Dan, do you realize whyAwesome Matt Polazzo is dangerous? Maybe it is because Awesome Matt wrote:
The controversy was stirred up by Stephen Brill's article "The Rubber Room," featured in the Aug. 31 New Yorker. It shows the incredible lengths the United Federation of Teachers has gone to protect bad teachers.
Teachers accused of offenses are forced into "rubber rooms" where they fight over chairs and play cards for six hours and 50 minutes a day.
See Dan, Matt doesn't have the higher order thinking skills to realize what a shill Brill (Hey! That rhymes!) is for Tweed, nor does Matt know what a failure at almost everything Brill has been in his life.
What is that Dan? You are asking if Matt failed to institute HOTS for any other part of his article? Hmmm, let's see. Awesome Matt writes about what his love interest has done to the schools:
Dan, people like Awesome Matt want to give all the powers to the administration. But we know what happens when one has absolute power. Ten years ago Dan, what do you think would have happened to you? But you are over forty and think for yourself. Awesome Matt thinks you are useless.It is true that Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein have tried mightily to reform New York's education system. They have expanded the amount of time teachers work in a day, given administrators the ability to hire and fire their assistant principals and allowed assistant principals to hire teachers that they choose.........
.........We must insist that a new contract contain three key provisions. The contract must allow administrators to fire bad teachers, give them the power to hire any teacher they want, and give administrators flexibility in setting the pay of their teachers.
What makes one wonder is what would the powers that be say if they saw teenage girls shaking their "bootys" at Awesome Matt Polazzo during instructional time and Awesome Matt laughing and applauding whilst it being done? But Awesome Matt Polazzo is not over forty. Yet. Nothing will come of it. For those curious, please check out 4:55 to 5:35 of video.
8 comments:
sbsb:
Your point is well taken. However, Matt Polazzo is old news and even his student defenders now see the light.
I am sure Matt Polazzo is very sorry he ever wrote his misinformed article.
It's hard to tell much from a short video clip, but I must say that I would never have allowed that kind of conduct in my classroom. Polazzo should have put the brakes on that performance as soon as those girls started dancing. It's totally inappropriate in any school setting.
I wonder if Polazzo read the story of Daniel Smith, who has been in the rubber room for over a year because a girl claims he told her to sit on his lap, while he says he told her she should do a lap and sit on her spot. He is now suing the city. Mr. Polazzo insists that someone like Smith should be fired without due process. Yet there is video of Polazzo sitting and actually applauding while two of his female students shake their butts at him. Polazzo had better hope that Klein doesn't get wind of this video.
Chaz, I understand your point. In fact you are right. I know Dan Smith very well. Dan is a good guy. It is not fair how he is treated whilst sycophants like Matt Polazzo are allowed to get away with what he is doing in that video. Not only having the girls shake their stuff at him, but where is the instruction going on? Since day 1 I have heard that instruction is to happen all the way through the very last day of school.
Agreed with Chaz about the fact that Polazzo is old news. Not sure I've "seen the light" and been fully converted to your point of view. I still think he makes valid points in his article, and that he does not claim to be presenting a full solution, or even a full diagnosis of what plagues the New York education system, but one intentionally strong critique of one aspect of the system.
And he laughed and even clapped at a crude joke that was the beginning of a group presentation. As a compilation video of irreverent seniors on their second-to-last day of school, they did not include what I am sure was a relatively substantive rest of the presentation. The idea that you defend the introduction into the classroom as serious literature of disturbingly graphic descriptions of autoerotic mishaps by one teacher, and then wag your finger at another who laughs at a *student*'s joke seems a bit absurd.
At Stuyvesant, students have the tendency to switch rapidly back and forth between serious discussion and crude humor (as does, I would note, this blog). Polazzo recognizes this tendency, and instead of chiding us for our typical teenage sensibilities, he focuses on stimulating our intellectual capacities. Yes, there will be the occasional lapse into crass humor, and yes, as people get senioritis and college approaches, it gets worse towards the end of the year. Is there something wrong with having a cheap laugh before launching into a serious discussion of whatever they were discussing?
I offer no defense to the band (assistant) director in the first segment of that clip. He is one of the incompetent teachers that I believe Polazzo's article was intended to address. And in the context of the rest of the clip, I understand why you would think that there is no instruction going on. However, the last few days of the class were group presentations on various issues of governance in various countries.
Yes, Polazzo wants to make it easier for administrators to fire teachers. This does not mean he wants them to just fire teachers out of the blue. In companies where bosses have the ability to fire their employees, it is not as if one small complaint from one dissatisfied customer will get an employee fired. My only real perspective on this is from the restaurant business--my father owns and runs a restaurant. The tendency is for him to be protective of his staff. When there is a troublesome customer who keeps complaining, it is assumed that it is the customer that is troublesome. Why people assume that principals would assume otherwise is beyond me. In slightly larger businesses, even things like seniority pay structures develop, because management understands the value of on-the-job experience. The idea that principals are going to be evil overlords that are looking for any excuse to fire an otherwise good teacher is absurd. And if there is an occasional crazy principal, hand-in-hand with the ability for administrators to fire teachers easily would be, I imagine, the ability for the DOE to more easily fire administrators.
We are going back to the same arguments again and again and we are not going to convince each other. For now, however, I will continue to respond to the unwarranted, unrelated attacks on Mr. Polazzo that have nothing to do with the validity of his claims. Each time I do so, I attempt to say something substantive as well, and as I admit to being somewhat removed from the situation, being a freshman in college right now, I will tend to repeat the things I know, and continue to make the arguments I can, in addition to deflecting the personal idiocy.
Just to make clear, I refer (albeit not by name) in my earlier post to Greg Van Voorhis, not Dan Smith.
If what Dan smith says is true, then he obviously should not be fired. Has anyone else from the class been consulted? I imagine in a situation like this in most businesses, an administrator would have a few quick conversations with witnesses, in this case, students in the same class, so as to ascertain what actually happened, and then make a decision, rather than wait for an overly formal legal process outside of either his or the teacher's control.
A typical administrative tactic is to 'forget' to interview witnesses or even to question the teacher. Presto...off to the rubber room with a disliked teacher.
Due process comes later...sometimes much later ... And there are no consequences for administrative misconduct. Wake up and smell the coffee my young friends.
To the last blogger. I find it fascinating that you refer to the kangaroo court procedures as due process.
This procedure with an arbitrator who has a serious financial interest in the outcome of a case is a disaster and a mockery.
According to the law the arbitrator should be a neutral with no more than $200 per diem at stake.
To have a permanent panel of arbitrators who are earning $2,000 per day, invites coruption. Many of these so called arbitrators have been mining this lucrative vein for many years.
There is no fairness in this situation. To sit in hell for years and then sit through a farce of a hearing is just icing on the cake.
Look for a new class action suit that has been just filed in federal court on behalf of all rubberroom inmates/victims.
I sincerely hope that this time some semblance of justice wil be served.
As for teachers who think that adminstrators should have absolute power.
Look what happened to the king of France during the start of the French Revolution. Such an end would be fitting for many adminstrative types.
However, they should be judged by the same neutral arbitrators that routinely destroy educators lives. That would be just and proper for such good people.
Sickened by the System.
To the last blogger. I find it fascinating that you refer to the kangaroo court procedures as due process.
This procedure with an arbitrator who has a serious financial interest in the outcome of a case is a disaster and a mockery.
According to the law the arbitrator should be a neutral with no more than $200 per diem at stake.
To have a permanent panel of arbitrators who are earning $2,000 per day, invites coruption. Many of these so called arbitrators have been mining this lucrative vein for many years.
There is no fairness in this situation. To sit in hell for years and then sit through a farce of a hearing is just icing on the cake.
Look for a new class action suit that has been just filed in federal court on behalf of all rubberroom inmates/victims.
I sincerely hope that this time some semblance of justice wil be served.
As for teachers who think that adminstrators should have absolute power.
Look what happened to the king of France during the start of the French Revolution. Such an end would be fitting for many adminstrative types.
However, they should be judged by the same neutral arbitrators that routinely destroy educators lives. That would be just and proper for such good people.
Sickened by the System.
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