We, public school parents and former parents - like me - are furious that Mayor Mike Bloomberg has shown once again disgust at anyone outside of his inner circle as having any leadership ability. And I mean, the ability to be Chancellor of the NYC school system, the largest in the United States.

Last week Joel Klein resigned as the alleged 'chancellor' of the NYC public school system and immediately Mayor Bloomberg announced his new 'chancellor', Cathleen Black.

The very same Ms. Black who created a sex app for the iphone and droid. Give me a break, Mike.?You put great teachers in the rubber room if they mentioned the word "sex" even in Health Education!

Cathleen Black is, I hear, not the rude and nasty person that Joel Klein is, but that is not the point. For 8 long years we gave a chance to a non-educator, Klein, to improve the NYC public school system, and what did we get? Nothing, nada, zilch. Except a bigger highly paid staff at headquarters who allow test scores and individual achievement of students to go down the drain. No, Mr. Bloomberg, on this one we hope and pray that you will not get your way.

Hmmmm.....sounds like a song.

Henry Stern has it about right:

Unweighted by Experience, Cathie Black Seeks Waiver.
Will Mayor's Wish Prevail?
By Henry J. Stern, The Sun, November 12, 2010
LINK

The prospect for the granting of a waiver to Cathie Black so she can serve as New York City's school chancellor may have dimmed a bit in the last two days.

For one thing, the New York Times reported today, in an article by Winnie Hu, that the man who will decide whether to grant the waiver, State Education Commissioner David M. Steiner, "will convene a screening panel consisting of representatives of the State Education Department and educational organizations to make a recommendation to Dr. Steiner." The commissioner's spokesman "would not speculate on how long that would take."

For another, two of Chancellor Joel Klein's deputies have announced their resignations, and others are expected to leave as well. One reason cited in favor of Ms. Black was that the Klein management team would be available to assist her as she familiarized herself with the educational universe.

No truly independent screening panel of educators is likely to conclude that no experience whatsoever in their professional field is adequate preparation for the most difficult and complex job in local public education. If they felt that way, they would be expressing the view that their own professional qualifications had little value, and that any corporate executive could fill the positions they now hold.

This does not mean that Ms. Black will not receive the necessary waiver. The Commissioner and his screening panel may be responsive to the wishes of a higher authority. Mayor Bloomberg wants the waiver, and carloads of movers and shakers will be influenced by his wishes. There is a strong argument that, since the law provides for mayoral control, and the first element of control is selecting the head of the enterprise, this appointment is his call, regardless of whom he may choose, assuming that the nominee is literate and not a felon.

There are also many people who believe that some schools are ungovernable, and some children uneducable, and that giving the mayor a free ride on the chancellorship would make it easier to fix the blame on him if a less than satisfactory outcome results.

Mayor Bloomberg has previously shown his distaste for technical, legal standards. When Patricia Lancaster resigned as Commissioner of Buildings in 2008, the law required that the Commissioner of the department be an architect or engineer. The mayor's choice, Deputy Commissioner Robert LiMandri, was neither. He solved that problem by having the City Council pass a local law repealing the requirement. Mr. LiMandri is now the Commissioner and he is well regarded.

Since the news from the Buildings Department is usually limited to collapsing cranes or bribe-taking employees, it is certainly arguable that his real estate background is as valuable as one in architecture would be. One may still wonder: is there not one architect or engineer in the City of New York who would also do a first-rate job of overseeing the Department of Buildings? The answer to that question depends on how wide one casts the net.

The Schools Chancellor's position is one that is a target for year-round assault by various groups. The politically correct term for them is "stakeholders"; the pejorative description, "special interests". Public officials begin with a modest reserve of good will, which is depleted over time as group after group is dissatisfied because their particular demands are not being met.

Ambitious politicians boast about their concern for education; photographs of children decorate their mailers. Some of these friends of education, however, do not go so far as actually voting for additional funds, or giving the Chancellor the power to manage the system.

In view of these hazards and obstacles, it could be said that the Chancellor, an official whose importance is comparable to that of the police commissioner, should be a person of impeccable and undisputed credentials, a Horace Mann of the 21st century, if such a person could be found and persuaded to take the job. To select a chancellor with no background whatsoever in education is certainly a daring leap of faith.

It is true that Mayor Bloomberg himself, a successful business executive, had no experience in government before he was first elected mayor in 2001. Since he has basically been a good mayor (he was re-elected twice, has generally appointed and removed commissioners on the merits, has run a scandal-free administration, and innovated in public health and environmental issues), it is understandable for him to believe that others who have achieved great success in business can use their talents to succeed in the public sector.

A perennial problem in the field of education is credentialism. Schools for teachers award degrees routinely, and school boards may require those degrees as qualifications for being hired. It is too often the case that possession of a degree has little relationship to ability to teach in a classroom. But even those who reject credentialism may support minimal standards for people who hold important positions in educational administration. Credentials may not have intrinsic value, but they do provide a veneer of protection for the qualified and unqualified alike.

The Mayor weighed in on the controversy this afternoon, as Simon McCormack of The Huffington Post reports. The headline: BLOOMBERG DEFENDS AGAINST CATHIE BLACK CRITICISM, by Simon McCormack. In response to the critics of his choice, the Mayor said, "It just goes to show they have no understanding whatsoever of what the job is. This is a management job."

These troubling questions remain: How will the proposed chancellor, skilled as she may be, decide on priorities, programs, personnel and budget allocations without personal expertise and knowledge of the basic subject matter she will oversee? How many of the expert professional team said to have been assembled will stay? What will she do if the experts disagree? On what basis will she make critical choices?

Will the members of the screening committee exercise independent judgment? Will the Mayor's wishes be dispositive? Does Speaker Sheldon Silver, a friend and patron of Merryl Tisch, chancellor of the state Board of Regents, have a discreet opinion on the matter?

The elusive qualities of managerial judgment and the ability to lead and inspire may be present in Cathie Black. If she gets the waiver, she will have the opportunity to demonstrate them. But will her skills be sufficient to improve educational outcomes for over a million children?

November 11, 2010
For Pick to Lead Schools, One Man Left to Persuade
By WINNIE HU, NY TIMES

The man who will decide whether Cathleen P. Black, a publisher with no educational leadership experience, is qualified to lead the nation’s largest school system is himself a career educator known for his efforts to better prepare teachers for the classroom.

But David M. Steiner, the New York State education commissioner, is also a well-regarded figure among the school reform movement, whose guiding principle is that American students are best served by a results-driven, businesslike approach to education management.

In the debate over Ms. Black’s qualifications — or lack of them — Dr. Steiner has quickly emerged as a focal point in what is widely expected to be a contentious process. State law requires all school chiefs to hold a professional certificate in educational leadership and to have at least three years’ experience in schools, two qualifications she lacks. The law allows for the education commissioner to grant a waiver to “exceptionally qualified persons.”

At least one elected official — Tony Avella, a former city councilman from Queens elected last week to the State Senate — has already urged the commissioner to deny the waiver, and Merryl H. Tisch, the chancellor of the State Board of Regents, said Thursday that her office had been flooded with phone calls and e-mails from parents, teachers and community leaders both for and against the waiver. She has no formal role in the waiver process but said she would be facilitating it.

Dr. Steiner, who took office in October 2009, has so far given no indication of where he stands, and declined to be interviewed.

Tom Dunn, a spokesman for the commissioner, said the Education Department had not yet received New York City’s request for a waiver for Ms. Black.

Mr. Dunn said that once it does, Dr. Steiner will convene a screening panel consisting of representatives of the State Education Department and educational organizations to make a recommendation to Dr. Steiner. Mr. Dunn would not speculate on how long that would take.

Dr. Steiner has not previously received a waiver request, though his predecessor, Richard P. Mills, approved a waiver for the current schools chancellor, Joel I. Klein, in 2002. But in 2004, the Education Department told the city not to bother applying for a waiver for one candidate for a deputy chancellor position, which also required a certificate.

Dr. Steiner, 52, was born in Princeton, N.J., where his father was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study. He grew up mainly in Cambridge, England, though he briefly attended Public School 41 in Greenwich Village.

He graduated from Balliol College at Oxford University with a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in philosophy, politics and economics, and later earned a doctorate in political science from Harvard University.

During a long career in education, Dr. Steiner has been director of arts education at the National Endowment for the Arts, and a professor at the school of education at Boston University. He also taught at Vanderbilt University.

He is known among reformers for his efforts to get education schools to spend more time imbuing teachers with practical classroom skills and less time on abstract notions like the “role of school in democracy,” he said in an interview this year.

As dean of the school of education at Hunter College, he developed a system of filming student teachers to evaluate their mastery of skills like making eye contact, calling students by name and waiting for more complete answers.

“He very clearly thinks out of the box,” said Charlotte K. Frank, a longtime New York City educator and a member of the New York State Board of Regents from 2000 to 2002.

This year, he was instrumental in getting the state teachers’ union to agree to a system of evaluating teachers based partly on test scores, which has been a major goal of the new generation of education leaders, including Mr. Klein and the federal education secretary, Arne Duncan. That agreement helped the state win nearly $700 million in federal Race to the Top money.

Henry L. Grishman, superintendent of the Jericho district on Long Island, said Dr. Steiner has also been a forceful advocate for professional development for teachers, encouraging districts to revise and update their programs to make them more effective. “He has brought a lot of creative and substantive ideas to the table, and I’m eagerly waiting to see them come to fruition,” he said.

A narcissistic approach to education reform
By Valerie Strauss
LINK

This post was written by Mark Phillips, professor emeritus of secondary education at San Francisco State University and author of a monthly column on education for the Marin Independent Journal.

By Mark Phillips

I haven’t read any Kafka in recent years, but I don’t really need to. I just pick up the newspaper or turn on CNN and catch up with the latest in the worlds of politics and education.

The other day it was a scene in New York City with Mayor Michael Bloomberg announcing Joel Klein’s departure as chancellor of the city’s public schools and the appointment of Hearst Magazine Chairman Cathleen Black as his successor. As I listened, the soundtrack from The Twilight Zone emerged from my distant memory. The narrative was out of touch with reality.

“It’s a chance to change the world,” said Bloomberg. Does he really believe that?

“She’s been there and done it,” he said of Black, who has no serious professional background in public education. Apparently he thinks anyone who can help oversee Popular Mechanics magazine can reform the largest public school system in the country.

The soundtrack music kept getting louder.

“There’s virtually no one who knows more about the skills our children will need to succeed in the 21st century economy,” concluded Bloomberg.

In the world in which most of us live, there are hundreds, even thousands, of experts in the field of education who know more than Cathie Black about the skills kids need. Even I do.

If these changes affected only New York, we could just leave it to the teachers and parents of New York to respond. But this is symptomatic of a widespread pathology that turns a certain breed of education reformer -- those who insist that business principles will save public education -- into heroes, and it is being fueled by many in the media, “Waiting for Superman” director Davis Guggenheim and others.

There is a form of craziness infecting the world of education reform today. Repeating the same behavior over and over again even if it fails and expecting a different result is nutty. And what too many reformers keep doing is moving ahead without input from teachers and parents.

Bloomberg’s appointment of Black is another example of appointment without consultation -- and more. Michelle Rhee resigned as D.C. schools chancellor truly believing that her scorched earth policy was successful, despite evidence that it wasn’t.

If you don’t agree with a diagnosis of cultural insanity, consider a diagnosis of narcissism at the top levels of education reform.

Narcissists inflate a sense of their own importance and capabilities.

Bloomberg, Rhee, and Klein all have talked about their role in education reform in terms that seem to go beyond the concrete realities of the job, or, as Bloomberg revealingly stated, engaged in a chance to change the world. In reality it would be terrific if the new New York chancellor could just manage her budget, the one area where she appears to have some competency, and perhaps assist some principals, teachers, and parents to effectively change some schools.

Guggenheim’s film, which transforms Rhee into a hero, will not, as he hopes, change American education either. Aroused interest rarely translates to change without a well thought out strategy that includes all the players. In this case too, the backlash probably equals the positive responses.

Businesses don’t hire chief executives who don’t understand business. Why shouldn’t we insist that our education leaders understand education?

Klein, Rhee, Black -- none of them were given the job of running a school system because they had the knowledge base needed to fully understand the complexities of public education. Picture what it would be like if Meg Whitman was brought in to oversee the reform of medical practices for the city of New York. Would Bloomberg note that this would determine patient survival rates for years to come?

Edward Pajak, professor and chair of the Department of Teacher Development and Leadership at Johns Hopkins University, writes in a forthcoming article in Teachers College Record that a narcissistic education policy style “denies the true learning needs of students; dis-empowers classroom teachers and schools by undermining trust in self and others; and reproduces narcissistic dynamics within the culture.”

It is imperative that education leaders today include teachers, principals and parents in their decision-making, but leaders such as Rhee actually took pride in making her own choices without their input.

Every time I hear the phrase “the skills our children need for the 21st century,” I think of the lines from Lord Byron: “If I laugh at any mortal thing, ‘tis that I may not weep.”

The “21st century skills” phrase, now a cliché, is out of a dark comic script, divorced from the potpourri of what kids really need to both survive and thrive.

But why don't we care as much about the 21st century skills educational leaders need, including a firm knowledge base of public education, the ability to engage in participatory decision making, and an understanding of how to build trust with teachers and parents?

It's past time that we did.



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