Mark Naison: "It's like the Gestapo, the education Gestapo!" - Citizen Combatants: Education Activism in New York State

Mark Naison: "It's like the Gestapo, the education Gestapo!" - Citizen Combatants: Education Activism in New York State:



Mark Naison: "It's like the Gestapo, the education Gestapo!"

Last summer Mark Naison and I walked together across the verdant lawn at Fordham University.  He wore a heavy black brace on his left knee and he was limping badly.  It was an old tennis injury, Mark explained, that he had exacerbated by playing hard even as his orthopedist had told him to rest.  For anyone else, that black brace would have been a heavy anchor.  For Mark it was a trivial inconvenience that he dragged along with him as he charged forward.  I could barely keep up. 

I had reached out to Mark as I began to explore the impact of education policy on public education in New York.  I asked, “If you were to think about the policies that you’ve witnessed, as they’ve been rolled out over the last few years, which would you say are the most deleterious, and why?”

“I would say school closings,” Mark replied.  “I think once you start closing allegedly failing schools rather than trying to help them, what it does is create a wave of fear that goes through every community where those schools are located.  It puts teachers under intolerable stress, principals under intolerable stress, and it eventually ends up on the backs of students.  I have story after story of teachers on medication for anxiety, depression.  What does it mean when teachers are constantly looking over their shoulders, if their students don’t get the test scores that are needed to keep the school open. 

“The principal loses, everybody loses.  Everybody is afraid of being displaced.  And you have no recourse [because of mayoral control]. The panel for education policy is totally controlled by the mayor.  They make the decision about whether or not the school is closed.  Your democratic input has no meaning.  So everybody’s voices are smothered.  One hundred sixty eight schools have been closed in New York City since 2007.  And many thousands of teachers have been pushed out. 

“But it’s not just the schools that are closed.  It’s the schools that aren’t closed that could be closed.  So there’s this polarized relationship.  You’ve been an administrator, you have to do evaluations.  It becomes loaded with tension and pressure in way I don’t think it ever quite was before. 

“I’m not saying that principals and teachers ever had an easy relationship, but the level of . . . [Mark thinks about how to phrase his comment].  I think many principals became abusers of teachers.  It’s one thing if you are secure.  But if you’re about to lose your job, everybody is going to keep passing it along.  So it goes from the principal to the teacher, to the kids, to the family.  And the result is kids who need most to be nurtured and loved are now being put under stress. 

“At the same time, the best things about school are being pushed out.  Art, music, history, trips, physical activity.  And it’s not happening in affluent schools because the scores are going to be good, because the PTAs raise money that can be used to hire art and music and technology teachers. 

“So there are terrible, tragic consequences in the Bronx, where recess is being used for test prep where you have the highest rates of obesity in the state.  It’s a nightmare—the fear, the wave of fear, and this way before anybody even knew what the Common Core was.  It started in 2007, when they started giving letter grades to [New York City] schools. 

“The other thing, this is all called ‘civil rights.’  This is supposed to be for equity.  The person responsible for the worst policies in NYC schools was a so-called civil rights lawyer named James Liebman from Columbia.  He was the first accountability officer in the Bloomberg administration.  He said that we have to figure out a way to make schools in low income communities perform.  And he figured out all these formulas for rating schools, based on test scores and other things.  So, here he is, in the name of what he thinks is equity, maximizing Mark Naison: "It's like the Gestapo, the education Gestapo!" - Citizen Combatants: Education Activism in New York State: