a little Latin, Greek and Hebrew in order to better learn more about the musical aspect of poetry.  I've had the good fortune to study with some "Class A" poets, but the truth is I've learned as much about language and song from 17 year-old (sometimes "failing" or "struggling") students from "the projects" -- as from any award-winning writer.  I've seen up close how the DOE prematurely consigns many very bright students to 'non-graduation.' This is a disgrace.

Walcott's experience in a kindergarten class has no doubt taught him that most students are excited about learning when they first come to school.  He knows that all too often it's their school system that flunks.

Discrimination in the DOE, is not limited to that based on race either.  Children with special needs are discriminated against on a daily basis as they are placed in inappropriate programs, denied services to which they are entitled by law, and warehoused in programs that don't work.  Like parents of children of color and parents of children with special needs often lack a voice when it comes to advocating for their children.  Caring for children with special needs is often so demanding that doing battle with the DOE is often, even for the most conscientious parents, impossible. Challenging the Kafkaesque CSE (Committee of Special Education) is thoroughly demoralizing. Parents of children with learning and developmental disabilities often accept inappropriate placements for their children out of sheer desperation.

Unscrupulous superintendents and principals bank on this desperation. The "least restrictive environment" policy of placing children with disability in mainstream and inclusion settings sometimes helps the discrimination along. While enlightened in theory, "least restrictive environment" can be disastrous for students who are ill-suited for it.  It is certainly cheaper to put a child with learning or developmental disability into a large class with a floating second teacher; however, this educational course is inappropriate for those who require a low teacher-student ratio.  Many DOE special education students are highly intelligent, but most require small classes, one-on-one support and help from reading specialists.

The DOE would save hundreds of thousands of dollars each year were it to achieve a better grade in Special Educuation, but designing and implementing programs for students with special needs is as much an art as it is a science.  Several New York City private schools have figured out how to do this without spending very much more per child than does the NYC DOE.   Their secret?  Imaginative instruction carried out by highly intelligent pedagogues.   Artful teaching is helpful at all levels of instruction, but never so much as with students with disabilities and general education students at risk.

Dennis Walcott knows this. Whether he will be able to make changes based on what he knows remains to be seen. Whatever Walcott's vision, it will be circumscribed by the mayor's educational vision or lack thereof. But if the mayor permits Dennis Walcott to put to good use lessons he learned as both a kindergarten teacher and a black student in New York City schools, Walcott could wind up deserving the grade of "A" in the class Cathie Black flunked.



Read Why 8000 NYC Middle School Students Don't Have High School Placements Yet

Why 8000 8th Grade Students Don't Have High School Placements Yet

I wasn’t surprised to learn on Friday morning (the day after students received their letters) that the NYC DOE (New York City Department of Education) had failed to match more than 8,000 New York City students with appropriate schools. And it is not students but the DOE who failed in this. 

As a former NYC teacher and parent of three adolescent students (two of whom attend NYC DOE schools) who has presided over a NYC DOE high school application process in recent years, I can hardly find the widespread disappointment of 8000 children who are currently without high school placements surprising.

In the NYC DOE, the students are too often afterthoughts. The deck is stacked in the favor of the educrats.

The matching process for eighth graders seeking places in NYC high schools is cloaked in secrecy. We are told that children are placed in schools by means of algorithms and computers at the mysterious OSE (Office of Student Enrollment). 

“Top schools” have first dibs on all applicants because not only do the strongest students choose “top schools,” but these “top schools” also recommend that students hoping for seats in them list them first (and second). Therefore, applicants with realistic chances of being admitted to these “top schools” — as well as those gambling on long shot acceptances — all put the same handful of schools at the top of their lists. How fair is it, really, that easily more than 10,000 students might be encouraged to squander their best shots at a few schools that can only accept 300 or 400? And isn’t there something sinister about asking 13-year-old children to gamble in this way? 

The order of preferences on these lists should be blind. This would make it more difficult for the OSE computers and more difficult for Brahmin DOE educrats to take the “articulation” money and run — but it would be fairer to students.

Specialized high schools have separate admissions processes. Stuyvestant (considered by some to be the best school in NYC) for example, uses the lone criterion of one’s score on the SHSAT (Specialized High School Admissions Test) to select students. An unfortunate consequence of this is that principals and guidance departments seeking the cachet of Stuy placements now direct families who can afford them to rigorous test preparation programs. Obviously this ups the ante, promotes inequality, and widens the educational divide between the “haves” and the “have-nots.” Overemphasis on standardized test performance is bad for learning; in addition, schools that admit students on the basis of testing alone tend to lack racial, cultural and economic diversity. 

One can be sure that whenever the children of white lawyers and teachers are scrambling, planning appeals and revisiting options that looked unseemly and untenable a week earlier, that things aren’t looking good for eighth-graders living in poor sections of the city.

The high school admission process is emblematic of all that is wrong with the DOE; it is fruit of the poison tree which, by design, is subtlely racist, embraces a pedagogically lazy and naive view of the value of standardized tests, rewards mediocrity, is organized to suit the needs of computers and educational toadies, and offers those who already have the most — the best chance to win the most.

The opening of new schools and closing of so-called “low-achieving” schools help ambitious administrators and affluent parents to keep the upper hand. New “selective” schools and charters tend to target stronger students. Administrators who lack the ingenuity to improve it are too often rewarded when they figure out how to “game” the system as they “make their bones” by pandering to vocal, white, well-educated parents. 

Although charter schools have a better track record when it comes to reaching out to black and brown students, too often new schools are placed in buildings and zones without regard for the people already working in those facilities and areas. Every time a new, whiter brighter school opens, some neighboring program in which predominantly black and brown students are enrolled is indirectly compromised. 

More balance is needed because the entire “system” becomes more discriminatory when new schools are conceived unscrupulously. Not only do whiter brighter schools siphon off DOE funding, but they also siphon off educational expertise. It is far easier to run a school with an active PTA and well-prepared students than it is to turn a “hell-hole” full of “sweat-hogs” around; yet some of the smartest young people in New York City are “sweat-hogs” in DOE “hell-holes!” 

Many a child the system has cheated would become an “elite” students if only her or she were given a clear shot at a proper education. 

The current method of matching students with high schools freshly violates those from forsaken (generally black and brown) schools that were closed this past winter following pro forma DOE PEP votes. Having long been denied the kind of support that students in new schools will receive this fall, students in “struggling” schools will now find themselves last in line when it comes to finding seats in decent high schools. 

Does coming from a closing school put a candidate for admission at a disadvantage? In an inherently racism system, I should think it does.

One of the reason that nearly 8,000 eighth-graders don’t know where they will attend school next year is that the DOE needs them scrambling — in order that newly “articulated” whiter, brighter schools be fully enrolled. The DOE has a vested interest in making sure these whiter, brighter schools get off the ground, and the OSE (Office of Student Enrollment) has a critical role in facilitating this.

Newly articulated “selective” schools will not get the “cream” of the crop this year (It takes new schools several years to become genuinely “selective.”) but thanks to the OSE game of musical chairs — wherein there are nearly 8,000 more players than there are schools — the whiter, brighter schools will enjoy the opportunity to skim off the top of the pool of nearly 8,000 students, many of whom wouldn’t have given a new school a second thought a week ago. 

If every one of those nearly 8,000 had been placed in appropriate schools, the whiter, brighter schools would have no enrollment. 

The corruption can and should be addressed. All new schools should be required either to admit students by lottery, or to reserve a significant percentage of seats for students residing in low-income areas. A conflict of interest exists when administrators who design schools run them. Monitoring the articulation of screened schools in demands particular vigilance — in order to ensure that new “screened” schools do not become fiefdoms and (relatively speaking) sinecures for unprincipled principals.

Students, parents and educators all know that the movers and shakers of the system are not those sucking up to district brass at Tweed conference tables and racking up credits at Teachers College. The movers and shakers say “no” to corruption, racism and cronyism. The movers and shakers are the teacher who taught my child to write a college essay when she was in his fifth grade class and the first-year high school Social Studies teacher whose daily quiz on the “A” Section of the New York Times she had to pass each morning. True educators, not a cabal of tenure whores, should supervise the “articulation” of schools. True educators set smart students ablaze while bringing “struggling” learners up to speed. They are the brains of the NYC DOE operation. 

We don’t need more “selective” or “elite” schools. We need good, safe, solid, diverse high schools for every young person in the system. Elite teachers make all their students “elite.” They know how to dig in at “low achieving” schools. They bring up everybody’s game.

April 4, 2011 

Michele Somerville, NYC

When "Failing" Schools Close and Whiter, Brighter Schools Open

Two weeks ago, the NYC DOE PEP (New York City Department of Education Panel for Educational Policy) voted to open Millennium Brooklyn (aka “Apartheid High”) a “selective” school in a building (located in my middle-class neighborhood) wherein three so-called “failing” schools currently operate. This week the same panel meets to vote to allow a new charter elementary school (Upper West Success Academy) to open in an affluent middle class neighborhood (the Upper West Side, NYC). 

By the end of this week, the PEP will have voted to closed more than 20 “failing” schools. 

A glance at the list of schools targeted tells the story:

Jamaica, Bedford Stuyvesant, South Bronx... if you think you see a pattern, it’s because you see a pattern. The schools closed this week are attended by primarily black and Latino students and most are located in some of the poorest sections of NYC. 

The matter of school closings is complex and polarizing. There is evidence to suggest that the only solution to the problem of “failing” (DOE speak for “black and Latino”) schools is to open new, small schools. 

There is a(n understandable) disinclination on all sides to pour (good) money (after bad) into “failing” schools. Money without expertise doesn’t work any more than expertise without money does. 

Large “failing” schools can be turned around, but not when the DOE itself is gunning for them. 

“Failing” students need superior intervention in the form of gifted teachers, safe buildings, expert guidance and good after-school programs. “Failing” students do not need small schools nearly so much as they need small classes. 

The complexion of school closings would be entirely different if the DOE were offering displaced students spots in the more selective, newly opened schools, but they’re not — because the founding of most of these whiter, brighter schools is driven by institutional racism. These newly “articulated” schools could (and should) be required to enroll students from “failing” schools. A portion of their “start-up” money could be set aside for bringing the students newly opened schools evict and marginalize up to grade level. 

But educating “failing” students costs more — not because “failing” students are less intelligent, but because most have been abandoned by a corrupt system. It is one thing to teach a properly promoted 8th grade student what he or she needs to learn in grade 8, and quite another to introduce 8th grade curricula to a student who needs to be re-taught (prerequisite) skills and content he or she ought to have mastered in grades 4 through 7. 

“Social” promotion defrauds students, and these victims of educational malpractice are entitled to reparations in the form of highly expert remediation, but doing the right thing in this is too expensive in the short term. (Not doing it is very costly down the line.) It’s easier and cheaper for the educrats in charge to warehouse and dismiss “failing students.” 

What happens to “failing” students when whiter, brighter schools open?

Every time an elite or selective school opens, black and Latino schools in the same district “take one for the team.” 

Because the process of forming new schools is not transparent (it should be), searches for the best principals are not conducted and plans for new schools are hatched in secrecy. This is fundamentally corrupt and perpetuates cronyism, mediocrity and racism, as a result of which school communities are blindsided, and new schools are opened not by those who best know how to educate — but by principals who best know how to game the system. 

Once upon time, one had to be a master teacher in order to become a principal. Today, a teacher with scant experience can become a principal in a year or two thanks to the quickie principal academies. Some “Class A” principals come out of these programs, but they are exceptions. 

With very little teaching experience and no substantive scholarship, a “founding” principal can identify a population with “elite” demographics, open a school for them, nail down building tenure within three years, and become a success story. There’s a shooting-fish-in-a-barrel aspect to catering to the NYC bourgeoisie; their children attend fine pre-schools, can read by age 6, are well-nourished, and live in homes — not homeless shelters. New school funding bankrolls computers, paint jobs and separate entrances (for safety). Affluent parents donate weekends at their beach houses for the fund-raising auctions and buy test prep and piano lessons to ensure that students remain “elite.” Mediocrity and playing politics pay off and no one gets hurt. 

No one except the students a racist educational system leaves behind. 

NYC public schools neither open nor close in a vacuum. There’s always a “ripple” or “see-saw” effect. For years, the NYC DOE has placed new schools in buildings alongside “failing” ones in the hope that their presence would boost — or (gradual) boot out — proximate “failing” schools. This strategy is not entirely pernicious, but “separate but equal” educational solutions must never be seen as just.

Many gifted educators are working today in schools that were or will be closed this week. How many new well-funded, high-quality schools for struggling students will open for their students this fall? Most truly gifted educators lack the stomach for the kind of politicking wrangling a new school entails. 

I’m not sure, but Eva Moskowitz, who plans to open Upper West Success Academy might be the exception. Part-politician and part-rainmaker, Moskowitz draws a big salary for overseeing four charter schools. Her critics feel she is too closely aligned with the mayor and the push toward privatizing schools. Some disagree on this: her initiatives do not seem to me to bear the taint of customary DOE racism. I think Moskowitz is actually interested in educating students the system has cheated, and that she may be the rare educator who can win the game of “found a school” without playing the race card. 

I’m on the fence about Success Academy — but I have a soft spot for Moskowitz. I have a hunch she’s a good teacher. I like that she’s smart. (She graduated from the elite Stuyvesant High in NYC and University of Pennsylvania; she earned a doctorate at Johns Hopkins and has worked as a professor.) Most of all, I like that she’s not just another doltish Tweed chimp.