yesterday, i felt a lot of hopeless

the changes that the NYC Department of Ed is putting into effect for next year are starting to really get me down. a person needs to fight against it, but a person also wants to run very far away. yesterday i listened to a middle school teacher spiral out in fear, going on and on about how little information the DOE was providing her and the other teachers in her school about the ways that these changes are going to affect her work and her classroom. for about 35 minutes she went on and on about how she and her colleagues and the parents of her students have all been kept in the dark. only her principal seems to know anything; only her principal is empowered to make any decisions and purchase the required "assessments" and "curricula" that they'll have to use next year. meanwhile, my colleagues, the ones with whom i work to coordinate the teaching american history workshops with elementary teachers in region 9, they know virtually NOTHING about what will happen to their jobs post-june 30th. if they are fired, who will i work with? who will be my liason to the public schools? how will i continue to do this work?

when i got home last night i was feeling eroded. just, you know? like, how in hell are we ever going to make the change in this world, how will public education ever come anywhere near to meeting its mandate, if the capitalist bureaucrats continually eviscerate the thing and mandate testing and require schools to purchase services from small companies, over and over and over, changing the rules and handing more power over to the crap marketing departments of kaplan and princeton review?

oh, that's the other thing: students will now, as of next year, be tested EVERY 60 days. woo hoo! lets go hog testing wild.

i am having a hard time remembering the long view.