NYC Educator: Death to "Legal"

NYC Educator: Death to "Legal"

Death to "Legal"

Susan Edelman in the Post writes about how Carranza's claim that nothing can be cut in the DOE budget is a lie. We are talking, of course, about things outside the classroom. I, for one, consider myself lucky when I even have a classroom, as opposed to a trailer, a closet, or a half room.

The city's plan looks bleak indeed:

The city has proposed $827 million in DOE cuts, including slashing school budgets by $285 million. This would reduce arts programs, counselors and social workers in needy districts, and college-prep for high schoolers. The DOE would also put off new classes for 3-year-olds, installation of air conditioners, and rat extermination.

So it's okay that our kids lack guidance or support as they sit around in sweltering, rat-infested hellholes. The important thing, evidently, is to maintain the bureaucrats in Tweed. After all, who but they can perform important services like sending teachers back for three days of training in Covid infested buildings? Who else will insist we need intensive training in remote learning by administrators who have never done such a thing in their entire lives?

Before Mayor de Blasio made the cruel, discriminatory  and boneheaded decision to keep schools open after closing Broadway, his worst educational failure was failing to clean out the cesspool that Bloomberg left intact at Tweed. It was really heartbreaking that this supposedly progressive mayor would leave in place a bunch of bureaucrats whose sole purpose in life was to push the ideological fanaticism of anti-public education Michael Bloomberg.

The Bloomberg agency that bothers chapter leaders the most is "legal." When principals violate contracts, rules, chancellor's regulations, or common decency, it's the job of legal to tell them that's fine, don't worry about it. After all, the only recourse chapter leaders and member have is often the grievance process, which is cumbersome, time-consuming, and potentially ineffective. (We thankfully have some new processes that sidestep this one.) The first step, of course, is to go the principal, the person who made the bad decision. At this step, the principal calls legal, who invariably says the principal is right.

So the principal doesn't need to read the contract, and in many cases legal hasn't either. For example, a principal has 90 days to place a letter in file. Once, I brought a grievance CONTINUE READING: NYC Educator: Death to "Legal"