With the help of corrupt press, expect big business to swindle New York education funds. To help redirect tax dollars, politicians push for new teacher evaluations. Lies, confusing terminology, false comparisons and propaganda, these are the only truths to expect from the media. Yellow press, the specialty of papers like The New York Post, remind us of the New York Inquirer from the movie classic, Citizen Kane, and its present day caricature counterparts, Citizen Bloomberg and Citizen Cuomo.
The Crime: By undermining teacher tenure through a new evaluation system, senior teachers can be evaluated right out of work leaving more so-called savings for private sector looters to plunder.
The Scam:“Failing teachers need help.” The help is the never-ending flow of programs administered by consultants, connected vendors and friends within the new teacher evaluation crowd. They create the programs, administer the new system, and bill the public.
Public Deception: The logic that teachers need a new evaluation system demands that the public believes the old system is flawed, that universities and colleges everywhere are deficient. Six years of teaching education instruction, hundreds of hours of student teaching and teacher mentoring, staff development and seminars, special training, testing, all, must be inadequate. They must be useless in helping college students qualify for the teaching profession. Furthermore, as teachers gain experience and coincidentally gain higher wages and more benefits, they somehow all become failing, stupid and lazy. They can only be replaced or saved by new graduates trained by new methods by special facilitators. Ironically, these highly funded consultants and staff developers would not last a day in most tough classrooms.
And when teachers quit or are evaluated out of a job, Bloomberg and his looters rejoice. Their expensive non-teacher sanctioned programs are legitimized thievery and the outcome is criminal. Instructors and students rely on the funds that businesses redirect into their new programs. Across America, only one-thing matters: How private industry can fleece the $600 billion in tax dollars allocated for education.
Example: http://dianeravitch.net/2013 /03/17/rupert-murdoch-wins-contract-to-develop-common-core-tests/
In a media grandstand, politicians rant that without a new teacher evaluation agreement, the state will not qualify for federal education funds. They are disturbed, not because children will not get those funds but because that money would never reach a classroom anyway. Our representatives are distressed because those dollars will not be available for special interest pockets.
The Feds:“Teaching Matters” facilitators held forums and conducted surveys throughout the school system to gain teacher input. They offer a work in progress teaching model. Appalled, every teacher vehemently rejects it. Teachers offer realistic and practical ideas in place of worthless data collection and misguided assessments only to discover that the next school reviews are in essence the same draft under the guise that it is a work in progress. Ultimately, the public gets a phony teaching standard and evaluation model that claims, “Created with Teacher Input.” An abomination of American integrity and justice, they support all the looters’ programs, not with teacher input, but in spite of it.
Union members have solutions: The UFT (United Federation of Teachers) must take the stand that teachers already have an evaluation system and members must be allowed to vote on all agreements.
The UFT should condemn programs like the Danielson Program, which is already being used to evaluate instructors, since there is hardly a teacher in 80,000 that gives it a nickel’s worth of respect. The testing racket along with the common core is another fund-diverting, time-consuming, worthless embarrassment.
It makes more sense to first evaluate all the other city and state agencies from Charlie the Dog Catcher to Governor Cuomo. The UFT should emphasize that they start with administration. Understandably, not only do the police and fire departments have less funding to appropriate compared to education, but distastefully, politicians must keep them unblemished as they are needed to earnestly suppress protests and rioting by the rest of the public. A furious Bloomberg recently denounced a plan to create an Inspector General that could usurp his power over the NYPD. If he loses control of the police, half the city, led by Occupy Wall Street, will be occupying his living room.
The UFT should demand that not a single cent of any education funding go beyond teacher salaries or teacher requested school supplies and equipment, putting an end to all ulterior siphoning of taxpayer money that goes to consultants, useless programs or any corrupt interests.
Sample: http://www.nytimes.com/2013 /03/06/business/media/news-corp-has-a-tablet-for-schools.html?_r=0
The UFT must stop trying to convince members of the union’s victorious agreements with the DOE. Teachers are fed up with being served curds and whey and told that it is ice cream. One outspoken member mocks, “You want a statistic? Ask 9 out of 10 teachers their opinion of the UFT, and stand back or you might get spit on.”
With the new Imposed Evaluation System, Mayor Bloomberg, together with the aid of his latest puppets Governor Cuomo and Commissioner John King, has not only made a shamble of the Department of Education but put an end to the teaching profession.
Visit David’s “Education Page” for related stories: “Writer’s Edge”
http://www.wix.com/davidmtc/writersedge
