The Insights of Tweed

Listen up, all you cynical high school teachers. We know that you think that the legions of MBAs which now populate Tweed don’t know thing one about real schools and real students, just because they never spent one day in front of a class teaching. Why, you probably sit around the teachers’ cafeteria talking about the “good old days” before Joel Klein’s little “cultural revolution” purged everyone who ever taught in a New York City public school from the DOE’s top echelons, and installed his business school elite in their place. Well here’s proof that Klein’s Tweed brings a fresh, new perspective on what is wrong with our schools, with insights you could never dream up — no matter how hard you tried.

While programmers in high schools were muttering curses at their blank computer screens as the new HSST programming software crashed again and again and again in the weeks before the spring term began, the Director of Secondary School Services at Tweed’s computer central saw the real problem that everyone else missed: Programmers in the schools were all using the program at the same time, from 8 in the morning until 4 in the afternoon. In an e-mail to programmers, the director even provided a little chart to show that 650 programmers were logging on at 11 a.m., while fewer than 50 programmers were using the software at 1 a.m. “It would be helpful,” the director’s memo read, “if you could attempt to do a [sic] much work as possible during non-peak hours …”

Now, admit it: You could have been in the director’s position for 25 years and you would never have hit on that brilliant solution for getting around the lousy programming software Tweed bought.