Editorials

An illustrative fiasco

Feb 15, 2007 11:39 AM

UFT members know all about the Tweed style of ruling the city’s public schools but perhaps much of the general public did not. And we deliberately use the word “ruling” rather than running or administrating or some other word that connotes sensible management.

The Tweed style, after all, involves no genuine consultation with educators, certainly not with the people in the classrooms who have the day-to-day responsibility for teaching children and who would know best about things like whether to use a curriculum and how to implement it, new curricula, teaching styles and, to cite a much used but perfect symbol, the use or misuse of bulletin boards.

Nor do the potentates at Tweed feel any need to consult with parents, ignoring the fact that they and their children are our reason for being.

So, familiar as educators are with the Tweed style, they may have been dismayed but were hardly surprised by the complete botch that Tweed made of school busing last month: changing the schedule in the middle of the school year, in the dead of winter, disrupting family routines, leaving parents and kids out in the cold, literally and figuratively.

Everyone else in the city, however, was mortified. And outraged. Even those Tweed acolytes in the daily press for whom, usually, the chancellor can do no wrong and the rest of us can do no right.

This time, the Tweed style was there for the general public to see: Rule by fiat, consult with no one, opt for a dollars-and- cents rationale instead of common sense, give no warning because, heaven help us, someone might suggest that the plan was flawed (which, by the way, people did back in September).

And so: The Great School Bus Fiasco of 2007.

The fact that the idea was promulgated by one of those high-priced consultants that Tweed has become so fond of makes it even worse. City Councilman David Weprin had it perfect when he said: “You can’t run the largest school system in the country strictly as a business. They should be consulting their constituents before consulting their consultants.”

UFT President Randi Weingarten called it a “debacle” that was typical of the “head-in-the-sand” style of leadership constantly exhibited by the people who currently run the school system.

Will this disaster make the public at large more aware of the imperial style of the Tweedocrats? Perhaps cause people to be more critical when the next pronouncements come down from the steep steps of the Tweed Courthouse, like say, oh, possibly another reorganization plan? Maybe.

Will this disaster and the blizzard of public criticism cause Tweed to change its ways? Be less dictatorial? Consult with educators and parents about ways to improve the schools? Well, one can hope.