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JUNE 2004

“Twas brillig and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe: All mimsy were the borogroves, And the mome raths outgrabe.”
—Lewis Carroll, Alice Through the Looking-Glass
by Jill Levy, President, CSA

I rely upon my morning walks to clear my head so I can concentrate on important issues. Lately, though, these walks haven’t helped. I hear lines from Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” with each step I take mixed up utterances from Tweed.

The child Alice (of Wonderland fame) says of the poem, “Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas—only I don’t exactly know what they are!” That’s pretty much how I feel when reflecting upon “Children First.” After this past year, “Children First” seems to mean “Children Whenever.”

Mayor Bloomberg’s first priority was turning the Board of Education into a centralized structure that disconnects instruction and administration and mimics franchise-style businesses. Now, I’m not about to defend the old bureaucracy at 110 Livingston Street. But within that structure, many BOE employees developed relationships to identify and solve problems before they affected children.

This year, because of the administration’s almost total disregard for children’s needs, principals scrambled for services that were not in place or were seriously deficient. Here are a few of the problems that arose under “Children First.”

Notwithstanding warnings from CSA and the UFT, the DOE failed to implement a system to insure the safety of students until this winter when a newspaper exposed the chaos ensuing in several schools. DOE dismantled the suspension system of yesterday but forgot to develop a new one.

Selections of literacy and math programs were the hot topics. Ultimately, Schools Chancellor Joel Klein back-pedaled to make sure the city didn’t lose $41 million in federal funding. Was the

selection of programs that were not researched-based putting our children first?

Does “Children First” mean our special needs’ students receive appropriate instructional support services including a timely evaluation? For Klein, the disassembling of one system and its replacement with a new one was significantly more important than meeting the needs of children. Children first?—only after a massive organizational change that left thousands of children without support services at all.

The social promotion and high stakes testing program is allegedly based on the premise that children come first. But between the lack of an appeals process in the initial policy, and the question of whether some children benefited from seeing last year’s test questions, this administration did not put children first. If it had, Tweed would have announced a well-thought-out plan, one that did not need immediate revision, one that did not have parents and children worried sick, and one that would have ensured that the test results were untainted.

This year makes it clear that “Children First” took a back seat to “Reorganization First” and that much of what we hear from Tweed ends up being gibberish.

“Jabberwocky” is often hailed as a masterpiece of nonsense. Unfortunately, much of what we hear coming out of Tweed is nonsense too, and differs all too little from the Jabberwocky that used to emanate from the halls of 110 Livingston Street.#

Jill Levy is the president of the Council of Supervisors and Administrators (CSA).

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