Lest we forget

This photo reminds us of how horrible the Holocaust was and teaches us that we must never let it happen again.

However, we have not been taught the early warning signs of a holocaust to come, much less how to go about stopping it before it gets out of control.
Last week I spent my time in the rubber room reading this book, "Unmasking Administrative Evil".

According to its authors, the Holocaust could not have happened without the complacent compliance of thousands of law-abiding, church-going people who were just doing their jobs. "Without the full complicity of professional civil servants (and a myriad of other professionals), it is virtually inconceivable that the mass murder of Europe's Jews could have been accomplished." Those working in economic affairs, tax collection, social security, statistics, railroad service, foreign currency, and municipal government carried out essential roles in the killing process, while believing themselves to be uninvolved.

But there are other psychological mechanisms involved as well. One is called the "Dirty Hands Choice" in which one knowingly and deliberately inflicts pain and suffering on others for the greater good. Today we call it collateral damage. The other is called "Moral Inversion" in which something evil has been defined as something good.

I think that we should become very concerned when Dirty Hands and Moral Inversion become systemic as it has in the New York City Department of Education.

My holocaust alarm went off when I realized that corrupt Department of Education administrators were encouraging children to lie. I have now learned a term for it: Moral Inversion. The DOE justifies this moral inversion with the Dirty Hands Choice--we need to do "whatever it takes" to replace "failing" public schools with private charter schools in order to "leave no child behind". Veteran teachers are seen as one of the primary obstacles to this hostile private takeover. Because they are tenured, "extraordinary measures" must be taken to get rid of them, such as framing them for things they didn't do by encouraging children to provide false testimony.

This is not a conspiracy theory. People smarter than I am have tried to figure out where the holocaust started, how it was driven, and how and when it might have been stopped by whom.

If we learn how to recognize preholocaust conditons, and take measures to stop them, we can ensure that it won't happen again.

Que Será Será

Today I had my conference with Mr. Z. about the Randy Dandy incident. My UFT representative was present.

I was very upset when I received a letter saying that I could be brought up on charges as a result of my reaction to an incident involving a student.

Basically, Randy let a prophylactic fall to the floor during class. It contained a liquid that did not look like water. It was similar to the bodily fluid that prophylactics are manufactured to contain.

As I mentioned in my blog entry of Dec.20 , I called security and the cusodian. Security officers showed up immediately and took Randy out of the classroom. The custodian showed up and mopped up. I asked him if he thought the liquid was water. He shook his head and said, “That’s not water.” I didn’t think so either.

This happened the last period of the day on a Friday. After I had dismissed the class, I went down to the office and called Randy’s home phone number. Randy’s mother picked up and I told her about the prophylactic. I said that it might have contained water, but then again, it might have contained something else. I told her that we had a best case/worse case scenario, and that I was leaving it up to her and her husband to talk to Randy and figure out what had happened. I suggested that she and her husband come in to the school and meet with a guidance counselor and then with me the following week.

The mother got upset, but not with Randy. She came into school and talked to my supervisor. She didn’t want her husband informed about the incident under any circumstances, and she didn’t want Randy in my class anymore.

Now Randy is in another class, and I am being investigated.

Hindsight. I shouldn’t have suggested to the mother that the liquid in the profilactic was not water.

Why did I say that? ….

…..because it wasn’t water. I can’t say without a doubt what kind of liquid it was, but I can say without a doubt that it wasn’t water.

My first thought was, “This child needs help.” Would anyone in the school help him? No, they would just shrug it off, and pretend it didn’t happen. The people who could really help Randy Dandy were his parents.

But then I found out that this is the kind of behavior that children might engage in when they are being abused. So maybe Randy’s parents weren’t the ones to go to for help.

I started this blog, because I knew that I was being targeted, and I wanted to document the process. Unfortunately, I may have given the administration an excuse to send me to the Rubber Room. They didn’t even have to frame me like they did with Adila (See "If a President Can Lie, So Can a Principal" 11/11/07.

Do I believe I deserve to lose my job over this? No. But I do believe that I deserve a better job—and life--than the one I have. So I’ll see how it plays out and accept that whatever happens will be for the best.

If a President can Lie, so can a Principal

My "U" rating was not just about my lesson plans, or my teaching ability, or my salary, or my age, or my political views. It really started with my reaction to a frameup.

Another teacher, K.N., was framed for child endangerment. She spent all last year in a Rubber Room Gulag. She was offered a deal--admit to a lesser crime, and pay a fine and you can keep your job. She accepted the deal, and signed an affadvit swearing to never speak of the matter again. She could have returned to her school, but she refused. She is now an ATR. Case closed.

When K.N. was first accused, she went to a private lawyer, and I went with her. At some point during the interview, I said, "But the principal lied, and we can prove it!". The lawyer replied: "Everybody knows that President Bush lied about the Weapons of Mass Destruction, and no one cares, so why should anyone care if a principal lies?"

The lawyer was right of course. A web of lies had reached from the loftiest office of the land down to our lowly little school in Queens. That just shows why public leaders should to be held to very high standards.

Representative Kucinich has just introduced a motion to impeach the Vice President. The fact that his motion was not automatically tabled, shows that there is a glimmer of hope that we can turn this country around.

K.N. does not want her case reopened. She wants to get on with her life, and put the nightmare behind her. But I am going to write about her case anyway. (Sorry K.N.). We are all victims of the trickle down effect of Washington's lies. This is not just about one teacher's sad story. What happened to her can happen to anyone, as long as liars rule.

So here begins the telling of THE PRINCIPAL'S LIE

K.N. was standing in the doorway of her classroom at the beginning of 5th period, as all teachers were required to do. She was expected to supervise not only the students in the hall, but also her seventh graders who were already in the classroom. The hallway was extremely crowded, because the school itself was overcrowded. We were on double session, but this didn't keep the halls from being regularly converted into mosh pits by squealing students who gleefully pushed one another back and forth when they got caught in a traffic jam.

The administration's answer to this problem, was to get the students from classroom A to classroom B as soon as possible (3 minutes) and then to keep them out of the hallways until the students had to move to classroom C. Regular "sweeps" were made to pick up lagging students who were then "written up". Bathrooms were locked during the first two periods and the last two periods of the day (a period lasted 45 minutes). Bathrooms were also locked during the first ten minutes and the last ten minutes of each period. Aides sat outside the bathrooms writing down the names of the students who entered and the teachers who had given the passes. Teachers were "written up" if they failed to mark students late, or if they gave too many passes to the bathroom. Principal S.T. regularly got on the loud speaker and irritably reminded teachers to stop giving passes during the prohibited times.

So in this environment, K.N. was trying to get her students into the classroom as quickly as possible. A few girls were playing around down the hallway--putting off going to the classroom until the last possible minute. A boy named J.F. came running up from the opposite direction. He pushed past K.N., and in doing so he tripped and almost fell, but he recovered his balance at the last moment. He must have presented a comic figure to the children in the classroom, because they all laughed at him. Perhaps to cover his embarrassment at his own clumsiness, J.F. shouted," Ms. N. made me trip".

Just as the bell rang, five or six girls tried to run into the classroom at the last moment, but K.N. stopped them and dutifully placed an "L" for Late next to each name in her attendance book. The girls were incensed. They argued that they weren't late because they had gotten to the door as the bell was ringing. K.N. told them to sit down, but one of the girls--the leader of the group--left the class without a pass saying that that she had to talk to her counselor.

A month later K.N. was called into the principal's office. J.F.'s mother was there. It seems that J.F. had complained that he had been tripped by K.N., and he had six witnesses to prove it. Now it was K.N.'s turn to be incensed. She had done no such thing! But there were witnesses, insisted the mother. K.N. consulted her attendance book. The so-called witnesses weren't even in the classroom at the time--they were the girls who had run up to the door just as the bell rang. When the meeting ended, K.N. felt that she had established her innocence.

A couple of months passed. K.N. received a letter saying that a Chancellor's Investigator was coming to the school to hold a hearing about charges of child endangerment. She was told by the UFT that she would be represented by Ms. Baker, but Ms. Baker was unavailable until the day of the hearing. K.N. saw her for perhaps three minutes before the hearing started.

The Investigator asked her about the incident with J.F., and K.N. told the same story she told the principal and the mother. Then the Investigator started asking her about a second incident. K.N. realized that she had been brought up on two charges. She was hearing about the second one with no warning at all.

The second charge involved a child named Karl. Karl had come into K.N.'s third period class one day asking to go to the bathroom. She told him that she would give him a pass in ten minutes as soon as the bathrooms were open. Now remember, Karl had already been sitting for two periods in math class with no access to the bathroom, because all bathrooms were locked during the first two periods of the day. When he had asked his math teacher for a pass to the bathroom, she had said the same thing that K.N. did--bathrooms are locked. But Karl couldn't wait. He had diarrhea--a detail which he failed to mention to K.N.--perhaps because he was already running out the door in an attempt to keep from having an accident. But the bathrooms were locked, remember? The aides were not yet sitting next to the door. There was no one to unlock the bathrooms--none of the teachers had keys. So poor Karl had a very messy accident. And poor K.N. took the fall for it.

K.N. told the Chancellor's Investigator that she didn't know that the child had an emergency. She told him that she had no way of opening the bathroom door, because she had no key. The Investigator called the principal and asked her about the bathrooms. Were they indeed locked? NO, answered the principal. BATHROOMS ARE NEVER LOCKED.

K.N. told the Investigator that all he had to do was to go down the hallway and look at the bathroom door. There was a huge sign that read:

BATHROOM HOURS OF OPERATION

Bathrooms Closed: Period 1,2,8,9 & Homeroom

Per. 3- 10:03 – 10:31
Per. 4- 10:52 – 11:20
Per. 5- 11:41 – 12:09
Per. 6- 12:30 - 12:58
Per. 7- 1:19 - 1:47

The principal hadn't even bothered to take the signs down. Why should she? The Investigator refused to get up and go look, as the principal knew he would. Ms. Baker, who was there to represent K.N., said and did absolutely nothing.

So because a child tripped and almost fell, and because a child couldn't get into a locked bathroom, K.N. spent a year in the Rubber Room Gulag.

No, I didn't leave anything out. There were no other incidents. No other crimes. I read the charges. I went with her to the lawyer. I swear those were the only incidents.

If a teacher can be sent to a Rubber Room Gulag on charges like those, none of us are safe. And I think that the principal did that to K.N., because she wants us to feel that way. Unsafe. The principal has the power to ruin our lives.

But my life is already ruined, because I can't stand the thought of such a horrible injustice being done to someone who had done nothing bad to anyone--including J.F., Karl, and the principal. It knaws at me. People don't understand why I can't let it go. The District Representative, just the other day said, "You're not K.N.'s mother--let it go".

I can't. I don't think that the principal of a New York City Public School should have that much power. And it isn't just my principal. She isn't a trend setter. She isn't a loose cannon. She is very much a team player. She is doing exactly what she is told to do by higher ups. She wouldn't still be principal otherwise.

ALL OVER THE CITY, TEACHERS WHO HAVE DONE NOTHING WRONG ARE BEING FRAMED, LIED ABOUT, RUINED!

I don't know why the UFT is putting up with this. I don't know why New Yorkers are putting up with this. I don't know why Americans are putting up with this.

I have told this story over and over. I wrote to the Chancellor's Investigator offering to send him the sign that was still on the door. I wrote to Randi Weingarten. I wrote to The New York City Teacher's Advocacy Group. I signed all letters with my real name.

I am going to keep writing. It's not OK to frame teachers. This is not going to go away.

Those in power are abusing that power and that means that THEY need to go away--preferably to a specially prepared RUBBER ROOM GULAG just for them.