It was business as usual on Friday as David Steiner apparently has agreed to provide Bloomberg with the waiver he needs to appoint Cathleen Black as the new chancellor of education for New York City.
Cathleen Black is as embarrassingly ignorant of education as sure-to-be presidential candidate Sarah Palin is of national and geopolitical issues. Steiner, though should know better.
Unfortunately, although steeped in philosophy and educational theory, he shares Bloomberg's corporate ideology, and apparently is ultimately a political animal. He thinks John Dewey was wrong-headed and that he recanted his life's work. Instead of blaming exploding rates of inequality, concentrated poverty, and unemployment for the plight of inner-city youth, he blames progressive educators--progressive both in the Deweyian sense of "child-centered" and in the sense of "left-liberal".
Educators should be clear that this decision is not a compromise. Creating a new #2 position of chief academic officer was a ploy to make Steiner's decision seem more palatable in the face of significant public opposition. Shael Polakow-Suransky is already a top official at the city's department of education, and would be available to Ms. Black anyway. Giving him a new title will make little difference; it will only make the Tweed Hall administration even more top heavy. Good superintendents, and even high school principals have long worked as teams, meeting regularly with colleagues and pooling their knowledge. But this is not the kind of corporate management that Bloomberg has brought into public governance, nor unfortunately is it Cathleen Black's management style.
What was heartening was the immediate outcry and organized opposition to both the candidate and the non-process. In spite of buying off opponents, including the teachers union and nonprofits, Bloomberg's political machine is showing some cracks. For one brief moment, when his advisory panel, packed with members linked to Bloomberg, wavered in their support, I thought David Steiner might do something heroic and democratic. But it is now clear that behind the scenes (and the public's back) Steiner and the real players (apparently including Arne Duncan) were scrambling to shore up the damage caused by Bloomberg's secretive and impulsive appointment.
Merryl Tisch, chancellor of the state Board of Regents, aware that the new #2 position was really political spectacle, asserted, "The issue for us is, 'can we create credibility around this position?' "
Clearly the "us" she is referring to is not the citizens or teachers of New York City. Sol Stern, a conservative commentator with The Manhatten Institute perhaps put it best when he said that Mr. Polakow-Suransky will be treated as a "gofer" by the mayor and Ms. Black.
Mr. Polokow-Suransky is an educator and has a graduate degree from Bank Street College of Education, one of the best and most progressive Educational Leadership programs in the city. One can only speculate why Mr. Polakow-Suransky would go along with what appears to be a political charade. He is also a graduate of what the Wall Street Journal called the "prestigious" Broad Superintendents Academy. I don't want to engage in guilt by association, since it is possible that Mr. Polokow-Suransky's Bank Street education inoculated him against the Broad Academy Kool Aid. But, it is worth taking a look at the ideological tenets of the Broad Superintendents Academy and its impact on the current cadre of corporate thinking superintendents around the country.
Eli Broad, a Los Angeles-based venture philanthropist, has for two decades bankrolled the corporate education of current superintendents and the retooling of business and military leaders to be superintendents. A recent press release for the Broad Superintendents Academy proclaims that Broad graduates filled 43 percent of all external superintendent openings in large urban American school districts last year. Not only is Broad selling a corporate management model, he is recruiting future urban superintendents from the ranks of the military. According to the same press release:
This year's class also includes high-ranking Army and Air Force leaders, including a major general who oversaw 45,000 combat soldiers in Iraq and led officers of 26 nations to coordinate efforts in Afghanistan, a brigadier general who led the Army to create and deploy a 4,000 man organization into combat anywhere in the world within 96 hours, and a colonel who created nationally recognized business practices to better utilize the skills and talents of 60,000 Army officers (Broad Center Press Release, 2010, paragraph 6)
If a corporate model seems top-down and undemocratic, imagine leaders used to a chain of command organization! I am not against cross-sector borrowing of evidence-based and appropriately applied ideas. In my last post I elaborated on why worn-out ideas (mostly ideologies) from the corporate closet have had a devastating effect on public education. But do you suppose there has been a nuanced discussion of the cross-sector borrowing from the military to education?
Speaking of cross-sector borrowing, a group of teachers from the Green Party will be applying for Ms. Black's position at Hearst magazines. They will bring books about the publishing industry and ask them to have patience while they "get up to speed." What do think their odds of getting hired are? Apparently cross-sector borrowing is a one-way street.
Eli Broad: Management Experience Is Paramount
Alan Singer: Fight for NYC Schools Is Just Beginning
That last bit about teachers applying for Black's old job is very funny.
To replace it we need its opposite. Change from the base, not conceived by experts, not uniform, not imposed. This engagement with the people to generate local, democratic change is called Renewal.
Central to renewal is the involvement of service users - children, learners, students. Those who have been acted upon must become agents in shaping their own education so that they may acquire the skills sets of autonomy. Currently, they are imposed upon and required only to comply.
The unions and the corporates, the radicals and the conservatives, the philosophers and the pragmatic managers argue only about which faction should control the lives of the children. None should. All are Late Modern manipulators who tell you that empowerment is a reward for enablement - and enablement requires compliance.
Now it is time to place empowerment before enablement. How horrific that must seem! Empowering children! Democratizing the schools! Whatever next! Freeing slaves and giving votes to women!
Oh, we did that.
Gary, I'm not a corp-reform supporter, but it isn't difficult to see why they are gaining ground so completely. That is depressing enough. But it is not hard to see why they don't put much stock in the uni-form stance because that stance is steeped in defeatism at its core.
Certainly, those ills you (and many others) cite are real and have a tremendous impact on students and their families, and I am in no way discounting or marginalizing that impact. But to capitulate to these ills out of the gate only compounds the problem under the guise of care and concern. The effects of such are devastating to the very ones who need the help the most.
When the macro message being delivered day in day out is some version of "until these ills are remedied, we teachers cannot accomplish significant progress," then it doesn't take long for the students to pick up the msg as well: we're screwed and there's no use because even our teachers don't believe it's possible, so why should we?
Education is still the greatest key to escaping the clutches of the ills you cite, but to say that until these ills are rectified, progress will not be made is akin to saying: you can have the key as soon as you get out of the cell.
And by the way I am a product of NYC public school system and I have never met an educator that told me to quit because I was poor or black. Both black and white teachers encouraged my pursuit of excellence and that was when it was really rough in the inner city of Brooklyn.
What I object to is the attitude of “until we end poverty . . .” because it is defeatist in nature because it predicates results upon an impossibility, at least for the short-term.
After the boooshes, we don't need any more c0rporatists in govt, they've already stolen the farm.
Because there is no reform without teacher buyin. And forcing Black on them through a waiver is a blatant corporate takeover by an educational incompetent.
You only need look at Alan Bersin and San Diego Unified. Fail. The teachers accepted Cohn and progress was made. When Terry Grier was forced on them, they rebelled and there were setbacks. Grier's management style was similar to Bersin's. Cohn was an educator who worked with teachers. Grier bloated the top even more than Bersin and reinstuted top down management.
Education is not the assembly line. The "workers" are as qualified if not more so than management. That means respect. That means being part of the decisionmaking. That means you can BS decisions. If you don't know what you're doing, everyone knows it. And no teachers with a masters degree and decades of experience is going to have their lessons scripted for them by a corporate bean counter.
It is why teachers have rebelled against standardized testing, No Child Left Behind and now Race to the Top. They know this is not how children learn, it is not research based education. They rebel against being forced to do what they know is harmful to children and to education.
Black is the new Palin.
And he sure better not blame the teachers. Who I hope will be screaming TOLD YOU SO often and in front of TV cameras.