What kind of enterprise would employ a top executive who spends her spare time undermining its key policies? If you answered “New York City’s Department of Education,” you’re right.
As The Post’s Susan Edelman reported last Sunday, DOE executive Lisa Nielsen — recently promoted to the post of “director of digital literacy and citizenship” — receives a salary of $170,000 to train teachers on the proper use of social media.
Outside the department’s halls, however, she uses that same social media to work against key DOE policies — most notably, standardized testing, an important measure of whether students are learning and teachers are teaching.
Nielsen helps run a Facebook page called “Opt Out of State Standardized Tests—New York.” It’s exactly what it sounds like: a social-media vehicle to urge New York moms and dads to pull their kids out of standardized tests.
Along the same lines, Nielsen’s “Innovative Educator” blog rants against testing and encourages teachers to develop alternative plans for students who opt out of a test. Among the “innovations” she favors: “The test might just be a perfect time to catch some zzz’s.”
The blog features a “rotten apple” graphic that mocks Education Secretary Arne Duncan and the “core curriculum” national standards adopted by the State Education Department.
It boggles the mind that DOE doesn’t see any problem with using taxpayer dollars to pay a six-figure salary to an employee publicly advocating against its own mission.
This isn’t a matter of freedom of speech. It’s a blatant conflict of interest.
After all, Nielsen is a DOE executive.
How, for example, can her superiors be sure that she isn’t using her access to privileged information for her various anti-reform crusades?
In any sane world, Lisa Nielsen would be forced to choose what is more important to her: a day job that comes with a fat public paycheck or her part-time vocation undercutting the department’s policies.
Alas, sanity is in short supply at New York’s public institutions. When asked about Nielsen, a DOE spokeswoman said no one was aware of her views when she got the job but that the department “is always open to working with people with different ideas.”
Someone ought to educate the Department of Education about the distinction between someone who holds “different ideas” and someone who is lobbying against her own employer.