Everyone's expendable

Today is October 6th 2010:  It is cold, wet and miserable in Massachusetts today.  The topic for the day seems to be The New England Patriots traded Randy Moss to the Minnesota Vikings for a 2011 Third Round Draft Pick.  This is comical to me in so many ways.  How does this help the Patriots right now?  It doesn't.  How does it affect perception of Randy Moss?  Depending on how you view the Patriots management you either think we don't need him cuz he's just another player or your arm is tingling cuz you are about to have a stroke wondering how they can be so monumentally stupid.  I don't know how I feel about this.  I think Randy was destined to leave at the end of the season.  His 15 minutes of crazy press conference telegraphed that.  Maybe I was hoping that he and TFB would have a swan song season for the ages on his way out.  Now we'll never know.  What we do know is that every one's expendable.  You can't watch sports and not know this. I guess that's what I think is sad.  Sports is such a mirror of society, although in most instances a perversely warped one.  When teams trade away talented players for the future they pretend that they are actually interested in the future.  This is the absolute best way to downsize a company and make it look like they care about the future.  The Pats just dumped a guy they knew would cost them a ton of money to re-sign.  He will be branded a malcontent now by the fans in New England and people will act like he never did anything of value while he was here.  This is a sign of things to come.  Not just for the Patriots either.  The NFL probably won't have a season next year.  Why?  Because of rampant and unmitigated greed on the part of the owners and the NFLPA.  Should this be a surprise?  No.  Like I said, sports are a warped mirror of society.

You can call it bitterness.  You can call it agitation.  You can call it disgust.  You can call it confusion.  You could even call it the grief cycle.  What you can't call it is smart.  What you can't call it is good business.  What you can't call is the right move.  I'm a teacher.  I'm good at my job.  I'm highly qualified.  I have busted my ass to get a Master's Degree.  I hold my students to a high standard.  I try to remember that just like when I was in school, there is more going on with a student than what they do in my classroom.  I knew going into education that I would never get rich.  I am cool with that.  What I'm not cool with is the current movement in education that seeks to reform everything except what the students learn and achieve. There is constant talk about the achievement gap, which by the way is a real thing.  It is based in the socioeconomic structures that we ignore.  I worked in an underperforming urban high school for the last three years.  We had an extended day, more time on learning, more teacher accountability, more authority for the principal, more autonomy from the union contract...  do you know what happened?  If you guessed that it didn't work...  then you guessed right.  Do you know why it didn't work?  Because at the end of each year one third of the staff left.  When I left at the end of last year there were only 20 people still working there that were there when i got hired.  Compare that to the average suburban high school where you can see the same teachers and administrators for 20 years.  This is despite the fact the Boston Public Schools pays an average of $15,000 more a year than the suburban schools do.  Schools are supposed to be the one place that youth can find some sense of stability and continuity.  Most of the teachers that freshman students have this year won't be there when these students graduate.  The English High School in Jamaica Plain had 65 teachers working there last year.   40 teachers were given their walking papers in the spring of 2010.  The replacements that were hired are all from a highly touted program called Boston Teacher Residency.  BTR is a program that takes people from other lines of work and puts them into the classroom within one year.  Or in other words, it's the exact same thing as hiring a bunch of graduate students.  So a struggling school got rid of forty seasoned teachers and replaced them with forty first year teachers.  This is viewed as progressive in the current political climate.  They are planning for the future like the Patriots did.  They will train these new teachers to be better than the malcontents they replaced.  After all, it must be the teachers fault that the scores are low and the dropout rate is high and not the apathy of parents and politicians.  It is ironic that the politicians talk about cutting costs surrounding education with teacher layoffs because the teachers they layoff make the least money!!!  Nothing is going to change.  These new teachers that were brought in will either burn out or get replaced in three years.

Well, if you are still reading this then you obviously have as much time on your hands as I do and if that's the case then you have my sympathies.