Mayor Bloomberg's Flatulence: The Tyranny of Mayoral NYC Educational Control

Mayor Bloomberg’s Flatulence: The tyranny of Mayoral NYC School Control
by Paul Schroeder
 
The insoluble problems to New York City education persist in badly outdated curriculum, crumbling school infrastructures, an a priori pupil ennui, widespread parental carelessness and untrained and inept assistant principals and principals.

These assistant principals and principals are unprofessional as well as untrained except in a new tactic of widespread mean -spiritedness.

These A.P.s and principals are taught in closed workshops, secretly encouraged by the Mayor’s Office and the Chancellor’s Office to rule by abject bullying.

Under the Mayor’s new total control, these principals have new found medieval powers over teachers in the New York City educational system.

The Teacher’s Union, the U.F.T. appears as helpless in this power struggle as David was against Goliath, and equipped with no real stones to cast.

Letters placed in teacher’s files can lead to a “U” rating which can lead to a forfeiture of license, in just two years of concerted harassment; a teacher with no letters in file for over twenty years can be railroaded out of a job quickly by a harassing Assistant Principal who takes the time to construct, ‘a paper trail’.

Teachers have fewer due process rights now than we did twenty-five years ago. We could then immediately summarily ‘grieve’ letters in file; now, we cannot instantly do so. They reside in files unchallenged.

Letters in file from unprofessional and jaundiced A.P.s and predominately now unprincipled principals, can quickly jeopardize one’s teaching job in such a skewed and unbalanced system.

I once had a letter placed in file by a virulent A.P. in Jamaica High School, on a day when I was absent, stating that my absence allowed behaviors in my pupils that my attendance would have prevented, had the substitute teacher, who could not control the class, not been needed.

You can’t make this stuff up.

With this in mind, here’s my story,

a moment in such a system, an experience of high strangeness, a close brush with one of the now typical more predatory, hostile supervisory ilk afoot, today, in New York City’s educational secondary halls, by virtue of the Mayor’s Office and its total control of city schools.

It is a story of supervisory monsters ensconced deep within departmental offices and the abject danger of a fart, under Bloomberg’s reign:

It’s October and outside of the paned windows the trees were dropping their alphabets again.

Inside, student’s pens forced writing onto newly started journals; I had handed out 8×11″ official sized paper, had distributed it to set the standard size for all the future acceptable, gradable journal entries, when

a student’s ha-ha hit the ceiling.

It had seemed to mushroom down like an A-Bomb.

It had circulated the room like an entity, the plague in Egypt.

We knew ‘stink bombs’ ; this was no ‘stink bomb’ ; someone had ‘lost their cookies’.

We had opened all of the windows, but to no avail.

Students had pulled their sweaters over their heads, had covered up their mouths and noses with my loose leaf paper and had exited into the hallway with muted mutual sounds of disgust.

An SBD, a Silent But Deadly, and true to the dinosaur fart that it was, it had emptied the room.

Not enough to have had a gasping class of thirty-six teenagers stagger into the hallway agog and offended, my teaching effectively stopped, but who had immediately stumbled onto us, arrived on the scene?

Nobody less than the “Butcher of Buchenwald”, as she had been called, trained in the Chancellor’s Leadership Academy, a severe, diminutive Assistant Principal of English, a predator with a Napoleonic complex, carrying a yellow pad just looking for trouble, who didn’t like me, and now she had found me and my class in the hall, during teaching time.

I had tried to explain to this neo Nazi WHY we were in the hall, but dubious scorn and contempt had deeply etched her face; one could see that she was already formulating a strong disciplinary letter to place in my employee file and was drooling stapling the envelope shut.

She had then stalked into the empty room, taking notes on a large yellow pad, her face red with anger and disbelief and she had exited the same room just as quickly, a few moments later.

She had looked cheated but nonplussed, had looked nowhere in particular and had loudly stated, “It WILL dissipate!”

She had quickly stalked off down the hallway, her birdlike frame hunting other victims; I never heard from her concerning that unfortunate and untimely incident .

In retrospect, I am most thankful for whatever lasting aftereffects had lingered in that deserted classroom.

That malodor had negated my having to defend myself, had prevented me from having to accumulate thirty some odd testimonies from my students about the power of that bestial stench to evict us from that room.

That one letter in file would have been a bloodied pecking spot, a peg for her to hang her hat on, for more letters to come soon afterwards.

She later gunned down some three, senior, other teachers, that semester, fine teachers who had done a splendid job, teachers who had loved their craft but they had been destroyed because they had stood up to her bullying.

She had destroyed them with many vindictive letters in their files. She gave me a wide berth after that encounter.

I like to think that perhaps the incident with me reminded her on some deeper level of her own specially trained foul twisted purpose; interestingly, she did not come back for me seeking vengeance . . .

I thought about those beloved teachers who had fallen victim to the new found power of meanness around and supporting her; of the hundreds more also deserted by their union, the UFT, subversives who had spoken up and found themselves in Rubber room type Gulags facing trumped up charges of all sorts.

I wondered how long this stench of tyranny would take to dissipate; the ‘leadership’ taught in the Chancellor’s Leadership Academy, was a hideous something no enlightened teacher could allow in his own classroom: the Art of Ugly Rule by Bullying.