They say it’s all for the children in New York’s public schools, but somehow it always ends up being about the teachers — as Schools Chancellor Carmen Fariña’s ode to joy at Columbia University’s Teachers College on Saturday morning made depressingly clear.
“We all know that teachers play the most critical role in shaping the lives of children,” said Fariña, a former teacher. “It’s time we give teachers the respect they are due and give them room to do what they do best — and in the process return joy to the classroom.”
You see, $150,000 in salary and benefits; retirement at 55; lifetime health care and every summer off — all in return for a 40 percent high-school drop-out rate and with 30 percent of those who do graduate essentially illiterate — simply isn’t enough.
There must also be joy.
How sweet it must be, in FariñaLand.
There are many differences between Bill de Blasio and Mike Bloomberg — not least being that Bloomberg knew the school system is broken and tried his damndest to fix it, to some modest success.
Mayor de Blasio intends simply to hand the keys to the store back to the teachers’ union.
Pre-K is his thing, don’t you know. Post-K is on its own. If that’s not true, why did he make Fariña chancellor in the first place?
No knock on her, personally. She has an inspiring biography; she had a singular career, punching every ticket from the classroom to a district superintendency before retiring. And while folks who know her say she’s not nearly so nice as her carefully cultured kind-grandmother image pretends, who wants a kind grandmother running a $25-billion-a-year enterprise anyway?
Even nominally.
Still, at her very core, Carmen Fariña is a New York City teacher. And, like most such, she’s deathly allergic to objective standards for classroom performance.
That’s because applying meaningful benchmarks to kids is only one short step away from applying them to teachers — which, not surprisingly, teachers consider impermissible. (If you doubt it, ask Gov. Cuomo — who just took a thumping from the teachers unions over performance standards in the Common Core curriculum.)
And so it was last week that Fariña pulled the plug on a major Bloomberg-era reform — effectively reinstalling social promotion as standard operating procedure for the Department of Education.
No longer will promotion in the lower grades be determined by test scores — that is, by an objective demonstration of acquired skills — but rather by…well, Fariña laid it out Saturday:
“Going forward, teachers and principals will be empowered to make that determination based on a more comprehensive, authentic review of their students’ classroom work. That doesn’t mean test scores won’t be used — it just shifts our emphasis from a single exam result to the whole child.”
“As a lifelong educator,” she continued, “this has truly been a personal dream of mine: to encourage, through an innovative initiative, system-wide collaboration and disseminate best-practices across the entire district. It’s now coming into fruition.”
Got that?
If not, here’s the plain-English version:
“Maybe Johnny is learning how to read, and maybe Johnny isn’t learning how to read, but either way nobody’s going to be able to pin the outcome on a teacher — because we just got rid of the rules of evidence! You’re welcome.”
Or, as United Federation of Teachers president Mike Mulgrew put it after the speech: “It is time that New York City takes into account all the work a child does the rest of the year, in the classroom. Changing the promotion policy is just common sense.”
“Mission accomplished,” in other words.
There were, to be sure, no spectacular public-education successes during the Bloomberg incumbency — except, of course, for achieving mayoral control of the schools itself. And, less sure, the adoption and slow maturation of a sustainable charter-school network across the city.
And certainly Mike Bloomberg and his educrats made some boneheaded tactical moves. Plus they never quite learned how best to navigate Albany’s treacherous political shoals.
But no honest outsider ever doubted Bloomberg’s sincerity.
Yet progress, measured against other urban school systems in New York and elsewhere, was real. Taken against the outlandish degree of difficulty (moving a massive, malignant bureaucracy against its own perceived best interests), it’s hard not to judge the effort to have been at least a qualified success.
Now all that is on its way to the dustbin of history.
But at least the city has Pre-K.
Oh, joy.