Mama and Papa Eyre were always very fond of the Staples commercial from back in the '90s, a screenshot of which is posted at left. It depicted a father joyously back-to-school shopping while two miserable-looking children trudged behind him, scored to Andy Williams' "It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year." And Miss Eyre can certainly hear the parents of her young charges counting the seconds until Miss Eyre and her colleagues have to put up with them endeavor to educate and inspire them.

Like, dude, I used to be all, like, let's hold the teachers accountable? And everyone, like, was mean to me just because I never actually passed the tests I said they all needed to pass or get fired? But like now, dude, I'm, like, giving up all my principles? That's right, dude, I take no responsibility for any of the stuff I wrote before, and I'm getting a fresh start while I, like, study education and stuff.

So, like, I don't think anyone will be mad at me anymore now. This is kewl, dude, because now everyone will forget about how I demanded they be fired. And dude, the best is they will forget that, based on the stuff I supported, that I should've been fired too, dude. Because now I don't support that stuff, so I'm all, like, I shouldn't be fired.

Now that doesn't mean I don't have standards. After all, dude, as soon as I get out of this program, I'll have to find a gig where I fire other people. So, like, even though I've publicly renounced all the stuff I've ever said, like, I think the reform folks will, like, read my New York Post piece, the one I complained about because they said pretty much what I wrote, and give me a gig.

But here's the thing. While I'm waiting, I still wanna, like, write for Gotham Schools. I figure, like, maybe if I say I don't believe the stuff I believe the commenters won't, like, be so mean to me. I mean, like, dude, why do they have to take it so personally just because I, like, say they should be fired for, like, doing the same stuff I did? All they have to do is, like, forget all the stuff I said, because I didn't mean it, or at least I'm, like, not meaning it now.

Now later, dude, when I get my high-paying admin gig, that's when I can, like, fire everyone, like Michelle Rhee does. But meanwhile, I'm hoping the readers at Gotham Schools believe I've changed and give me a break. One of the kewl things about Gotham is the folks who run it believe anything I say, and publish whatever no matter how inaccurate or questionable it might be.

Thank goodness, dude, they run with folks like me instead of real, highly experienced teachers. With folks like that, people might get a real idea of what's going on out there. Then, where would folks like me fit in?

Mike Winerip's column today gives us a pretty forceful rebuttal to Steven Brill's latest adventure in teacher-bashing. Specifically, he finds a pretty bald-faced falsehood. Did Brill even bother to check this stuff before publication? Hasn't he got an editor?

He notes that charters are criticized for having fewer children with learning challenges, but “none of the actual data supports this.” 

Actually, it does. According to the city, in 2010 P.S. 149 had more children poor enough to receive free lunch (76 percent vs. 67 percent for the charter); more children for whom English was a second language (13 percent vs. 1.5 for the charter); and more children with disabilities (22 percent vs. 16). 

This, in my view, is typical of what gets written about public schools--unchallenged nonsense presented as unvarnished fact. And even Winerip neglects to note the degree of disability. It's far more likely that more disabled students wind up in public schools. I can't imagine Eva Moskowitz picking up alternate assessment kids who will neither receive a traditional diploma nor embellish her statistics.

Brill sees career teachers as lazy slobs sitting around and waiting to collect pensions. That's the favorite stereotype of the "reformers," so why not toss it out yet again. No stats, no support, just tar working Americans as a bunch of lazy bastards. But what's the alternative? Charter school teachers are harried, overworked, and underpaid, and appear unable to sustain what's asked of them for any substantial length of time. This, of course, is the vision of the "reformers---"cheap, replaceable McTeachers for poor kids. (Brill sent his kids to private schools, so that won't be a problem for them.)

It's pathetic that at this point in our history Americans can be manipulated to believe that teachers and other working people are responsible for the excesses that have scuttled our economy. We should be thankful for the few prominent voices, like Winerip, that will speak the truth.

Man it's tough to come home and see the remnants of the four feet of water that's swept through your garage, your laundry room, and likely taken out your washer and dryer. Big question now is whether it's killed our gas furnace.

On the positive side, the flood didn't hit any of our living areas, and we have power everywhere in the house except my room. Seems the water is causing a short up here. Life is an adventure, but some days I'd like to just sit down and have a coffee instead.

Nothing truly catastrophic for us, but there are costs to living by the water. If only it would stop coming to visit without a formal invite. I hope you and yours are warm and safe.

The NYC Educator family has left our little home for higher ground. Actually, we've been subject to mandatory evacuation. We're lucky enough to have family to stay with.

We wish all our readers a safe and easy time as this disaster hits. We prepare for the worst and hope for the best--but we wish all of you the best!

Over the last two days I've been besieged with calls to go in and assist NYC shelters. It's certainly a worthy cause. Still, it's hard to forget that the mayor unilaterally decided not to give teachers the raise all other city employees got. It's hard to forget the constant vilification and insults we've gotten from Tweed over the last few years.

Despite this, a lot of teachers will volunteer. Will Bloomberg acknowledge us? Will he thank us? Will he credit us for being role models? I doubt it. All he cares about is test scores, and in his view, only teachers are responsible for test scores. He can't wait to fire him some teachers because the test scores aren't high enough.

Personally, I live very near the water, and if Stormagedden comes tomorrow my concern will be moving my little family the hell out of here. So I can't help the mayor this weekend. But I have to say this--city teachers serve New York every single day of their lives. It's our job to help kids, not only with tests, but with everything and anything we can. That, in fact, is what we do, and that's why a lot of teachers will help, despite the abuse the city heaps on us. Were conditions different, I'd volunteer as well.

It's very sad how little this mayor appreciates us, not only this weekend, but every day of the year.

It's absurd to suggest that cheating is prevalent in New York City. Here in NY, we take test scores very seriously. In fact, we close schools and dismiss principals based solely on test results. So what possible motivation would anyone in the system have to cheat? We encourage all episodes of cheating to be reported fully, and I've invited anyone who knows of any cheating to contact me personally. What more can people ask?

As for this nonsense about expensive erasure analysis, it's important to note we have limited funds. In these tough times, we need to pick and choose how we spend our money. Since we already know we have little or no cheating, why would we want to spend money testing it?

Now clearly there have been cheating scandals in other areas of the country. But here in NY we have standards in place that should make cheating more difficult. That's good enough for me. If in fact there were cheating going on, why hasn't anyone reported it to me? Sure, there are a few bad apples, but the good ones would pick up their telephones and immediately expose whatever malfeasance that may be occurring.

So I ask you, New York, to simply relax. Don't worry about cheating because it's not happening here. You can trust us here at Tweed. After all, have we ever misled you in the past?

In connection with NYC Educator's post on cheating yesterday, I wanted to share this gem with you in case you haven't caught it. Michelle Rhee, media darling of the education world, seems to have gone awfully quiet with respect to investigations into widespread cheating in the D.C. public schools during her tenure as chancellor. It would seem that the cat, perhaps an adorable furry one as pictured at left, has Ms. Rhee's tongue.

There are allegations that cheating is up in NYC, and the only surprise is that anyone is surprised. When you place a gun to someone's head to encourage a certain sort of behavior, you are likely to elicit that target one way or another. If test scores don't go up, we close your school and the principal can go fish. The teachers become wandering subs, going from classroom to classroom in the hope we can discourage them enough to quit of their own volition.

So really, what can they expect? Maybe the next time we give a test, we allow the students to help one another. Maybe we leave a few highlighted review books around. Or maybe those decorations on the bulletin board just happen to contain the formulas or responses that they need. Maybe the teacher overlooks those little papers being passed around.

Of course, perhaps the teacher or administrator can simplify everything and simply erase the answers that aren't part of the program. This seems to have occurred en masse in DC under brilliant "reformer" Michelle Rhee. And it's human nature. If test scores are everything, if our jobs depend on them, they will be manipulated. In fact, it's not in City Hall's interest to challenge cheating. When our grades go down, theirs do too. Count on this--the cheating we hear about is the tip of the iceberg, and as long as we have this insane emphasis on test scores, it will grow exponentially worse.

What else would I be, facing the revelation that charters serve fewer special needs kids than public schools? I mean, do they have some advantage when their kids actually understand English and have no learning disabilities? This shell game has been going on for years and the remarkable thing is how rarely we read about it in the papers.

And, in fact, it goes beyond the percentage game. Are the ESL students classified that way because they need a little help, or did they just get off a plane last week? If, in fact, they just set foot on American soil, the likelihood of their parents applying for a charter hover around nil.

And let's talk special education. While I'm no expert, I know there are degrees of special education. Some kids simply need resource room. Others, perhaps, require only testing modifications. However, that's not the same as kids who need self-contained classrooms with very small class sizes. How many kids like these are in charter schools? There are even more severe categories of kids who are non-diploma bound, and sure to damage the statistics of those schools that take them. How many of those kids are in charters?

It's not an even playing field, not by a longshot. We've known this for years. Charters, if they were worth a damn, would actively solicit the very most difficult kids and work their magic. The fact that they do the opposite speaks volumes.

It appears not everyone in Queens is supporting Mayor Bloomberg's directive to teach sex. ed. I don't feel strongly about it one way or another, though I can certainly see benefits of well-informed young people. Of course, I'm skeptical that Bloomberg could pull off anything as rudimentary as effective sex. ed., and wondering what his true motivation is. It seems perfectly plausible that this mayor would try to contain long-term school population via birth control, as both Cathie Black and Joel Klein suggested.

Yet by announcing this initiative without consulting with schools or community, the mayor did not inspire a whole lot of buy-in by those who will need to enact the directive. Sex. ed. was what took down Chancellor Joseph Fernandez. He made condoms available for high school students, and pushed a "Rainbow Curriculum" in which one of the first grade books turned out to be Heather Has Two Mommies. You'd think now that Heather's mommies can legally get married we'd be able to get over this sort of thing, but that would assume that the bigotry that took down Fernandez was dead and gone.

At this point I have no idea whether Mayor4Life has incorporated any such things into his program. I doubt it though. Sex ed. is pretty much whatever the mayor says it is. Considering that, if I had a kid bound for a city sex. ed class, I'd very much like to opt out. It wouldn't half surprise me to see a chapter on how union membership detracts from a healthy sex life, or how questioning the PEP could lead to venereal disease.

I continually wonder what the purpose is of the PEP. They simply pass everything. Verizon is bullying its employees into all sorts of givebacks, despite great profits, and PEP approves a huge contract with them anyway. Massive demonstrations to the contrary, PEP simply does whatever Mayor Bloomberg wishes. Then they went and approved a bunch of contracts for outside agencies to run schools.

“These contracts will be approved, but they will not be reviewed before hand,” said Paola de Kock, a member of the Citywide Council on High Schools, who spoke in between Communication Workers of America strikers. ”What you will be approving tonight is unethical for our children.”

Is that what "reform" is all about? Seems to me, yes. Let's improvise. Let's try this. Let's try that. If it doesn't work, we'll blame the teachers, the union, the schools, close them, fire them, whatever. So what's the point of a deliberative body that barely deliberates and simply says yes to everything? Well, maybe it makes people feel better to get up and complain for two minutes. I've done that. But I never really thought I'd persuade a Bloomberg appointee.

So--why waste money on these meetings? Why not simply issue the proposals, signed and approved by Mayor4Life, and notate, "In your face, students, parents, and teachers," at the end? Maybe a little skull and crossbones to show they mean business. But the fact is, appearances notwithstanding, that's pretty much what we're getting right now.

How many teachers could we hire with the money we saved canceling these kangaroo courts?

It used to be that I didn't personally know anyone who was leaving teaching forever, believe it or not. My circle of friends, from the Fellows and from the schools in which I've worked, seemed to be an unusually persistent bunch of people. I'd check with the gang from the Fellows in particular, and we'd tote up all the members of our crew and confirm that each one was still hanging in there. This ritual took on new significance as we reached year 5, the time by which, many studies suggest, 50% of teachers have quit the profession. Each year we would be happy that we made it through without losing anyone.

It's kind of incredible when we read of legislators voting on bills like the Patriot Act, which it's pretty much inconceivable they've read. You'd hope they'd vote no on the basis of not knowing what the hell the bills contain, but no one wants to be unpatriotic.

Closer to home, our Panel for Educational Policy often votes on contracts they haven't seen. There is a distinction here, though. It doesn't much matter whether or not PEP members see contracts, read them, understand them, or agree with them. We've known for years that when 8 of 13 members are chosen by the mayor, they vote the way they're instructed. In fact, early in Bloomberg's term, he simply fired a couple of members who were planning to vote against him.

So the primary difference between the federal and city legislators is that members of Congress, while beholden to whomever, need not necessarily vote a certain way 100% of the time. Bloomberg's appointees, however, have no choice whatsoever, and will lose their jobs if they exercise their consciences. Bloomberg is fine with that--he said something like mayoral control is just that. It's a little more than that, though. What it is, actually, is an end run against democracy. None of that stuff here in Fun City.

What we have is a billionaire mayor doing pretty much whatever the hell he sees fit. Sure, you can get up and talk for two minutes. You can express whatever POV you see fit. After you do that, the majority on the PEP will do whatever Bloomberg tells them to do. You see, democracy is messy. There are all these gray areas. Who knows what's really right or wrong?

But in Mayor Bloomberg's New York, there's none of that. He does what he wants, when he wants, and how he wants to do it. And if there are inconvenient laws saying he can't, say, run for a third term, directly affirmed by voters, he simply writes a few checks, twists a few arms, and gets what he wants anyway. No muss, no fuss.

And all the no-bid contracts a billionaire could salivate over.

For years we've read about how Bill Gates has planted his two cents, and billions more, into education. Largely it's pro-corporate nonsense, anything that disrupts unions, and anything that hurts working people. The small schools experiment didn't work, but Bloomberg had embraced it and so it goes on. The preposterous statements he'd make in public---principals cannot observe teachers due to contracts. The assumptions that all that mattered was test scores, or that DVDs of excellent teachers were just as good as giving every kid an excellent teacher.

I could go on, but essentially Gates has filled America with crap ideas, spending millions to push a propaganda film, and generally infecting all of us up to and including the White House. Arne Duncan seems nothing more than an echo chamber for Gates druthers, spreading the crap ideas farther and wider.  The question, then, becomes this--how do we get rid of all this crap?

It's a tough task. But the NY Times reports that Gates himself is now involved in rethinking and reinventing toilet technology. It's important, for health reasons, to get the rest of the world a system that works. This could help prevent disease and save lives. If the article is to be believed, Mr. Gates seems not to have simply invented a problem and pulled a proposed solution out of his hind quarters. In fact he's eliciting solutions that work.

So my question is this--if Mr. Gates can perform this service for our neighbors, why can't he get to work extracting the crap with which he's infected the American consciousness? It wouldn't be nearly as rough as creating a new technology. A simple admission of failure, of ignorance, of self-appointed expertise amounting to no expertise whatsoever would go a long way.

Thanks to Reality-Based Educator

I'm struck by the recent revelation that E4E shill/ Gotham Schools mouthpiece Ruben Brosbe is leaving for the greener pastures of an educational leadership program. E4E, as you know, is a Gates-sponsored shill organization designed to destroy union from within. Its leaders are not even teachers anymore, but rather employees of the organization who work in schools every now and then.

E4E exists primarily to support demagogues like Bloomberg in their efforts to fire teachers, and particularly to eviscerate the reverse seniority-based dismissals that would occur if ever he decided to fire teachers, with or without reason. In recent bills supported by E4E, Bloomberg's layoffs were not actually layoffs but dismissals, since there was no right of return. And one of the categories to be dismissed would have been teachers who were unable to get tenure. Brosbe's now had two extensions of tenure, and surely would have been cut under this scenario.

Personally, I've seen extensions of tenure for various reasons, some better than others. I don't always agree they're necessary. However, E4E is all about this stuff being valid, all about the quality of teaching, and does not much question the methodology of its corporate sponsors. By their logic, Brosbe does not qualify as an exclusion to the next layoff list.

So my question is this--how hypocritical is it that someone who does not meet the standards for teacher tenure would move toward educational leadership? Ought not our leaders be able to master the most basic and important job in education--teaching? Should someone like Brosbe, unable to meet the standard his group feels is so important, be placed in a position to evaluate others?

I'd love to take a year off and go study at Harvard. Regrettably, like most of my colleagues, I actually have to support myself. This is a problem that affects a lot of us, and our children. It's a problem folks like E4E don't have, what with the corporate sponsors, and who knows who else, that take care of them.

We don't need educational leaders, particularly of Brosbe's ilk, all that much. We need real teachers. And real teachers need real protection from those who'd fire us for our opinions, most of which are eons away from those of Brosbe and company. Those of us who'd advocate for children (and for the working people our children will grow up to be) need support.

Folks like Brosbe and E4E make sure they're in a good place and don't appear to give a damn about anyone else.

Cathie Black has finally made her stamp on NYC schools. Ms. Black famously asked, when presented with evidence of chronic and systematic overcrowding, why we couldn't have just a little more birth control. Now, it appears, Mayor4Life is making her idea a matter of law. We must have sex education classes in city schools, and that's pretty much it.

After all, with class sizes the highest in the state already, years of failure to reduce class sizes, and a history of taking hundreds of millions for class size reduction yet achieving the opposite, it's a tough row to hoe. So Mayor Blooomberg is taking the long-term view, from hoe to eternity if you will, and hoping that eventually this results in fewer students.

And if it does not, well, what's the dif? By the time our kids have kids, Mayor Mike will perhaps have abdicated and there'll be some other poor fool to take the rap. Even better, Mayor Mike could look at the whole situation and say, "It's those darn teachers. We asked them to teach kids not to have sex, and look, kids are having sex anyway." It's a win-win, in Tweedspeak.

So sure, Cathie Black didn't last. She was even more preposterous a figure than most of Mayor Mike's education people, and after a while not even the New York Post could pretend to take her seriously. Still, who would've thunk, all these months later, that her single most offensive piece of advice would be the one that drove the mayor, even all these months later?

Sometimes it's pretty difficult to conceive of life-work balance for teachers. Our jobs, more so than many others, tend to follow us home in unexpected, inconvenient, joyful, and painful ways. One of my goals for the coming year is to continue to improve as a professional educator while also maintaining a better sense of that balance. To that end, I recently read the book pictured at left, The Well-Balanced Teacher by Mike Anderson.

Mayor Michael "Accountability" Bloomberg is very big on insisting people do what they're responsible for, whether or not they're actually responsible for it. This applies, of course, to teachers, who are responsible for absolutely everything. Factors that occur outside of school are meaningless, excuses, and in Mr. Bloomberg's New York, there are no excuses.

However, there's a different standard when it's not quite so easy to point to a teacher and assign blame. For example, in a Bronx school, a clear toxic chemical contamination was not enough to provoke action from the Tweedies. Rather, it was an opportunity to run another test, examine all the mitigating factors, sit down and think about things, and allow the students and staff of Bronx New School to enjoy continued exposure to carcinogenic toxins.

Because putting "Children First" is not actually about protecting children. (Poison? City kids are tough, so let's hope for the best.) "Children First" really means let's screw all the adults, to the adulation of editorial boards all over the city. "Yeah!" cry readers of the NY Post, without the remotest awareness that crappy working conditions for adults now means much the same for their children tomorrow.

The city's depraved indifference to the health of our children (not to mention adults working at such locations) ought to be enough to dispel the preposterous claims of putting children first. This is not, by far, an isolated incident, and Mayor Bloomberg has no problem using toxic waste sites for public schools.

It looks like NYC will be using the highly-important Race to the Top funds to create more managers and educrats, just what the city needs. It's amazing that we jumped through hoops to get this money, agreed to all sorts of "reforms" to get this money, and made such a big deal out of it when it turns out kids are the last to actually benefit from it.

It's not just that they won't benefit from the data collectors or whatever the city is creating, but actually they had no chance of benefiting from it under any circumstance. The money was never to reduce class sizes, to promote innovation, to improve instruction, but rather a chance to utilize a wishing well of Gates Foundation ideas hoisted upon the country. Here's a country that adores innovation in education, and no one cares whether or not it works as long as teachers can be held accountable for whatever ends up happening.

The important thing, apparently is to figure out what to do with the data. My guess is it will need to be examined ever so carefully, and interpreted in favor of Mayor Bloomberg one way or the other. Because the Race is not about how well children do. It is, rather, about making clueless billionaires appear to be taking positive action on education.