Tag Archives: Bloomberg’s Corporate School Agenda

The DOE’s Moral Bankruptcy

Posted on April 15, 2012 | 12 comments

As a potential witness in an ongoing 3020a hearing for a colleague, it has been made very clear to me that I am not to talk about specifics of the case. The same goes for my colleague. One gets the sense that the Department of Education treats this as an actual trial.

We have already seen in the case of Chaz that the DOE has no problem with revealing incomplete information to the media about cases that have already been resolved. Despite the fact that independent arbitrators have already closed the cases of 16 teachers, the Daily News was able to run an article about these teachers along with Dennis Walcott’s sentiments that they should be fired.

The Daily News was only able to run this story because the DOE gave them biased and incomplete information.

It does not stop there. Susan Edelman of the New York Post ran a story this morning featuring teachers who got in trouble for things they have said on Facebook. The first teacher that was mentioned stuck out:

Meanwhile, Facebook is an occupational hazard. Patricia Dawson, an English teacher at the HS of Economics and Finance in Manhattan, is fighting DOE termination on misconduct charges for jesting 15 months ago on her Facebook page, “I’ll bring a gun to school” to get into security-controlled elevators. Several students joined in the banter — one offering to bring a gun to help her.

“No one took it seriously,” an insider said.

Colleagues say Dawson should not lose her career over a wisecrack, but her words, which the DOE deems harmful, are carved in cyberspace.

Patricia Dawson is “fighting termination”. Does this mean that the DOE is still doing an investigation or conducting a hearing? Does this mean that the hearing is over and the teacher is waiting on the arbitrator’s decision? Whatever it is, judging from this passage, the case is not yet closed.

I am sure that, just like my colleague, Patricia Dawson was warned against talking about the case. So how did the NY Post get information about a case that is not yet resolved?

There could only be one answer: the DOE gave them the information.

Why is it that a teacher cannot talk about their case, but the DOE can?

It seems to me that the DOE is looking to put pressure on the investigators and/or arbitrator to make the “right” decision. And what is the “right” decision?

That’s right, termination.

If they are able to cause enough of a public uproar, the arbitrators will be pressured to make the decision that the DOE wants. All the while, the teacher is not allowed to speak out or give their side of the story.

This is just one of the many ways that the 3020a process is skewed against the teacher.

It is fitting that the article ends with a mention of Christine Rubino. As we have seen, Rubino was able to get her termination overturned in New York State Supreme Court, a decision that the DOE is currently appealing.

During Rubino’s hearing, the DOE made up charges as they went along. They added new charges not originally included as they went into her past and tried to find things they could twist out of context.

So while the DOE tried to scare teachers with a sense of gravitas about these termination hearings, the fact is that they are nothing more than kangaroo courts. While most teachers do not get fired, the vast majority are found guilty. Exoneration is rarely ever an option for a teacher brought up on the most frivolous of charges.

How much tax money is being spent on these hearings? How much money is being wasted on lawyering up so the DOE can fire someone for something they said on Facebook? In an age of supposed budget cuts where art and music are disappearing and schools are being closed, this waste of tax dollars should be a crime.

Our tax dollars, the hard-earned money of working people, are being spent to fire other working people. And if the DOE can fire these working people for such trivial things, it sets a nationwide precedent for employers across the country to do the same.

This is the twisted game Bloomberg’s Department of Education plays. To say it is unethical is an understatement. To say that it is underhanded falls short of the mark. This is pure evil done by people with no scruples and no sympathy for those who have to actually work for a living.

The 3020a process is in need of a major overhaul. Add it to the list of things for which our union should be fighting, but is not.

12 Comments

Posted in An Embattled Career, education reform, School

Tagged , , , , , , ,

“Democracy and Education” at John Dewey High School

Posted on March 9, 2012 | 2 comments

It seems like another “Fight Back Friday” at John Dewey High School. Norm at Ed Notes is reporting that the students have walked out of class in protest of Mayor Bloomberg’s “turnaround” plan for their school. This plan will entail firing half the staff and no doubt gutting its many enrichment programs.

Looking at the 33 turnaround schools across the city, one sees right away that many of them are the types of large high schools that Bloomberg has a penchant for shutting down. Earlier this year, I visited one of these turnaround (or is it “transformation”?) schools at Franklin D. Roosevelt in Brooklyn. It has a large, beautiful campus peppered with grassy sitting areas. Its wide hallways are festooned with trophies won in contests like the Lincoln-Douglas debates. The championship flags in the gymnasium indicate a long tradition of athletic achievement. The feel of FDR reminded me of my beloved Alma mater of Brooklyn Tech.

These are schools from a bygone era when people saw education as a civic institution and the school building as the heart and soul of the community. What can you say about the values of a mayor who sees fit to hollow out these schools?

As far as John Dewey High School goes, Bloomberg has been setting it up for failure for years. The New York Times reported back in 2008:

“…. With only three of the five mini-schools at Lafayette now open, department officials say, enrollment in the Lafayette building has declined to 1,064, from 1,320 last year. New admissions from the Lafayette area to Dewey, especially of ninth graders, have risen by one-third over the same period, but overall enrollment has declined since 2004, bringing the school to about 118 percent of capacity, they say. (The total number of Lafayette-zoned students in Dewey, though, has remained stable.)

Faculty members, students and administrators at Dewey say that the students coming from Lafayette are academically deficient, although Education Department statistics show that the current crop of ninth graders performed essentially similarly to previous cohorts on the citywide reading test. Still, the perception at Dewey is that Lafayette students did not choose Dewey for its quality, but landed there by default because they did not qualify for any of the Lafayette building’s mini-schools. With the overcrowding, Dewey students and staff members say, in many periods of the day there are several hundred students with no assigned room, often roaming the halls. A round of budget cuts this year sharply reduced staffing of the “resource centers.”

In other words, overcrowd and underfund John Dewey for the sake of maintaining the image and reputation of Bloomberg’s disastrous small school model.

The students and staff of John Dewey High School know Bloomberg’s game. They are doing what John Dewey himself called for 100 years ago in Democracy and Education: schooling through engaging in the world around them. They are showing us what needs to be done when democracy is under attack.

You cannot be against public education and for democracy. Bloomberg, through his mayoral controlling, school closing, charter schooling policies has proven that democracy to him is a dirty word.

On the eve of tomorrow’s State of the Union conference, the students are giving all of us hope in the fight against the corporate hijacking of our democracy.

2 Comments

Posted in An Embattled Career, education reform, Politics, School, teaching

Tagged , , , , , , ,