Thank goodness we have a visionary leader like Merryl Tisch in charge of our Regents. After all, if she weren't highly qualified, why would she have all that money? And then, of course there are her brilliant tactical moves to attack the corruption that pervaded our lowly and unexamined profession.First, she determined that no teacher was trustworthy enough to grade her precious tests, because God forbid some corrupted pedagogue should change some kid's grade from 64 to 65. It would surely be the end of Western Civilization. After all, those tests are so precisely engineered that there is no room for error.
My kids, of course, shouldn't even be taking a test like the English Regents exam, because, well, they don't actually speak English yet, but why fritter away our time dwelling on technicalities? The point is, the decision has been made, and the tests must go on. As long as I'm grading total strangers in whom I have no interest, everything should be fine.
And what's more, I can get paid for it. I got multiple invites to do so. Every time I deleted one message, another appeared. YOU MUST ANSWER BY THIS DATE OR YOU"RE SCREWED FOR ALL ETERNITY! Wow. That's a little harsh. But then, a reprieve. WE'VE EXTENDED THE DATE, LUCKY YOU! PLEASE PLEASE SIGN UP TO DO THIS THING!!!
I didn't, of course. I have no interest in grading tests of strangers, for love or money. But holy crap, it must cost a lot of money to pay all these teachers to grade these tests. But it's money well-spent. After all, there was that time where they put all the tests on a truck to Connecticut or someplace where they were gonna do this super-duper scanning to make everything fair, but a bunch of tests fell off the truck.
How many dollars are they now spending to get teachers to do what they used to do for free? Who knows? Who cares? The important thing is people like me no longer get to grade their own students. What a disaster that is. Of course I do it every day, all year, but on this particular day the only thing I care about is that they pass, for any reason, no reason, and by any means possible. Because the only way I can validate my worth as a teacher is to make my kids get a good grade on a test that measures nothing whatsoever that I actually teach.
And to prove to Merryl Tisch that my kids can pass a test that measures nothing I teach, I will cheat. I will change grades. I will ignore errors. Hell, I'll sit in the classroom and write 30 papers myself and grade them all. Because that is the sort of corruption that pervades my profession. Not like the upstanding paradigms in Albany, where only two of the three prime powerbrokers have been indicted, to date.
Thank goodness Merryl Tisch has caused NYC to spend tens, hundreds of thousands, who knows how many dollars to pay teachers to do something that used to be part of their jobs. The only thing that will top that is when she shuffles around thousands of administrators to evaluate teachers they neither know nor care about, so as to make sure that home administrators don't give their teachers good ratings.
Maybe, since no one will be around to actually administrate schools, things will run better. Or maybe they can just pay more people to do that stuff. After all, there's nothing more efficient than spending taxpayer money for no good reason. She may not know doodly-squat about public education, but Merryl Tisch is an unparalleled expert in spending our money.
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