I've been catching up on my dead tree reading, and highly recommend New York's 40th Anniversary Issue. Check out the dialog between Mike Bloomberg and Ed Koch, in which the third term-crusading mayor refers to himself throughout in the third person. (MB: "I'd argue that Ed Koch -- and Michael Bloomberg, both -- had a real advantage coming in. ... Bloomberg got elected because he spent $75 million and his opponent self-destructed.") I was also fascinated by Bloomberg's visceral anger toward the teachers' unions, which in the state legislature blocked his attempt to use student test scores when evaluating whether teachers deserve tenure.
I'll give you an example of the worst thing I think has happened, the most disgraceful thing in the last six and a half years. In April, in the middle of the night, with no notice, no hearings, no publicity, the Republican Senate and the Democratic Assembly passed a law, which the governor signed, which prevents us from using teacher performance in granting tenure. Now, tenure for public school teachers is about as stupid a concept -- these people are not advancing man's body of knowledge, they have civil-service protection anyways, they don't need to be able to say stupid things or write stupid things like some college professors.
This kind of overheated ("the worst thing...the most disgraceful thing") rhetoric toward teachers from politicians is part of a trend I've written about before. There are good reasons to oppose tenure and good reasons, rooted in history, to support it. But shaming teachers, who work all day educating children, for "not advancing man's body of knowledge" is no way to build support in the profession for accountability measures. It's simply bad politics.
Update: Open hostilities. According to GothamSchools, the UFT, New York City's largest teachers' union, is preparing to oppose Bloomberg's push for a third term.
--Dana Goldstein
