My story, which I will tell briefly, is well known to Diane Ravitch, whom I met when I was a celebrated educator in NYC, who experienced that first assault on the profession. I did not know then that the tenured teachers with the most powerful voices on LEARNING, were the targets-- thrown to the dogs, on fabricated charges, as in LAUSD today.
Dan Rather heard my story at the beginning, when I was famous, and there were 40 students applying to my school to be in my Communication Arts classroom. I was, at the time, the cohort for the Harvard National Standards research and the NYS English Council's Educator of Excellence. How can a teacher whose students test at the top of NYC on the first ELA exam (which 3/4 of city kids failed) to be charged with incompetence.?
I experienced the utter collapse of my CIVIL RIGHTS to confront the administration that had emptied my employment folder, and filled it with total fabrications -- just as I was perhaps, the most celebrated teacher in NY State. All my awards (Who's WHO Among America's Teachers) and decades of excellent performance reviews, GONE, replaced my bogus documentation.
Now you know the lengths to which they can go when the law is absent from the workplace!
And one last anecdote, the behavior of which shines a spotlight on the crux of the problem: the charge of incompetence, an actual charge, came a year, after I had been 'rubberized,' for six months with no word as to why.
No union rep spoke to me, as my students wrote to me in email, about the destruction of my wonderful classroom. Moreover, the superintendent of NYC District 2 wrote a letter and published it to my school, saying that I had been found guilty of 'corporal punishment,'-- although there had never been a hint of the allegation, and no charges or hearing.
If this lawlessness is incomprehensible, imagine how I felt when I stood in shock and objected to the lies of verbal abuse, and the NYC UFT Manhattan head honcho in 1998, silenced my objections. It was not enough to rob me of my career, they shredded my reputation while I was unable to defend myself.
That is what is happening in the schools. The intimidation is something that makes it impossible for the professional to design the lessons, or to have any autonomy in the practice.
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