Klein's Educrats Undermine Good Teaching

A teacher says rugs & rocking chairs

replace spelling tests & dictionaries

By R.M. ISAAC

A superintendent from Joel Klein's Education Department recently sat in on one of my seventh-grade classes. He conceded that my students, among the least academically oriented in the Western world, were fascinated by the college-level words I insisted they could handle.

But then I got hit with a revelation: My lesson was fatally flawed, because vocabulary words were written in chalk on a traditional blackboard!

Later that day, I read stretches of Elie Wiesel's Holocaust memoir "Night" to a similar class of typecast kids, and they were as attentive as West Point cadets. But because the lesson did not fit the lockstep and scripted format of Deputy Schools Chancellor Diana Lam, it was ruled an act of grave noncompliance.

The noose is tightening around the necks of all teachers who do not rigidly execute the orders of Lam and her staff developers.

The Education Department calls its actions progressive when they are the opposite. The department discredits any educational practice that has worked in the past. For example, spelling tests are disallowed because they supposedly strike fear, do not relate to experience and produce a distaste for language.

Teachers are warned not to correct errors with red ink because that color is "aggressive." Grammar is not taught because it is "dull." Children are encouraged to invent their own spelling so that they can discover the delights of creativity. Dictionaries are frowned on. They have been replaced by mandatory word walls where random but relevant-sounding terms are taped.

The disciples of progressivism imply that absolute standards trigger inner conflicts in kids, that they are natural learners who are mentally sterilized by direct teaching. In some schools, teachers' desks are removed because they are symbols of authority. Other teachers receive unsatisfactory job ratings simply because their bulletin boards are not showpieces for visitors.

Educrats tour the building, consulting their checklists and looking for a host of missing items. Among these are rugs, rocking chairs and "mission statements." I doubt if many children can tell what their school's mission statement means. But it is critical to the landscape of every classroom.

Central to Lam's regime is "staff development." A school may have a literacy coach, a math coach and two part-time "Aussies," so named because of the Education Department's questionable association with an Australian outfit. They are the enforcers of doctrine.

The ideologues at the Education Department are assassinating our once-proud public school system. They have brought winds of change that should provoke a storm of protest.

Isaac teaches at Junior High School 189 in Flushing, Queens, where he is a teachers union chapter leader.

Originally published on February 8, 2004