NYC educator blog sounds off. A beautiful rant. NYC teachers and parents feel righteous anger.

madfloridian

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Mon Feb-07-11 12:31 AM
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NYC educator blog sounds off. A beautiful rant. NYC teachers and parents feel righteous anger.

Here is the video of the NYC school chancellor, Cathie Black, putting down a group of parents who wanted to keep their schools from being closed. It's an arrogant moment on her part.

Here is a link to the video. Her words are about 1 minute 40 seconds in.

Here are the words from the article:

Eventually, the crowd demanded that School Chancellor Cathie Black speak, and she did, for the first time all night.

"I cannot speak if you are shouting.... We have studied these very difficult proposals for the better part of two years. It has been an extremely difficult process," said Black.

In the video when she said that the crowd went Ohhhhhh, and she responded with the face you see in the picture and said a snide "ohhhhhh" back to them. Very childish of a CEO in charge of the schools of a big city. Petty, in fact.

The NYC Educator blog tells about this meeting. It is most descriptive.

The party's over.

A still from the video of Cathie Black speaking down to the crowd

The first speaker was an unforgettable Tony Avella, the NY State Senator elected with the UFT's help. Tony was the only Democrat in the state to beat a sitting Republican, and he asked why on earth a hearing over Jamaica High School's future would be in Brooklyn rather than Queens. Of course it was to keep the community out, as they're always raising nasty objections about their neighborhood being decimated---not to mention other things Cathie Black and Michael Bloomberg don't wish to be bothered with.

I've no doubt Cathie Black's snappy remarks about birth control or Nazis murdering children go over very well at ritzy cocktail parties. Doubtless she's shocked that public school parents, the ones who don't get invited to fetes in Park Avenue penthouses, don't seem to find them that funny. And the juvenile "Ooooohhhh" with which she greeted their concerns about the future of their children the other night did not go over that well either.

I walked out, along with most of the crowd, reluctant to watch the Mayor Bloomberg's odious and utterly undemocratic PEP do their rubber stamp thing. What on earth was NYC thinking when it determined the best thing for the future of its children was to turn it over to the richest man in New York City, so that he could do whatever the hell he felt like with them?

And the anger there was said to be very strong.

Here's the thing--I've never seen anger like this before, even at these meetings. It's palpable. Several speakers made references to Egypt, rising up against tyranny. Mayoral dictatorship is a bad policy and must end. And absolutely everyone at the meeting last night could see that New York City has had just about enough of it.

They voted to close 10 schools. It was a done deal, and the people felt those on the panel were only pretending to listen.

The New York Daily News wrote about this meeting. The reporter seemed alarmed as well.

Bloomberg talks down to parents, teachers and students fighting for lives of their schools

"This is not democracy, letting people yell and scream."

No, that was not Hosni Mubarak talking about the demonstrators in Egypt. That was Mike Bloomberg talking about the parents, teachers and students who turned raucous at two meetings preceding a rubberstamp vote to close 22 schools.

How does Bloomberg propose NOT to let them yell and scream in an actual democracy? Eject them? Lock them up? Bloomberg went so far as to say they had embarrassed their city, their state, even their nation.

He did not seem to consider that they were roused to fury by much the same feeling that rouses the protesters in Cairo. This is the sense that whatever you say in more reasonable tones will be ignored.

The NY Daily News spoke of one of the parents who pointed out that Cathie Black was on her blackberry, not even listening.

"Not one person on the panel was actually listening," said Charm Rhoomes, who was there Thursday night as the mother of a student at Jamaica High School and the president of its PTA. "Even Cathie Black. She was on her BlackBerry."

.."Had they bothered, the minions on the stage would have had no trouble hearing Rhoomes as she spoke with a Caribbean lilt of her son, who never misses school and gets good grades and was so thrilled when he was admitted to college-level math. He attended one class only to be told at the second that it had been dropped from the curriculum because the teacher had been cut. He would still love to have college math, but he does not want to lose the school where he has worked so hard. "He still loves the school," she said.

The parents cared enough to come and wait for hours to speak and to listen. They are fighting for their public schools and being ignored and treated badly.