Secret Revelations
by

Ron Isaac

Every New York City public school is a showcase, provided it has something to hide. Striking another blow for paradox, Chancellor Klein has harnessed reverse psychology and unleashed his serum of deceit to coarse through the collapsing veins of the gullible public. He claims to have made clear that parents and professionals are valued for their contributions while simultaneously making sure that they aren't. It is consumer exploitation at its most cynical.

Schools are public buildings that are never more closed than when they are open. Doors ajar and welcome mats do not make the school's scandals an open book. All the open books have been cooked. Only illusions are for the public record. It is Klein's domain of booby traps and shattered relationships. The carnage is bypassed on the prime time building tour. Be sure to call well in advance for an appointment. Skeletons do not go gently into the closet.

The Chancellor has broken the bonds that linked teachers, parents, and principals in their historical alliance for children. He has liquidated their role as collaborators. The Comprehensive Educational Plan, now a document as useful as a human tailbone, is a case in point.

Until Klein's gang of un-educators let the CEP twist in the wind, it was a precise, practical, and weighty document. It isolated all the factors of a school's operation and identified specific needs for improvement so that dollar and human resources could be targeted to meet them. There were other dividends, such as mutual respect, which Klein replaced with lip service.

The Plan was the product of dozens of exhaustive but exhilarating hours of hard thought and labor. It was drawn up on the basis of the immediately preceding Pass Review, conducted by a team, in the true sense of the word, of parents, teachers, administrators, and regional and central Board of Education officials, who in the pre-Klein days were educators.

Over two days they visited every classroom, took notes, and later convened to analyze every facet of the school's operation, debated needs and strategies for improvement, and collegially reached consensus without dueling egos or hostility to staff. Regardless of the directions from which their observations and proposals came, the children were the unifying constituency. The process was democratic, efficient, and fruitful. That's a strikeout in Klein's ballgame.

The Chancellor has invited parents into the schools but thrown out their freedom of inquiry into their children's placement and the justification of the school's priorities and programs. He is a master of mocking as he mollycoddles. He has a way of beguiling as he bears false witness. He says he empowers parents, yet he disenfranchises them by denying members of the mandated "School Leadership Team" their rightful access to the school's budget. Before Klein, these teams were monuments to partnership between educators and the community. Its members had at least potential influence over a range of issues, and because their counsel was entertained, there normally arose unity if not unanimity.

They are no longer viable, but like the Comprehensive Educational Plan, local school districts, and educational privilege itself, they still exist in name only. Principals are now the sole and unchallenged mistresses of all operations. Their machinations will never see the light of day, because those who proclaim the doctrine of accountability yet exempt themselves from it have barred the windows and closed the shades. These are the bureaucrats who anoint principals as CEOs, yet abridge their freedom of conscience as never before. Contrariness is the Chancellor's sport.

Klein orchestrates communications breakdowns and then makes bogus overtures to the victims of it. He encourages parents to call his Parent Engagement Hotline, e-mail their gripes to him, audit public hearings, and make politicians their sounding boards, but at the same time he denies their children special education services that are federally mandated. PTAs, historically independent watchdogs, have been undermined and superseded by Klein's new "parent coordinators" who are paid by the principal who can fire them without cause.

Parents are being humored as they are being humiliated. The school's Safety Plan, containing contingency outlines for emergencies, is typically produced without their input, but requires their signature for appearance's sake. Their children are given history texts in which dozens of modern countries are unmapped because they did not even exist when the book was copyrighted. Their children's teachers are being increasingly picked for sensitive jobs because they are the principal's chums, not because of legitimately defined qualifications. Nonetheless, according to an impartial City Council report, these teachers usually donate four hundred of their own dollars each year to their students, because the Chancellor's financial plan does not allow for basic supplies and materials.

Most educators are not enamored of Chancellor Klein, but respect his position and want to work positively with him. Unfortunately he shuns all dissidents as though they were agitators. He carries a portfolio of pretexts and grudges and hunts down with a vengeance those he forced as a last resort to become whistleblowers. He can build bridges or gangplanks. The decision is his.

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