An education mayor takes charge: the picture in New York

Education Next, Fall, 2005

"DOE administrators talk about balance," Ms. Bennett recently wrote in an unpublished letter to the New York Times.

    What they really want is all-group, all the time. What's more, the
  message is clear: when we visit your classes and the kids are not in
  groups, you have one strike against you.
    My recent experience at staff development is illustrative of just
  how clear that message is intended to be. After spending the morning
  working with my colleagues on a small group activity that entailed
  busy-work that did nothing to further our development as teachers, we
  returned to a whole-class discussion to briefly assess what we had
  learned. I raised my hand and asked if there was any research tying
  group work to better test scores. The answer was no.
    My behavior was reported to the Local Instructional Superintendent,
  and two days later, my assistant principal asked me to forgo
  attendance at the remaining meetings. I had, it seems, been kicked out
  of staff development. Had I made a ruckus? No. But I had asked
  uncomfortable questions. I had thought critically. Though the City's
  Department of Education gives lip service to teaching kids to think
  critically, it is clear they want those critical thinking skills
  taught by drones.

Tyranny in the Classroom

Chancellor Klein has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on mandated professional development sessions of the kind that Jackie Bennett describes. Yet there's no research evaluating the effectiveness of a program that is eating up so much of the city's budget and its teachers' precious time. New York City has nothing like the independent research consortium, based at the University of Chicago, which provides objective third-party evaluation and analysis of performance data supplied by the Chicago school system.

What's indisputable, however, is that the intellectually vacuous nature of these sessions and the central administration's tyranny over classroom instruction is demoralizing many excellent and successful teachers. The city will surely lose many of them. "There isn't one teacher I know who doesn't say they would leave if they could," says Norman Scott, a 35-year veteran classroom teacher and publisher of an independent newsletter for city teachers. In the meantime thousands of teachers have taken to the streets in union-organized protests over Klein's instructional dictatorship. "Let teachers teach," say the placards carried at these demonstrations. At a recent UFT rally, union president Randi Weingarten said: "We knew that a top-down, command and control management and rigid, lockstep teaching mandates would be demoralizing. But I never imagined that guidelines for, say, the workshop model, complete with its limit of ten minutes of direct instruction, would devolve into orders to use it every day, for every lesson and every group of students."

Klein and Mayor Bloomberg have countered that all the tumult in the street is nothing but posturing over a contract dispute. The UFT wants more money, they say, but no reform of the work rules. They are right that the existing contract is a lousy deal for everyone involved. I have been writing about the contract's excellence-killing seniority rules, its lockstep pay schedules, and its other inflexible regulations for years (see "Facade of Excellence," Education Next, Summer 2003). In fact, Joel Klein once told me he had read my critique of the contract, and from time to time he has even borrowed my quip that this is the ultimate "we-don't-do-windows" labor agreement.