Davonte's Inferno is a truly remarkable
book. It is also informative, insightful and quite disturbing. The author,
Laurel Sturt, taught for ten years in a Bronx elementary school with high needs
students, demoralized teachers, incompetent principals and overwhelmed parents
all the while under the "my way or the highway" dictatorship of Mayor
Michael Bloomberg. As a retired teacher I approached reading this book with
more or less professional interest. After reading it I am glad I am retired and
no longer subject to the pseudo educators who now call the shots. I was fully
aware of the folly of Dubyah's No Child
Left Behind and Secretary of
Education Arne Duncan's rigged game of Race to the Top; but I had no idea of
the devious agendas and shady dealings of the New York City power brokers in their
manipulation of the city's school system.
Think of the operations of New
York Schools as a game of chess. On one side is Mayor Bloomberg, the Dept of Education,
Arne Duncan, Michelle Rhee, Bill Gates and host of supporters (parasites),
including many school administrators and principals. On the other side are
parents and teachers with the teachers represented by their Union.
Unfortunately the role of pawns is played by the city's students who are the
end of the line recipients of the school system's actions and programs. After
reading Ms. Sturt's chronicle you will come to see the students as not only
victims but the real losers during Bloomberg's tenure as schools' chief. Former
presidential candidate Howard Dean summed up his departure from teaching after
one year with these words: "too many kids with too many needs".
It is widely believed that our
schools need to be improved and our students need to receive a more world class
education. It is the delivery of this improved program where things go awry.
With little valid research and hardly any parent or teacher input (as usual) programs of dubious value and high stakes
testing have been forced on schools by those who actually favor the
privatization of our school systems. Ms. Sturt details how NYC schools were denied funds and staff
so Bloomberg's preferred Charter Schools could prosper. As a former CEO,
obsessed with data collection and reporting, Bloomberg subjected students to
unprecedented testing and evaluation all of which required both time and energy
from teachers at the expense of students' instructional time. Ms. Sturt
describes a school system where testing and data collection for the sake of
testing and collection of data became the norm or the end in itself.
Ms. Sturt documents how Mayor
Bloomberg, as head of New York's Schools, was generous if not irresponsible
with tax payer money in awarding millions of dollars in contracts for questionable
staff development, standardized testing contracts and consultancy hours. All
the while Ms. Sturt's school and many others lacked adequate supplies, clean
rest rooms, working water fountains and a host of other amenities most of us as
students had and took for granted.
Mayor Bloomberg's micro
management of the NYC school system was replicated by a succession of
Principals Ms. Sturt and her fellow teachers had to endure over her ten years of
teaching. From Principal Cruella to Guido to Principal Dearest to finally the
seriously disturbed Principal identified as Rosemary's Baby, Ms. Sturt recounts
the harassment, verbal abuse, frequent ambushes and disrespect that she and her
colleagues endured on a daily basis. This
abusive administrative behavior continued all the while she and her
fellow teachers were dealing with children exhibiting serious learning and behavior
issues in a less than ideal environment.
As the inexperienced and totally
unqualified Arne Duncan continues to lead the nation's schools, students and
teachers into the era of Common Core Standards Ms. Sturt's book is an excellent
source of information on where we have been, where we are now and unfortunately
where we are going with respect to our schools. As NCLB and RTTT have led us to
Common Core consider the analysis of the Brookings Institute: "The
empirical evidence suggests that the Common Core will have little effect on
American students' achievement. The nation will have to look elsewhere for ways
to improve its schools." Is Arne Looking?
The answer to the improvement of
our schools is not the influx of corporate money, increased testing, more and
more teacher evaluation nor the establishment of Charter Schools ;but a
recognition of the elephant in the room and that elephant was aptly described
by Ms. Sturt as: "poverty, providing prenatal care and ongoing health care
and nutrition for kids ... after school and child care, supplying basic
education and parenting classes to poor adults and increasing school-to-parent
outreach and cooperation".
I congratulate Ms. Sturt for her years of service to New York city's children
and for her dedication and perseverance in surviving what she described as
"Ten Years in the New York Public School Gulag'.
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