A Sunday Night Rant

Wow! Two weeks without a post. I apologize to everyone. Not only have I been extremely busy, but it has been extremely difficult to write with two of my best source materials no longer at the school. Also there is the revamping of the blog which I keep putting off. I want to change the name and URL but my mind has been a blank.

But something has come across my mind. I actually read it first in EdnotesOnline, and in yesterday's New York Post. Mayor Bloomberg thinks that parents involved in the DOE are bad. Bad because they know nothing of education. I find this laughable. Just look at the first three paragraphs.

Mayor Bloomberg said yesterday that parents should butt out of trying to dictate educational policy as the debate over mayoral control of the schools intensifies.

"You do not want parents setting educational policy. You do not want parents telling teachers how to teach. Teachers would not be happy about that," Bloomberg said on his WOR radio program.

"That's what you have professionals for," he added.

Does this not contradict the last seven years of mayoral control? Please explain to me Chancellor Klein's qualifications in education. That is except the six months he taught in 1969. Or better yet, golden boy Whitney Tilson's qualifications. Yes, that Whitney Tilson of the upper East Side liberal Tilson's. Also the Whitney Tilson with the poor manners, and angry, mean blog. Now I am sure Whitney means well, but he is some type of investment/hedge fund dude. What does he know about education? Other than deriding those who disagree with him? Whitney is good if you wish to know what rest stops one can cruise in the metropolitan area, but education? Nah.

Remember opinions are like a**holes. Whitney is one, and everyone has one. But I have digressed.

No one has said that parents should make policy. What people are saying is that parents should be involved in the decision making process and have access to redress their complaints immediately. In fact, in my opinion (there is that word again!), I think parents truly want to know who is accountable for the child's school and want some accountability when something is wrong. Back when there were, as Bloomy likes to remind us, "32 bureaucracies" all a parent need ed to do if they had a problem was stay local and actually speak to the local superintendent. Now, where does that person go? To an ISC? To Tweed? To the LSO? Everything is so centralized.

Just look at what happened in my school. No one was willing to accept responsibility. The buck was passed. Nothing was done until someones a** was on the line. But again I digress.

I think the real reason Bloomy and Klein don't want parental involvement is they think they are smarter and feel they need to take care of the great non-white. The majority of the public school students are non-white and Bloomy and Klein with their superiority clearly in their own minds feel that they need to be Uncle Mike and Uncle Joel and tell the non-white what is good for them. They do not give one iota about these people. Of course Klein likes to say how he is one of them by growing up in the projects of Queens. But that was fifty years ago. Let's see Klein come to the Melrose Houses and hang. At night. Than we can talk.

Only in NYC are the parents shat on. This will be unacceptable in Saddle River, Great Neck, Scarsdale, or Greenwich. Why is it in NYC?