Pssst, it’s still a secret, but for her next new initiative, Schools Chancellor Carmen Fariña is bringing back the Hula Hoop. She’s launching the multimillion-dollar union boondoggle, er, program, under the name of Doing Our Progressive Exercise.
For short, we’ll call it DOPE. For kindness, we’ll call it dopey, like many of her other plans.
Mayor Bill de Blasio recruited Fariña out of retirement, and her tool kit features a grab bag of theories and fads from yesteryear. They were put out to pasture for good reason.
But social promotion, teacher coddling and a junked reading scheme called balanced literacy are back, thanks to Fariña’s nostalgia. Never mind that they didn’t succeed the first time around in the only way that matters: helping kids learn.
Fariña , wrapping the past in the progressive mantle to make it sound better, romanticizes her salad days as the good old days. That would be the decades of the ’80s and ’90s, which were not good at all.
Those were the days when another discredited fixture, the Board of Education, ostensibly ruled the roost, but did so only with union approval.
With one vote each, the five borough presidents had a collective majority on the seven-member board, and the union, which is always at its most powerful in single-district or borough elections, could stitch together support for its pet projects. Mayors generally agreed to work rules that, as former Chancellor Joel Klein noted, resembled the straitjacket diktats of industrial craft unions.
Not surprisingly, schools declined steadily, despite vast infusions of money, racially sensitive policies and politically correct leaders. Failure was labeled “pre-success,” and attempts by mayors to shake up the system were met with demands that politics be kept out of education.
By that, the union meant any politics it didn’t control.
By 2001, results were so bad that even the teachers union saw the writing on the blackboard and supported mayoral control. Mayor Michael Bloomberg was its first beneficiary and, despite significant waste and some major mistakes, including a fling with balanced literacy, he finally found his way to holding teachers accountable for student performance. Perhaps most important, Bloomy nurtured the charter movement to supply competition to the union monopoly.
But now City Hall is turning back the clock.
The mayor seems to have no ideas of his own about how to improve student performance, so never ventures beyond feel-good talking points about getting parents involved and reducing the impact of tests. He put all his chips on pre-kindergarten, which doesn’t mean a thing for the 1 million students already in school.
Even worse, his personal vendetta against charter star Eva Moskowitz and his alliance with the Working Families Party led him into an asinine assault on the schools that are actually helping poor, black and Hispanic children.
As for everything else, de Blasio, long in thrall to Fariña’s experience and union-political ties, left it to her. She is repaying him with a mishmash of educrat jargon and code words, such as a teacher-centric rubric called Progressive Redesign Opportunity for Excellence, and a mentoring program she calls Learning Partners.
All this is part of her aim to bring “joy” back to the classroom, though it looks more like she’s substituting hugs for standards and simply putting teachers in charge.
Her most important decision is giving balanced literacy another boost. The program de-emphasizes challenging books and hard knowledge and was scrapped by Bloomberg because low-income students subjected to it fell behind their peers who were not.
“Spelling and grammar were de-emphasized in favor of fluency. Textbooks were scrapped in favor of classroom libraries teeming with novels and plays,” The New York Times said of its earlier incarnation. “And students were encouraged to write about social justice issues and tell their personal stories.”
It sounds like a fad because it was, and critics note that its failure led to the Common Core standards. Alarmed by student decline, especially in urban areas, educators created a standardized approach in core subjects.
New York is part of that compact, but Fariña and de Blasio are sailing against the national winds in practice, just as they are when they denounce merit pay and other state-of-the-art reforms that reflect global realities.
Their focus on the past can mean only one thing: The Board of Education is waiting in the wings, ready for its comeback, too. If only they could think of a way to call it progressive.
Blaming Bush is a time(s) warp
Displaying the integrity of a carnival huckster, editors at The Times claim to have found the spark that ignited the surge of Central American youngsters crossing our southern border. It is — you guessed it — George W. Bush’s fault.
That’s what the paper says, seriously, in a front-page article that echoes new White House insistence that the 52,000 young people who entered since October did so because of a 2008 law signed by Bush. It aimed to stop human smuggling and treat young illegal immigrants as victims, and everybody in both parties thought it a good idea.
But now that the chaos and danger are hurting President Obama, the Times dug deep to blame somebody else. As for the nearly six quiet years since the law passed, years that happen to coincide with the Obama presidency, the Times doesn’t have much to say. Yet somehow, it insists the old law suddenly caused the current invasion.
If that’s the best they can do, Obama is really in trouble.
Hillary truly has no idea
A Politico story, headlined “Searching for Hillary Clinton’s Big Idea,” reports that it can’t find one. It dissects the Democratic Party’s debates on topics ranging from income inequality to income inequality and finds her positions are mushy. It concludes that, during a campaign, “the pressure will be on to make clear what she would actually do in the White House.”
That’s easy: She’d live in it. That’s her Big Idea.
The whole point of Hillary Clinton’s existence for the last decade is to be president. She wants to be the second President Clinton, and the first female ever.
Everything that other politicians must do to appeal to voters, including making proposals and outlining the vision thing, are to her mere tactical moves.
She’s Hillary, a celebrity, an icon, a brand, and that’s what she offers voters. Her promise is that, as president, she’ll do the stuff that presidents do. Some things will be different, but not all.
That’s her pitch, and it’s high time Politico and the rest of the jabbering class stop pretending there’s more to it than that. With Hillary, what you see is what you get.
Shel game in Albany
Let’s see: A law firm paid Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver up to $750,000 last year, but there’s no record showing what he did for that money, nor is he required to disclose the information.
Albany ethics — still an oxymoron.