Friday, June 29, 2007

Coming Soon to a school near you....

with a full big thumbs up from the union Green Dot, a charter school that has met nothing but criticism from Los Angeles where they have originated from.
Why would the Union be in favor of a charter school coming in and take up space in an already established over crowded school? I thought the union was pro teacher. How can that be if they would allow teachers to have to take on an extra burden of teaching in a large class. Especially in a High School. NYC Educator and Norm at EdNotes have been blogging about this issue for some time now and it does not seem favorable for our students to be placed in a Green Dot school. BUT our Mayor does not seem to care what happens to teachers, time and time again he proves that he just does not have a firm grasp on the realities of Charter Schools and that they really do not bode well for our students.
An ever increasingly large overturn of staff, who are not valued at the schools, but why should they it is just a business after all.

4 comments:

NYC Educator said...

Thank you very much for your sympathetic comments. I really appreciate them.

Anonymous said...

You ask why a union would be in favor of a charter school and you say that you thought that the union (UFT) was pro-teacher.

You err big time. The UFT is pro-Randi Weingarten. The UFT is no longer a teacher's union. It is just a dues collecting organization that favors what makes Randi and her cronies comfortable. The UFT is not interested in the welfare of its members (its first goal!!) or students.....

It is really sad that this has happened and that so many teachers have been screwed by the amoral megalomaniac Randi Weingarten....and that senior teachers are being squeezed out of the system.

Pissed Off Mom said...

Anytime NYC Ed. You know I am pro teacher, anti charter.

Anonymous, I do know that Randi is Pro Randi and that she does not do what is good for her teachers, but only what is in her best interest, it is a true shame.
We shall see what happens when all the senior teachers are squeezed out of the system and our education system truly does fall apart. But then again... that sure does open up the door wider for Charters now doesn't it?

Anonymous said...

I now am past past the point in my career where I qualify to be a senior teacher/mentor; they were the colleagues I learned from the most as a a fledgling teacher. They taught me the little useful things that I now pass down to students such as mnemonics; thanks to them, I now use MANIAC for the causes of World War I, and of course the legendary PEMDAS of mathematical fame whose application does a lot for basic skills. The pervasive disrespect especially reserved for senior teachers is now all the rage. No group of people could be more guilty of crimes such as caring about the kids, trying several methods of teaching to reach as many as possible within our classroom walls, sharing teaching tricks and general advice with the younger teachers, and so on, as the senior teacher. I forgot...their other crime is that they went into teaching hoping to stay in the general "middle class" economic class without having to work another job after school and possibly teach summer school also. The level of burnout we can experience has increased exponentially since BloomKleinGarten took the reins of power and took away the ultimate hard earned perk of being a senior teacher, the promise of job security. That is gone with the wind. The school system, in the meantime, is deteriorating rapidly as non educators and lawyers run the educational system. I am dismayed at how education is now viewed by the city. They see it as a power base for themselves and their cronies, and a contract mill for their corporate friends such as Pearson Prentice Hall and McGraw Hill. Their priorities are very skewed. BloomKleinGarten would sooner get rid of senior teachers and call it "reform" than look hard at particular programs they are shoving down teachers' throats and if the skills taught by these programs are adequate. The unasked question is, if teachers are no longer the center of classroom communication, then are these lockstep programs helping to set up a positive relationship between the child and the subject matter, whatever it is?Green Dot is not an educational answer; in the long run, it is simply managerial. The school system has become so unstable that the middle class of the city is beginning to consider moving out of the area to places more livable with less expense, and not too far from Manhattan. This may be the KleinBloomGarten legacy more than anything else: driving out the middle class, Green Dot or not. Cutting the parents out of the equation was a fatal error on the part of KleinBloomGarten. The sinister Minister of Education, Herr Klein, believes with all his heart that testing is education. No, your highness, communicating and thus teaching followed by the desired learning is what embodies education, not tests. If he was an educator, he would have known that. But he and his henchmen are power brokers and edu- slavemasters. Education is a human service. They have managed to take the "human" away from the "service".