Cliff notes

Back around September I began to hear from friends and acquaintances that they were getting less work, or their company was readying layoffs, or new business was drying up. It confirmed the rumblings in the financial pages about a recessionary wave heading for shore.

Now, the water is up to our knees. Hardly anyone is unaffected by the downturn, and New York (city and state) flounders in the sea, comprised mostly of red ink. We now know that the recession actually began in December of 2007, but in just the last three months it has palpably engulfed us. Those entities (businesses, nonprofits, governments) that did not spend the fat years preparing for the lean are suddenly in deep trouble.


It’s better to learn to swim in advance of, rather than during, a flood, but how many institutions plan ahead? It’s somehow part of biped nature to assume that present conditions will obtain forever and put off emergency planning for later, i.e. never.

For example, just a year ago or so, the city’s transportation authority gave us a few days of free rides on the subways because they had a budget surplus. Say again? No thought of putting aside a few million or paying down some of the system’s crippling debt?

The larger implications are that crisis means opportunity, and that’s not always a good thing—crises also can enable the worst tendencies among us as 9/11 so amply demonstrated. We hear a lot about Obama as the new FDR, but to fill those rather large shoes, he’ll have to assert himself, take big chances and kick some butt.

The other side is certainly ready to do so.

During the fat years Mayor Bloomberg took great delight in sending out property tax rebate checks to all residents in a perfect imitation of Juan Perón or more exactly Evita tossing cash from her limousine to ‘the poor’. Now that the budget deficit has ballooned, guess who is supposed to make the sacrifice?

Teachers.

My friend Laura C., a toiler in the vineyards of New York City’s public school system, wrote me the following note a few weeks ago when the names of New York school superintendent Joel Klein and his Washington counterpart Michelle Rhee were being floated as possible education secretaries. I quote at length here (with her permission) her complaint about both of them as exactly what we don’t need.

I am so glad to see that, yes, someone seems to be on to her [Rhee]. I have been watching her from afar with great distaste. She is getting nationwide play and positive hype. The fact that Obama didn’t choose Rhee or Klien for a cabinet position was somewhat reassuring.

What irks me is that the talk about the “struggle” over education always seems to center on teachers’ “perks” as opposed to the near dictatorial power of principals in most schools, low teacher pay and ever increasing class sizes. At least with Rhee someone thought to look at what she has or hasn’t actually achieved even though it is far too focused on test scores. Those figures sometimes can be marginally improved (especially when teachers are terrified into spending all their teaching time on test prep), but high drop-out rates and low college admission rates remain fairly intractable.

This, in my humble opinion, is because education is not enough of a national priority—period. We are not really dedicated to eliminating the presence of a large, uneducated underclass. There was an eye-opening piece last summer in Time magazine of all places that revealed the vast differences between our system and more successful ones in places ranging from Finland to Hong Kong.

By the way, my school has an 80% to 95% college admissions rate, depending on the year, and a very low drop-out rate. This is almost unheard of in larger schools. However, rather than imitating our model (we are one of the smallest schools in the city), the DOE is doing everything possible to hinder us, cutting about 20% of our teachers this past year with greater cuts lined up for the end of this one.

To top things off, the powers that be have set up an evaluating system that penalizes us because it takes some of our disaffected transfer students (who are already low on credits when they come to us) an extra six months to a year to graduate. How in the world are we going to increase overall graduation and college entrance rates if we are unwilling to invest a little extra time in the kids who are behind??

As a result of this, our school has actually teetered at times on the edge of becoming a SUR school (one in which the principal can be fired, staff reorganized etc.) when it is probably one of the best schools in the city. By “best” I do not mean one of the elite schools like Bronx Science that gets the creme de la creme students through rigorous entrance exams, but “best” in terms of our success with average or troubled students who are at high risk of academic failure.

How do we do this? We are undoubtedly one of the most democratically run schools in the city, with an unheard of system of consensus decision-making where, in theory, even the principal must bring policy proposals to staff for approval. Most of the good ideas implemented bubble up from the teachers themselves.

The teachers have historically been a high caliber, creative bunch (many Ivy League degrees) who wouldn’t be caught dead teaching in a regular city school if they could help it. We’d keep them longer if they could offer better pay and conditions and if teachers had respect in society. (Who could blame my brilliant colleague in her prime teaching years, who moved on to teach at Vassar??)

So there you have it: pay teachers more so that you can attract some of the best minds; respect teachers rather than running them down in every media report on education; reward schools for taking on students who are behind in credits (even if it costs money); spend the extra it takes to create small schools (ideally with even smaller class sizes than ours); lower teaching loads so that capable teachers can share in the administrative and visionary work that comes from a lifetime of experience. It takes national treasure. Money. Period.

But we aren’t committed to it as a nation. Instead, my school is housed in an antiquated, 1930s building with too few rooms assigned to us, and has lost space twice in the past three years. And we’re slated for even more teacher cuts. That’s the reward for our success.

The Rhee boomlet is an example of how easy is to get positive ink by taking aim at unions of any sort. Teachers’ unions are a particular juicy target since they combine everything conservatives hate: public schools, taxes and uppity workers.

And leave it to the ‘centrists’ to echo the popular anti-teacher line. Newsweek senior editor Evan Thomas lauded Rhee a while back for not ‘giving up on inner-city schools’ unlike ‘most educators’ supposedly had done. ‘Right here in Washington, D.C.’, intoned the breathless Thomas, ‘there’s a lady who is trying to actually win this battle, but she’s trying to break the union to do it. . . . Rarely have the lines been so clearly drawn’. That would be the lines between Good and Evil.

Time magazine helped out the cause by putting Rhee on the cover holding a broom.

I don’t pretend to know anything about the details of Washington’s collapsed system, but I’ll bet a week’s pay (assuming I continue to receive some] that it operates on a tiny percentage of the resources available to the suburban school systems. It’s a lot easier to gang up on teachers than to address that glaring inequality.

Laura’s comments were made a couple of weeks ago, and yesterday the Mayor threatened to balance his budget by slashing 15,630 teacher jobs, 80 percent of the proposed 19,650 city layoffs. No need to clean out the top-heavy DOE bureaucracy, just slash the cash spent on those standing in front of the kids day in and day out.

Says Laura now: If [teachers union president Randy] Weingarten’s figures are correct, Mayor Bloomberg is purposely using this crisis to undermine the school system to the point where teaching will no longer be a viable profession and urban kids will never have a chance.

Both Bloomberg and D.C. mayor Adrian Fenty have engineered their own takeovers of city schools in the name of efficiency. But who is going to determine whether they’ve succeeded or, more importantly, what we are going to call ‘success’?

Obama had a lot to say about education during the campaign, so it will be interesting to see whether his politics of reconciliation includes fighting off this assault on his core principles or whether the nation’s bankruptcy will be hijacked by the anti-union conservatives wearing the sheep’s clothing of ‘reform’.