Atlantic Yards, New York City Department of Education

Eminent domain or the take over of the public services like schools and streets for the purpose of private gain.

I saw the New Civilians production, IN THE FOOTPRINT, The Battle Over Atlantic Yards at the Irondale Center this evening.

While I watched the actors portray the struggle of ordinary Brooklynites against the bulldozer that is Forest City Ratner, I couldn’t help but be reminded of Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s appointment of his friend Cathie Black to continue the “improvement” or privatization of the New York City public schools and how much money can be made by private companies opening charter schools, selling computers, testing supplies and other necessities to the largest school district in the country if only the parents and teachers unions would get out of the way.

I couldn’t help but remember the Cathie Black interview I watched today and how she’s rolling up her sleeves and is raring to go.  She said in answer to the reporter’s question about the words “three years” used in connection to her tenure as Chancellor of Education:

“A lot can be done in three years.  Sometimes I think less time to do something makes people really focus, makes them focus on the priorities.  You don’t have eight years to think about something.  We want to get this done now.”

I wonder what is it exactly that she and Mayor Bloomberg have in mind to shake up the entire education system during the next three years, the only three years that my daughter will ever be in middle school.

I kept her in the elementary school where she started kindergarten through 5th grade because I wanted her to feel secure.  I remembered from my childhood moving the summer between 2nd and 3rd grade from a school in one state where cursive was taught in third grade to a school in another state where it had already been taught in second grade.  I had to catch up on my own and and good penmanship became a lost cause for me. I didn’t want to uproot my daughter if I didn’t have to.  Other parents pulled their kids out of one elementary school and put them in a different elementary school where as the new kid they have to make an entirely new set of friends just so that they would have a chance to apply to a different set of middle schools.  Of course those with enough money aren’t tempted to play those kinds of games with their children’s social lives.  They just put their kids in private schools.

Are her middle school years going to be marked by having the rug pulled out from under her on a regular basis by game changing choices implemented by the same education administration that gave her elementary school wildly fluctuating annual letter grades based on surveys and comparisons to a set of “similar” schools that changed every year?  Her school experience has been unremarkably consistent and positive since kindergarten.

I have spent the past 3 months visiting a random assortment of middle schools and learning about the Orwellean “choice process”.   My daughter just brought home the Official Application for Middle School on Friday.  And now today, Monday –not even three days later, it was announced in the press that one of her “choices” on that application has been placed on the list of schools slated to be closed because they’re so bad that anything or even nothing is better than going to THAT school.

It’s not for nothing that I lack confidence in the New Schools Chancellor who was apparently chosen from an array of the mayor’s wealthy business associates.