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FEBRUARY 2006

The Flavor of the Month

By CSA President Jill Levy

(This column is excerpted from Jill Levy’s speech to the union membership at the CSA Conference at the New York Hilton. The complete speech can be read at www.csa-nyc.org.)

Each year, you attend this Conference to demonstrate your genuine and unswerving loyalty to the education of children – a dedication that transcends politics, reorganizations, budget crises, and the latest sexy “flavor of the month” in education reform.

This month’s flavor is Charter Schools and it is no mere whim that Joel Klein and Mayor Bloomberg strongly support charter schools and want to control them. Mr. Klein has repeatedly said privately to me, and publicly that he believes that charter schools are “the answer.” The answer to what?

Are charter schools the answer to responding to parents, being collaborative, bringing the “public” back into public education?

Or are they simply the precursors to vouchers? Are they the precursors to privatization? (By the way, the new buzz word for privatizing education is “entrepreneurialism.” So, if you’re not entrepreneurial, you can’t be a good leader. Well forget it. We know where that’s going.)

Here’s another question: Is this quest for charter schools a way to get rid of professional unions—the unions that they don’t want to deal with; the unions that they do not respect; the unions that, in fact, speak for their members? Their fondest desire is to do with you what they will – move you, fire you, intimidate you, harass you. Read the November 30 Education Week to find out Joel Klein’s views about union contracts and “entrepreneurialism”.

Joel Klein said: “In a system that is producing results that we as a nation find somewhere between awful and deplorable, we need to think seriously about an environment that’s going to foster entrepreneurialism so that we have innovation in the system.” How dare he say that? Yes, we have issues. Yes, we need to do better in some cases, but, deplorable?

Joel Klein’s embrace of an entrepreneurial system would have us working in a school system that bends to the whims of private funders and their ideas about what education is. Tweed and its cadre of young MBAs creates new, untested policies and reorganizations and calls them “reforms.” This house of cards, funded by outside interests, will come tumbling down when, guess what, all these private philanthropists move on to the next flavor of the month for them.

And who gets left to pick up the pieces?

We do! When this new experiment fails, who will be blamed? We will, the school administrators and supervisors—the first to get blamed when things go wrong and the last to get a contract.

Well, Mr. Klein may still think that the reorganization is “a work in progress” or that you’re “on the right track”, or “moving in the right direction,” but he needs to know that you, every one of you, supervisors, administrators, teachers, parents, paraprofessionals, school aides, all of you, you are the people who struggle to keep ahead of that train that’s on the “right track” and its ever-changing rules and mandates. You are the people that Joel Klein should be applauding today.#

Jill Levy is the President of the Council of School Supervisors  and Administrators.

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