When Mayor Bill de Blasio replaced the Bloomberg Administration, Michael Mulgrew claimed at the delegate assembly there was a change of tone at the DOE and that the leadership was apologizing for all their anti-teacher actions and demonizing of the profession. Nice words, but when it has comes to actual deeds, there has been NO CHANGE IN HOW THE DOE TREATS THE TEACHERS! Every school I go to the teachers are under stress trying to fulfill the punitive Danielson rublic, the dubious rigor of Common Core, and the low morale.
I know it takes time to see changes and that this school year is a transition time between the punitive Bloomberg Administration and the De Blasio Administration. However, Chancellor Carmen Farina has failed to make the changes necessary to instill confidence in her. She has made few leadership or policy changes, made inappropriate statements, and backed down on the charter school issue. Worse, it seems that she's taking no action against the DOE bloated bureaucracy and punitive leadership who protected "bad principals" and has apparently backed away from placing the ATRs in schools that could benefit the schools with extra teaching support by using them as "push in teachers" in their subject area or as co-teachers.
The result is that until the next school year the New York City Public School students will suffer from inadequate resources, inexperienced teachers, and worst of all, the lack of accountability by the DOE administrators, like the useless "Children First Networks" that simply suck up much needed funds that could go to the classroom instead.
Every school I go to have funding issues. There's no money to fix broken smart boards that were placed in a middle of a blackboard, making instruction very difficult. Many schools require teachers to supply their own copy paper and quite a few schools require teachers to buy their own classroom supplies. Worse, in almost every school I walk into there are broken copy machines, lack of preventive maintenance, and wi-fi networks that don't have adequate bandwidth and are insufficient for use for classroom projects. Accountability for these problems are dumped on the schools while the bloated DOE bureaucracy denies any responsiblity for these problems.Unless Chancellor Carmen Farina starts to do some major housecleaning, its not a change of tone that UFT President Michael Mulgrew claims he sees but the "same old song" when it comes to what's actually going on in the schools when it comes to the the dysfunctional, DOE with the children the real losers.