In Parting Shot, Bloomberg/Walcott Oversee Demise of Adult Ed

Thus the charge in an email document received from an anonymous source.
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GENERAL MILLS

If Chancellor Walcott has sent the current Superintendent, Rose-Marie Mills, to the Office of Adult and Continuing Education in order to oversee its demise, she has been well chosen.  The policies she has instituted, and the many vice-principals she has brought with her, have nothing to do with Adult Education.  There is no awareness of or care for our students or the specific issues that they must face.  If, as the new supervisors tell us, the Danielson assessment is soon to be used in Adult Education, they should read what Danielson has to say about taking into consideration who the students are and the nature of the school and the class.

Considering monetary issues, classes are being cut and schedule changes are being implemented that directly affect the income of the program.  Since the program is paid for on a reimbursable basis, every class that is cut, and every person who is forced to leave before the end of a class because of schedule changes, costs the program money. Every senior, experienced teacher who finds herself with too few students to sustain a class is in danger of having that class closed, to the detriment of the students.  The students then leave, to the detriment of the program. The closed classes then become an excuse to cut the program further.

Why is this Superintendent, who is paid for by tax levy monies, unlike the teachers, as she boasts to staff, shrinking the number of classes?  Why is she spending scarce money for children’s books, at one end, or for recorded books that are entirely too difficult for our population on the other end?  Why has she chosen to purchase huge, unwieldy and impractical easels, when teachers need decent text books or access to copying services, or smaller classes?  Perhaps it is because she does not know and does not care who our population is.  Or is this merely another instance of the improper use of funds that caused the parents of District 19 to drive her out?  Ms. Mills consistently refers to the needs of the program as separate from the needs of the people it is supposed to serve, among them the parents of the P-12 students.  Ms. Mills boasts that she was specially selected for this job.  Why might that be?  Is it possible that her superiors do not want our population too well educated, so that they will be docile and will not cause trouble? 

That might explain why the teachers who should be preparing their students for the new High School Equivalency exam , the TASC, have been given no information as to what that exam is like.  Professional development time that could be profitably devoted to helping these teachers is spent on explications of the Common Core, which becomes vaguer every time it is explained, and in spite of the fact that Adult Education is exempt from the Common Core, since our tests are different from those of the P-12 students.

Teachers are demoralized. People suddenly hate to go to work.  Our twelve hour days, hard as they were, were manageable because the rewards of working with our students were great enough to overcome our exhaustion.  Now we all feel beset; we cannot concentrate on our students’ needs.  What a wonderful way to serve our population, who are already working the same twelve hour days as we are, after which they flog themselves into coming to class!  And what do they find?  Teachers who are not allowed to teach, or to answer their questions, because a schedule must be adhered to, and a certain objective must be met, never mind what the students are telling us that they need.  Thank you, Ms. Mills. Thank you, Mr. Walcott.  Thank you, Regents.