Schools chancellor Joel Klein won't be missed - he lost the respect of teachers and parents alike
Juan Gonzalez - News, November 10th 2010
LINK
You could tell the Joel Klein era was ending long before Mayor Bloomberg made it official on Tuesday.
It became clear one cold January night in the cavernous auditorium of Brooklyn Technical High School, during an extraordinary all-night meeting of the Panel for Educational Policy.
The panel, Bloomberg's rubber-stamp replacement for the old Board of Education, was about to approve Klein's proposal to close down 19 low-performing public schools and install several new charter schools in their place.
State law required the panel to go through the motions of a democratic process by holding a public hearing.
More than 1,000 angry parents and teachers filled the auditorium that night. The list of speakers seemed endless. Many gave eloquent defenses of their programs. Several begged for assistance from school district headquarters.
I was dumbstruck to see teachers and even assistant principals take their turns at the microphone and publicly berate their boss, Klein, for refusing to support neighborhood schools.
The chancellor, who spent long stretches of the meeting on his BlackBerry, walked out of the room at one point.
Suddenly, the entire auditorium rose in unison. Everyone began chanting: "Where's Joel Klein? Where's Joel Klein? Where's Joel Klein?"
The longer Klein stayed away, the louder the crowd became. Not until he sheepishly returned and took his seat did things quiet down.
When the panel finally got around to voting, it was near dawn, yet hundreds of people were still in the room.
That's when you realized the disconnect between advocates of Klein's regime and the countless parents and teachers who long ago grew weary of his autocratic and disrespectful style.
Klein's legacy is truly a Tale of Two Cities.
To Manhattan's wealthy elite, the city's longest-serving chancellor was "one of the most important transformational ... education leaders of our time." That's what Bloomberg called him Tuesday.
The chancellor, they say, fought aggressively to reduce the racial achievement gap in education, brought in scores of innovative charter schools and brought corporate management methods to a "dysfunctional" system.
But most New Yorkers simply do not agree that he succeeded.
Only 30% of city residents believe our public schools have improved under Klein and Bloomberg. So says a poll conducted last month by The Wall Street Journal, a paper owned by Klein's new employer, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp.
Many critics now realize all those trumpeted state test score results over the past few years were grossly inflated.
They see how Klein's headlong rush for more charter schools spawned bitter neighbor-versus-neighbor battles for scarce space.
His constant reorganizations of the school bureaucracy only demoralized and confused the system's veteran employees, teachers say. The racial achievement gap has not significantly diminished.
In short, progress was hardly stellar when you consider the unprecedented increases in state funding for public schools in the past decade.
That night of the marathon meeting at Brooklyn Tech, it was apparent Klein had lost the confidence and respect of too many teachers and parents.
A few months later, a Supreme Court justice overturned his decision to close the 19 schools. Then came the revelations of the inflated test scores.
We will soon see if our new chancellor actually listens to parents and teachers once in a while.
jgonzalez@nydailynews.com
Saturday, November 13, 2010
From A Teacher: What Are We Doing? And Why Are We Doing It?
Now that Mayor Mike Bloomberg has appointed another person as "Chancellor" of the NYC public school system who has no credentials for the job, I think the article below is timely even though it was written more than two years ago.
What Are We Doing?
And Why Are We Doing It?
An examination of educational purpose. There is something seriously wrong here and if it is not with WHAT we presume to give our students in their various subjects, it must be with the HOW we do so.
by L. Swilley, July 1, 2008
LINK
Part I. What Are We Doing?
A regular columnist in our local newspaper asked this question of teachers: "When in real life, will I ever use [the subjects we take in school]?" The columnist continues, "Most teachers just glare at the asker ... praying for an answer from above... because they don't know."
The columnist then answers the question herself: "Never...you won't use this stuff unless... you plan to be a physicist, chemist, mathematician or biologist." She acknowledges the need for literacy and for enough Math "to be able to balance one's checkbook." She then concludes, "The best reason I can think of for an education? So that you understand good jokes."
Before we condemn this - as we would like to call it - Yahoo Manifesto, we ought to ask ourselves what we are indeed doing, requiring the curricula we do of our students, especially since, as this columnist correctly reminds us, most of the facts we require the students to know disappear rapidly from the mind after graduation.
If literacy and mathematical rudiments are sufficient for the conduct of our general lives, why DO we torment students with years of courses in History, Literature, the Sciences and the Arts, if they are never or so seldom going to use what they have learned? The answer that comes to the mind of the teacher faced with this question is often a desperate, nervous, "Well, you never know when you will need this material in the profession or work you pursue after you graduate!" This answers invites the response - or should invite it - that it makes little sense to take up so much time and energy on material that only vaguely if at all will be used in a profession or in work, especially since, in the later pursuit of either, specialized courses pertinent to those occupations will be provided elsewhere.
If literacy and mathematical rudiments are sufficient for the conduct of our general lives, why DO we torment students with years of courses in History, Literature, the Sciences and the Arts, if they are never or so seldom going to use what they have learned?
If our real, central and only purpose in public education is to assure that our citizens can read, comprehend, write - and calculate sufficiently to measure correctly and "balance their checkbooks" - does it not make infinitely more sense to give our attention entirely to those areas, then insist that the professions, trades and businesses provide, themselves, any further training necessary to those who take them up?
Imagine the results! High schools would virtually disappear, middle schools and elementary schools would merge; Science departments would vanish, along with History, Literature, Art, Music departments! Teachers formerly in any subjects other than "the three R's" would be redistributed to much smaller groups of students (for more effective teaching and learning), and they would teach the students to read, to comprehend what they read, to write legibly and cogently - perhaps even speak well! - and give them such mathematical learning as would allow them to keep up with their finances and measure their kitchen cabinets and clothes closets!
And imagine the savings of public money! In fact, what need would we have to retain teachers and principals at all? (and what need of graded classes?) Prudent use of computers, monitored by clerks trained to follow specific, step-by-step instructions in a manual will provide, at tremendous savings, all that is required to achieve this noble end! (Since a growing number of districts already demand scripted classes - denying the teacher-competence they have nevertheless certified - this seems but a small step ahead, anyway.)
If this is not the proper, honest position to take about our educational "philosophy," how do we explain to our students and to our public what we are indeed doing NOW? If, beyond the needs of literacy, we say we are providing those bodies of knowledge only as those subjects may distantly serve professionals and workers, must we not agree that it would make more sense - and be much more economical of time and money - to train for literacy and the mathematical rudiments, then release the students, graduate them into the adult world?
If not, shouldn't we face the looming truth that our schools are mere holding pens to keep workers from flooding the labor market and undermining the economy?
What are we doing?
Part II. Lessons From the Past
The deadly central error in our feeble educational policy is our meek acceptance of the utilitarian public's demand that public education should produce primarily (if not solely) workers. When businesses send out the alarm that their workers cannot read well, write well or calculate accurately, the public rouses itself from its self-indulgent torpor of greed and pleasure, just long enough to shake its beer-and-popcorned locks at the educational establishment for its negligence, its failure to provide "what business needs." There follows a sudden, confused flurry of activity among the herds of sheeplike educators, all attempting to protect themselves from the public's barks by responding with new educational "programs" designed to satisfy the howlers and presented to give the impression that, after all, the sheep know where they are going.
The deadly central error in our feeble educational policy is our meek acceptance of the utilitarian public's demand that public education should produce primarily (if not solely) workers.
But these sheep don't know where they are going, as will be made evident to anyone who poses the columnist's question ("When in real life will I ever use this?") to students, parents, teachers, administrators, School Board members, State Education bureaucrats - or U.S. presidents. The response will either be patriotic gore or glazed eyes as the questioned party, if he answers at all, retreats into the night and fog of emotional twaddle.
Well, then, where SHOULD these sheep, the educators, be going?
To determine that, we need to look to the distant past where the curricula we still blindly use today had its origins.
The regimen of Mathematics, the Sciences, History, Literature, Art, Music - and O forgotten now! - Dance, had its beginning in Greece; it was enthusiastically continued by the Romans and revived and reformed in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. It continued, with the fullest understanding of its significance, in the education of "the gentleman" through the 19th and early 20th centuries. Then, with the rise of universal public education, funded now with hard-won taxes, although the regimen of subjects remained, the purpose for its application was lost; in its stead, we were given the utilitarian purposes dictated by our American "philosophers," Carnegie, Ford and Rockefeller. These purposes we embraced, hardly noticing that the ancient regimen of subjects, which we kept still in our schools, had no justification for existence now if the "thought" of our new "thinkers" was to be the revised Vision of work and business-efficiency they offered.
But what was the purpose of that regimen of subjects as our ancestors saw it?
�with the rise of universal public education, funded now with hard-won taxes, although the regimen of subjects remained, the purpose for its application was lost; in its stead, we were given the utilitarian purposes dictated by our American "philosophers," Carnegie, Ford and Rockefeller.
The purpose of the ancient regimen of subjects - a regimen to which we still blindly cling - was to help the student realize and perfect his Human Being. It was NOT for the purpose of making him capable of DOING - although that inevitably resulted - but for the purpose of make him capable of BEING.
It was reasoned by our ancestors that inasmuch as every person is born with natural but undeveloped interests and different proper but undeveloped ways of pursuing them, each person should be educated ("led out" into the world) by perfecting those different ways of thinking appropriate to the different interests - or subjects. Until the student had become all that he could BE as a Human Being, it was thought, there was little he could DO for himself or his community. The student's task was, as Socrates told us, to "Know himself," a wisdom that could be achieved only by refining all of his different ways of knowing all the different experiences under all the categories of his natural interests - Mathematics, Science, History, Art, etc.
Without those refinements, that knowledge of those dimensions of experience, the student was without location in the world - although he had to be in it and could not escape it - he was merely a wild thing, confused, unsociable to his own kind or any kind, ignorant of his possible perfection of form and grace, dangerous to all who approached him; he was a loose cannon on the deck of the ship, the community.
A worker without the understanding and appreciation of his work in ever-larger contexts is simply a slave.
In order to be of service to others, then, the student had first to be a human being, and this was to be achieved by exercising his body and his mind - especially the latter, for it was Mind that distinguished him from the other animals - in all the ways of which they were capable. Once knowing how to BE properly - or at least beginning to know it - the student was ready to leave his "educator," move out into the world and ACT effectively.
This was education *par excellence*; it is the only kind of education that gives the proper perspective on the subjects of the present curricula; and it is not and can never be considered robotic training for a job; indeed, the very degree it is specifically applicable to a particular job it is suspiciously destructive of its larger *human* purpose.
It is this perspective of the curricula as creating human beings rather than workers that so many modern educators seem either not to know, or knowing it, have failed to emphasize it to everyone they encounter in the education scene. Those entirely ignorant of it must wonder hourly what they are really trying to accomplish and must take their job as teachers as mere "busy work" or baby-sitting. Those who have known it but failed to stand up for it before anyone who hold any other position must be miserable beyond the groaning of it. And any educator who allows himself or herself to be intimidated and moved to a nervous defense of his subject as "possibly useful later in a profession or trade" does not really know what he is supposed to be doing.
It is this perspective of the curricula as creating human beings rather than workers that so many modern educators seem either not to know, or knowing it, have failed to emphasize it to everyone they encounter in the education scene.
Students who have been given the kind of liberal education I am describing here, an education for being a complete human, are ultimately those who - ironically for our contest with the utilitarian forces of Fordism and Rockefellerism - make the very best workers after all, for this ideal education creates the capacious mind, one that can see the relations of things and ideas, a worker who understands where he is not only in the job but in the larger world that contains it. Such a worker cannot but be more efficient than one who moves robotically through duties for which he has been narrowly "trained." For example, the computer programmer must be more deeply satisfied with himself and his work than the clerk who merely manipulates the program without knowing how it works; and the mathematician/engineer who stands behind the programmer as master-puppeteer is probably, for his greater knowledge and scope, happier than both.
A worker without the understanding and appreciation of his work in ever larger contexts is simply a slave.
But haven't we now in our schools the regimen that provides the liberal training described above? Haven't we courses in Math, Science, History, Literature, Art - all required of our students?
Yes, but mustn't there be something wrong in our delivery of these subjects, because students put through years of exposure to them nevertheless forget within months if not weeks after graduation most of what they "learned" about them?
And isn't it tragically telling that the students' very intellectual models, their teachers, cannot pass the tests required of their students - save in the particular subject each teaches?
There is something seriously wrong here and if it is not with WHAT we presume to give our students in their various subjects, it must be with the HOW we do so.
Part III. "Habit of Mind"
We live in a time when it is assumed that quantity is superior to quality. The expert, individual human touch that produces one-of-a-kind signed and customized products has been replaced by the machine that grinds out, sausage-like, cheap duplicated items to satisfy a growing public demand for the disposable.
Not so subtly, the mentality that has furthered this craving for ever more and more things has infested the domain of education: increasingly we believe that command of quantity of facts - a quantity so easily measured with the tests and surveys to which we have become addicted - is the proper measure of educational achievement. (This poison shows itself, too, in our unchecked passion for extra-curricular activities, spectacularly in our cripplingly expensive sports programs, and in our silly conviction that monumentally extravagant new buildings, fancier labs and "innovative" programs that grow like Topsy will distract the public from our real need: more and better teachers.
Not so subtly, the mentality that has furthered this craving for ever more and more things has infested the domain of education: increasingly we believe that command of quantity of facts - a quantity so easily measured with the tests and surveys to which we have become addicted - is the proper measure of educational achievement.
Our courses in History and Literature, particularly, become exercises in memorization of facts. For example, in History there is an almost universally exclusive emphasis on chronology and "what the textbook says" about those dates and events. Rare is the teacher who has built his own critical principles for dealing with the problems in either subject and who understands that it is his own *habit of mind* that he should be teaching - not *what* he thinks but *how* he reasons about his subject, and the advantages and weaknesses of that critical approach. If he understood that, he would use selected, increasingly complex historical or literary *cases* to develop his students' consciousness of the teacher's principles of judgment. (His model should be the teacher of Mathematics who has no choice but to teach principles of judgment, for those are built into the very content of his subject.)
The repetition of such exercises in principles of judgment produces a lasting *habit of mind* and offers the best condition for both intellectual appreciation and retention.
I say that it is not the command of a multiplicity of historical or literary facts that should be our aim - as delightful as such encyclopedic knowledge may be - rather, our aim should be the students' command of the individual teacher's habit of mind, his principles of judgment of facts, developed by the careful, lengthy and precise examination of cases selected for their increasing complexity to test and secure those principles.
Teachers must be trained to become aware of their own principles of judgment of their subjects, for without this emphasis at the level of the individual classroom there is no real hope for developing in our students any lasting habit of mind.
Of course, it must be accepted that our massive educational system, determined as it is to prescribe *universal* standards and tests, will not entertain a shift from easily measured standards of *quantity* to elusive standards of *quality*, particularly since the latter must be defined by the individual teacher; yet the teacher as an individual mind forming minds like his own is the very reason he exists, the very reason he cannot be replaced by the computer, the reason he cannot surrender completely to the demands of *system*. An accommodation must be sought, the system sharing time and attention with the teacher.
Teachers must be trained to become aware of their own principles of judgment of their subjects, for without this emphasis at the level of the individual classroom there is no real hope for developing in our students any lasting habit of mind.
Absent such accommodation and teacher training, our only hope lies in an early and thorough concentration on the rudiments without regard to division by age-groups, followed by the students' and their parents' selection of academic or vocational electives as their middle and high school curricula. The student's own interest in an elective will help him to his own lasting habit of mind, whether or not his teacher has one.
Whatever the solution, we must abandon our present totally ineffective and humanly and financially wasteful curricula.
What Are We Doing?
And Why Are We Doing It?
An examination of educational purpose. There is something seriously wrong here and if it is not with WHAT we presume to give our students in their various subjects, it must be with the HOW we do so.
by L. Swilley, July 1, 2008
LINK
Part I. What Are We Doing?
A regular columnist in our local newspaper asked this question of teachers: "When in real life, will I ever use [the subjects we take in school]?" The columnist continues, "Most teachers just glare at the asker ... praying for an answer from above... because they don't know."
The columnist then answers the question herself: "Never...you won't use this stuff unless... you plan to be a physicist, chemist, mathematician or biologist." She acknowledges the need for literacy and for enough Math "to be able to balance one's checkbook." She then concludes, "The best reason I can think of for an education? So that you understand good jokes."
Before we condemn this - as we would like to call it - Yahoo Manifesto, we ought to ask ourselves what we are indeed doing, requiring the curricula we do of our students, especially since, as this columnist correctly reminds us, most of the facts we require the students to know disappear rapidly from the mind after graduation.
If literacy and mathematical rudiments are sufficient for the conduct of our general lives, why DO we torment students with years of courses in History, Literature, the Sciences and the Arts, if they are never or so seldom going to use what they have learned? The answer that comes to the mind of the teacher faced with this question is often a desperate, nervous, "Well, you never know when you will need this material in the profession or work you pursue after you graduate!" This answers invites the response - or should invite it - that it makes little sense to take up so much time and energy on material that only vaguely if at all will be used in a profession or in work, especially since, in the later pursuit of either, specialized courses pertinent to those occupations will be provided elsewhere.
If literacy and mathematical rudiments are sufficient for the conduct of our general lives, why DO we torment students with years of courses in History, Literature, the Sciences and the Arts, if they are never or so seldom going to use what they have learned?
If our real, central and only purpose in public education is to assure that our citizens can read, comprehend, write - and calculate sufficiently to measure correctly and "balance their checkbooks" - does it not make infinitely more sense to give our attention entirely to those areas, then insist that the professions, trades and businesses provide, themselves, any further training necessary to those who take them up?
Imagine the results! High schools would virtually disappear, middle schools and elementary schools would merge; Science departments would vanish, along with History, Literature, Art, Music departments! Teachers formerly in any subjects other than "the three R's" would be redistributed to much smaller groups of students (for more effective teaching and learning), and they would teach the students to read, to comprehend what they read, to write legibly and cogently - perhaps even speak well! - and give them such mathematical learning as would allow them to keep up with their finances and measure their kitchen cabinets and clothes closets!
And imagine the savings of public money! In fact, what need would we have to retain teachers and principals at all? (and what need of graded classes?) Prudent use of computers, monitored by clerks trained to follow specific, step-by-step instructions in a manual will provide, at tremendous savings, all that is required to achieve this noble end! (Since a growing number of districts already demand scripted classes - denying the teacher-competence they have nevertheless certified - this seems but a small step ahead, anyway.)
If this is not the proper, honest position to take about our educational "philosophy," how do we explain to our students and to our public what we are indeed doing NOW? If, beyond the needs of literacy, we say we are providing those bodies of knowledge only as those subjects may distantly serve professionals and workers, must we not agree that it would make more sense - and be much more economical of time and money - to train for literacy and the mathematical rudiments, then release the students, graduate them into the adult world?
If not, shouldn't we face the looming truth that our schools are mere holding pens to keep workers from flooding the labor market and undermining the economy?
What are we doing?
Part II. Lessons From the Past
The deadly central error in our feeble educational policy is our meek acceptance of the utilitarian public's demand that public education should produce primarily (if not solely) workers. When businesses send out the alarm that their workers cannot read well, write well or calculate accurately, the public rouses itself from its self-indulgent torpor of greed and pleasure, just long enough to shake its beer-and-popcorned locks at the educational establishment for its negligence, its failure to provide "what business needs." There follows a sudden, confused flurry of activity among the herds of sheeplike educators, all attempting to protect themselves from the public's barks by responding with new educational "programs" designed to satisfy the howlers and presented to give the impression that, after all, the sheep know where they are going.
The deadly central error in our feeble educational policy is our meek acceptance of the utilitarian public's demand that public education should produce primarily (if not solely) workers.
But these sheep don't know where they are going, as will be made evident to anyone who poses the columnist's question ("When in real life will I ever use this?") to students, parents, teachers, administrators, School Board members, State Education bureaucrats - or U.S. presidents. The response will either be patriotic gore or glazed eyes as the questioned party, if he answers at all, retreats into the night and fog of emotional twaddle.
Well, then, where SHOULD these sheep, the educators, be going?
To determine that, we need to look to the distant past where the curricula we still blindly use today had its origins.
The regimen of Mathematics, the Sciences, History, Literature, Art, Music - and O forgotten now! - Dance, had its beginning in Greece; it was enthusiastically continued by the Romans and revived and reformed in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. It continued, with the fullest understanding of its significance, in the education of "the gentleman" through the 19th and early 20th centuries. Then, with the rise of universal public education, funded now with hard-won taxes, although the regimen of subjects remained, the purpose for its application was lost; in its stead, we were given the utilitarian purposes dictated by our American "philosophers," Carnegie, Ford and Rockefeller. These purposes we embraced, hardly noticing that the ancient regimen of subjects, which we kept still in our schools, had no justification for existence now if the "thought" of our new "thinkers" was to be the revised Vision of work and business-efficiency they offered.
But what was the purpose of that regimen of subjects as our ancestors saw it?
�with the rise of universal public education, funded now with hard-won taxes, although the regimen of subjects remained, the purpose for its application was lost; in its stead, we were given the utilitarian purposes dictated by our American "philosophers," Carnegie, Ford and Rockefeller.
The purpose of the ancient regimen of subjects - a regimen to which we still blindly cling - was to help the student realize and perfect his Human Being. It was NOT for the purpose of making him capable of DOING - although that inevitably resulted - but for the purpose of make him capable of BEING.
It was reasoned by our ancestors that inasmuch as every person is born with natural but undeveloped interests and different proper but undeveloped ways of pursuing them, each person should be educated ("led out" into the world) by perfecting those different ways of thinking appropriate to the different interests - or subjects. Until the student had become all that he could BE as a Human Being, it was thought, there was little he could DO for himself or his community. The student's task was, as Socrates told us, to "Know himself," a wisdom that could be achieved only by refining all of his different ways of knowing all the different experiences under all the categories of his natural interests - Mathematics, Science, History, Art, etc.
Without those refinements, that knowledge of those dimensions of experience, the student was without location in the world - although he had to be in it and could not escape it - he was merely a wild thing, confused, unsociable to his own kind or any kind, ignorant of his possible perfection of form and grace, dangerous to all who approached him; he was a loose cannon on the deck of the ship, the community.
A worker without the understanding and appreciation of his work in ever-larger contexts is simply a slave.
In order to be of service to others, then, the student had first to be a human being, and this was to be achieved by exercising his body and his mind - especially the latter, for it was Mind that distinguished him from the other animals - in all the ways of which they were capable. Once knowing how to BE properly - or at least beginning to know it - the student was ready to leave his "educator," move out into the world and ACT effectively.
This was education *par excellence*; it is the only kind of education that gives the proper perspective on the subjects of the present curricula; and it is not and can never be considered robotic training for a job; indeed, the very degree it is specifically applicable to a particular job it is suspiciously destructive of its larger *human* purpose.
It is this perspective of the curricula as creating human beings rather than workers that so many modern educators seem either not to know, or knowing it, have failed to emphasize it to everyone they encounter in the education scene. Those entirely ignorant of it must wonder hourly what they are really trying to accomplish and must take their job as teachers as mere "busy work" or baby-sitting. Those who have known it but failed to stand up for it before anyone who hold any other position must be miserable beyond the groaning of it. And any educator who allows himself or herself to be intimidated and moved to a nervous defense of his subject as "possibly useful later in a profession or trade" does not really know what he is supposed to be doing.
It is this perspective of the curricula as creating human beings rather than workers that so many modern educators seem either not to know, or knowing it, have failed to emphasize it to everyone they encounter in the education scene.
Students who have been given the kind of liberal education I am describing here, an education for being a complete human, are ultimately those who - ironically for our contest with the utilitarian forces of Fordism and Rockefellerism - make the very best workers after all, for this ideal education creates the capacious mind, one that can see the relations of things and ideas, a worker who understands where he is not only in the job but in the larger world that contains it. Such a worker cannot but be more efficient than one who moves robotically through duties for which he has been narrowly "trained." For example, the computer programmer must be more deeply satisfied with himself and his work than the clerk who merely manipulates the program without knowing how it works; and the mathematician/engineer who stands behind the programmer as master-puppeteer is probably, for his greater knowledge and scope, happier than both.
A worker without the understanding and appreciation of his work in ever larger contexts is simply a slave.
But haven't we now in our schools the regimen that provides the liberal training described above? Haven't we courses in Math, Science, History, Literature, Art - all required of our students?
Yes, but mustn't there be something wrong in our delivery of these subjects, because students put through years of exposure to them nevertheless forget within months if not weeks after graduation most of what they "learned" about them?
And isn't it tragically telling that the students' very intellectual models, their teachers, cannot pass the tests required of their students - save in the particular subject each teaches?
There is something seriously wrong here and if it is not with WHAT we presume to give our students in their various subjects, it must be with the HOW we do so.
Part III. "Habit of Mind"
We live in a time when it is assumed that quantity is superior to quality. The expert, individual human touch that produces one-of-a-kind signed and customized products has been replaced by the machine that grinds out, sausage-like, cheap duplicated items to satisfy a growing public demand for the disposable.
Not so subtly, the mentality that has furthered this craving for ever more and more things has infested the domain of education: increasingly we believe that command of quantity of facts - a quantity so easily measured with the tests and surveys to which we have become addicted - is the proper measure of educational achievement. (This poison shows itself, too, in our unchecked passion for extra-curricular activities, spectacularly in our cripplingly expensive sports programs, and in our silly conviction that monumentally extravagant new buildings, fancier labs and "innovative" programs that grow like Topsy will distract the public from our real need: more and better teachers.
Not so subtly, the mentality that has furthered this craving for ever more and more things has infested the domain of education: increasingly we believe that command of quantity of facts - a quantity so easily measured with the tests and surveys to which we have become addicted - is the proper measure of educational achievement.
Our courses in History and Literature, particularly, become exercises in memorization of facts. For example, in History there is an almost universally exclusive emphasis on chronology and "what the textbook says" about those dates and events. Rare is the teacher who has built his own critical principles for dealing with the problems in either subject and who understands that it is his own *habit of mind* that he should be teaching - not *what* he thinks but *how* he reasons about his subject, and the advantages and weaknesses of that critical approach. If he understood that, he would use selected, increasingly complex historical or literary *cases* to develop his students' consciousness of the teacher's principles of judgment. (His model should be the teacher of Mathematics who has no choice but to teach principles of judgment, for those are built into the very content of his subject.)
The repetition of such exercises in principles of judgment produces a lasting *habit of mind* and offers the best condition for both intellectual appreciation and retention.
I say that it is not the command of a multiplicity of historical or literary facts that should be our aim - as delightful as such encyclopedic knowledge may be - rather, our aim should be the students' command of the individual teacher's habit of mind, his principles of judgment of facts, developed by the careful, lengthy and precise examination of cases selected for their increasing complexity to test and secure those principles.
Teachers must be trained to become aware of their own principles of judgment of their subjects, for without this emphasis at the level of the individual classroom there is no real hope for developing in our students any lasting habit of mind.
Of course, it must be accepted that our massive educational system, determined as it is to prescribe *universal* standards and tests, will not entertain a shift from easily measured standards of *quantity* to elusive standards of *quality*, particularly since the latter must be defined by the individual teacher; yet the teacher as an individual mind forming minds like his own is the very reason he exists, the very reason he cannot be replaced by the computer, the reason he cannot surrender completely to the demands of *system*. An accommodation must be sought, the system sharing time and attention with the teacher.
Teachers must be trained to become aware of their own principles of judgment of their subjects, for without this emphasis at the level of the individual classroom there is no real hope for developing in our students any lasting habit of mind.
Absent such accommodation and teacher training, our only hope lies in an early and thorough concentration on the rudiments without regard to division by age-groups, followed by the students' and their parents' selection of academic or vocational electives as their middle and high school curricula. The student's own interest in an elective will help him to his own lasting habit of mind, whether or not his teacher has one.
Whatever the solution, we must abandon our present totally ineffective and humanly and financially wasteful curricula.
Cathie Black's Sex Position of the Day Now on Android-Enabled Devices
Mr. Bloomberg: are you kidding? You put great teachers in the rubber room if they mentioned the word "sex" even in Health Education, and you appoint a person, Cathie Black, who creates a sex app for the iphone and droid. Give me a break, Mike.
New schools big Cathie Black gives big yes to sex app: 'Yeah, $2.99. ... Cheaper than a hooker'
BY Celeste Katz, DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER, November 13th 2010LINK
Before she was a schools chancellor, Cathie Black was definitely a Cosmo girl.
Black, the chairman of Hearst Magazines tapped to replace Joel Klein as the head of city schools, engaged in some racy chitchat about a new Cosmopolitan iPod app in August.
When NPR asked if her magazine would charge for the "Sex Tip of the Day" app, Black gave a saucy reply.
"Yeah, $2.99. ... Cheaper than a hooker," she said, adding, "I didn't say that, did I?"
The app, described as a "to- go version of the 'Kama Sutra'" for folks in a "romp rut," boasts moves like the "G-Spot Jiggy" and "Rock-a-Bye Booty."
Downloaded more 80,000 times already, this “to-go” version of the Kama Sutra has approximately 120 sex positions and is just $2.99!
Features include:
*Carnal Challenge Ratings: The more flames a position has, the higher the difficulty!
*Erotic Instructions: Your step-by-step guide for how to execute the position
*Why You’ll Love It: Hints to help you make the most of the position and what to look forward to
*Colorful Illustrations: Tasteful visual that helps you understand what the position should look like
To download the app, check out the Android Marketplace from your handset or visit the iTunes app store if you have an iPhone.
Sex-Tip App? New Schools Chief Promotes It
By CARA BUCKLEY, City Room, November 12, 2010LINK
When he announced that Cathleen P. Black, the chairwoman of Hearst Magazines, would become the next chancellor of New York City's schools, Mayor Michael Bloomberg touted Ms. Black as uniquely qualified for the role.
"There is virtually nobody who knows more about the needs of the 21st century workforce for which we need to prepare our kids," the mayor said.
It seems that Ms. Black also knows a thing or two about an altogether different kind of need.
In an Aug. 10, 2010, segment of the Diane Rehm radio show entitled "The Future of Magazines," Ms. Black plugged Cosmopolitan Magazine's latest iPhone App: the Sex Tip of the Day.
"Are you going to charge for that sex tip of the day?" the host, Frank Sesno, asked.
"Yeah, $2.99," Ms. Black replied, as the host and other guests erupted into giggles. "$2.99," she repeated. "Cheaper than a hooker," she continued, before adding, "I didn't say that, did I?"
The application offers a cornucopia of advice on an array of inventively, sometimes bogglingly, named sexual moves - among them, the Jet Jiggy, the Randy Raft, the Wanton Wheelbarrow and the Linguini. Each position is rated on a "Carnal Challenge" scale of one to five flames (the "Octopus," for one, ranks five flames, and comes with words of encouragement: "Do it right and you two will look like a multilimbed lust creature"). A variety of aids are often employed, among them bathtubs, hot tubs, pools, inflatable rafts, inner tubes, balls, staircases and small boats.
Cosmopolitan, long a stalwart in the field of dishing and redishing sex advice, is just one of Hearst's many publications. Other magazines include Harper's Bazaar, Marie Claire, Popular Mechanics, Redbook and O, the Oprah Magazine. Ms. Black served as president of Hearst Magazines until the summer of 2010, and is now chairwoman.
Asked how many times the app has been downloaded, a spokeswoman for Hearst Magazines was mum. A spokeswoman with the city's Department of Education said this application had no bearing on Ms. Black's suitability to run a school district with 1.1 million children.
Ms. Black's comments on Ms. Rehm's show were reported this week by the television channel NY1.
Joel Klein's job with Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. a sellout of everything he supposedly stood for
Michael Daly, NY DAILY NEWS, November 11th 2010
LINK
Tell me you're not really stepping down as schools chancellor in the middle of the academic year to become a token Democrat in what truly is a vast right-wing conspiracy.
Tell me you are not signing on with a corporation that contributed $1.25 million to Republicans who consider school-funding cuts only necessary and tax cuts for the rich vital.
In taking the job with News Corp., Klein actually said, "I've long admired News Corporation's entrepreneurial spirit and Rupert Murdoch's fearless commitment to innovation."
What is Klein talking about, entrepreneurial spirit such as peddling the conservative agenda, at times with willful ignorance? Fearless commitment such as giving that $1.25 million to the Republican Governors Association? The association's poster boy is New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, the Jason of school-budget slashing.
Klein also went on to say, "I am excited for the opportunity to be part of this team."
The team including Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly. Oh, yeah, and Karl Rove, who helped guide the nation into disaster while at the Bush White House and uses a faux grass-roots movement funded by billionaires to blame President Obama.
Klein added, "And to have the chance to bring the same spirit of innovation to the burgeoning education marketplace."
Not education. The educational marketplace. That means making money off school kids in times of budget cuts.
Think of the public reaction if Bloomberg appointed a police commissioner who had no law enforcement background. Think of what it means to real educators when you say that running the schools is just a question of management, only with the widgets being kids instead of magazines.
Not that Black is less than competent. She was publisher of New York magazine when I worked there, and she seemed to do fine.
Murdoch was the owner, and I have to say he was more pleasant and egalitarian than many rich liberals. He would stride into the office without entourage, friendly and polite, in one friend's words "a treat."
He once offered me a lift in a cab during a downpour. That's more than I can say about a media millionaire from the vast left-wing conspiracy who once left me standing in the rain while he rode off in his limo.
That does not make News Corp.'s political agenda any less anathema to what Klein supposedly stood for as chancellor.
And it does not make Black any more qualified to be chancellor. Even a bigtime publisher has an easier task than a principal at your basic city grammar school.
I have to hope that Black would not take the job unless she was certain she is capable of doing right by our kids.
As for Klein, I had this sudden fantasy that he is secretly still doing Bloomberg's bidding in a covert scheme to educate those politicians of whom the mayor complained, "Look at who we're electing to Congress, to the Senate - they can't read."
A fair number of the newly elected illiterates were put in office with the help of Fox News. Imagine if Klein were infiltrating News Corp. with the aim of educating them.
Well, that won't happen, and Klein is not really an educator, anyway.
He is just a guy who had a big job who now has another big job.
Say it ain't so, Joel!
mdaly@nydailynews.com
El Diario: NYC Commissioner Steiner - Deny Cathie Black a Waiver To Be NYC Chancellor
Bloomberg’s private players club
Editorial, El Diario
Mayor Bloomberg shuffled his private player list to select a chancellor to guide the future of 1 million public school students.Most people, including top level folks at New York’s Department of Education (DOE), were blindsided by Joel Klein’s sudden departure to a News Corp position that seems to have been created for him.
Bloomberg didn’t bother with consulting educators as he secretly handpicked Klein’s successor, Cathie Black, a wealthy publishing executive who lives on Park Avenue and in Connecticut. His selection of Black has provoked a host of questions and concerns, which Bloomberg and his supporters are quick to dismiss as naysaying.
Deputy Mayor Howard Wolfson claimed that Bloomberg did not announce Klein’s departure or a search because he didn’t want to destabilize the school system. But if Bloomberg was so concerned about a seamless transition, then it stands to reason that he could have plucked a seasoned leader from the ranks of the DOE.
This decision is a complete deviation from his claim to choose people based on merit and qualifications—a response he has given to questions around diversity in the largely white City Hall. It appears that the standards change on whim.
Black, who indeed may be a fantastic manager in the business world, comes with no background in education and has had no substantive contact with public schools. Not even as a corporate partner or volunteer. For all the criticism of Klein, his formation was relevant to the population he served. He is a Queens-bred New Yorker who attended public schools, worked in public interest law and was involved in civil rights litigation. That background at least made it seem that he was sensitive to the needs of children in an inequitable school system.
It seems cynical to put the future of New York City’s public schoolchildren (overwhelmingly our Latino kids) in the hands of someone the mayor could only describe as a dear friend. It is even more cynical to have his buddies in the mainstream media jump quickly on board to support his choice unconditionally. Perhaps it’s different when the children of your top editors and writers are not condemned to a dysfunctional system.