The Chancellor Sends Us His Summer Message

Dear Colleagues,

As we wrap up the school year, I want to take a moment to say thank you and congratulations to everyone at the DOE who made this school year a success, particularly myself and the various family members I've gotten on the NYC gravy train. From all of us, let me say it certainly beats working.

I’ve only been Chancellor for six months but in that short period of time, we’ve accomplished a lot together. We’ve gotten billions of dollars from the feds, and still managed to cut the budgets of your schools by millions of dollars. We’ve managed to confound not only the City Council, but also the State Assembly and Senate in their efforts to reduce class sizes. Instead of seeing your class sizes go down, you’ll almost certainly watch them explode next year. No skin off my apple, since I'll be sitting in my office, doing Whatever.

We successfully navigated the Omicron surge, and cleverly managed to drop the mask mandate despite the most contagious strain yet. Sure, some of you got COVID even if you masked every day, but I never got it. Now the mayor did. Let me ask you this question—the mayor says when he has swagger, the city has swagger. Therefore, if the mayor has COVID, does the city has COVID? (Just a joke, Eric. Keep that 350K a year coming, and please don’t fire my brother.)

We’ve refused to cooperate with potential lifeguards, resulting in a dire shortage. We are instead embarking upon a drowning awareness campaign. That way, while you’re drowning, you’ll understand completely what’s happening to you right up until you drown. We’ve defunding public schools at the highest rate since the great recession. We’ve raised rents on stabilized apartments by the highest level since Bloomberg.

We announced key initiatives such as the expansion of Gifted & Talented programs, which may or may not mean something, given budget cuts. We made you sit through training on dyslexia, because that’s what the mayor has. If your students have some other learning disability, too bad for them. Let them elect a frigging mayor who shares it. We also made you sit through an insipid online seminar about online privacy, because when and if it’s violated, we intend to blame you. We’ll say, hey, we offered the training, so it’s not our job, man.

All of these accomplishments are the result of your hard work!

In a school system as large as ours, each and every one of you plays a vital role in ensuring that our students are well supported and thriving academically and socially. And you better believe when we max out class size, that’s gonna be one hell of a task! Good thing we’ve weaseled our way out of both city and state efforts to reduce class sizes, and can save tons of money by slashing your budgets. In fact, in our surveys, when we asked what parents most wanted for their kids, it was reasonable class sizes. Well, screw them and the subway trains they rode in on.

I feel enormous gratitude to be working alongside such smart and passionate people. If it were not for you, people like me would have to do this work, as opposed to sitting in comfortable offices at Tweed counting my blessings and paper clips I will look for your guidance and feedback, and believe me, I will give it valuable lip service at every opportunity.

Have a safe and fun summer. The best is yet to come as we advance toward the 2022-23 school year! Wait until you see what surprises the mayor and I have in store for you, UFT!

Soaring high,

Mister Chancellor David C. Banks

Jumaane Williams for Governor

I'd been prepared to vote for Kathy Hochul in the primary right up until she failed to sign the class size bill that passed both the Assembly and the Senate. I was going to overlook the fact that she was Cuomo's number two, that she supported the tax cap on non-city schools, that she supported tax credits for those donating to private schools, and her preposterous assumption that charters would somehow reduce the overcrowding in public schools.

In fact, given the opportunity to help us do a better job, Hochul has thus far failed to take the only action I know of that would certainly help children. She's clearly concerned more with money than education. Spending 1.4 billion on a stadium to ultimately enrich some billionaire is fine with her. But our kids are not a priority. No wonder she supported a four-year unconditional extension of mayoral control for Eric Swagger Adams.

Jumaane Williams will support better education for city students. He'll support housing for those of us who actually need it, as opposed to gazillionaires looking to build stadiums. He'll stand up for people regardless of how much cash they have. 

Next Tuesday, in the Democratic Primary, vote for Jumaane Williams, vote to support our schools, communities and jobs, and vote for real change.

Exams and Me (and You)

Yesterday I read the oral part for the Spanish LOTE exam. (I'm not the best in Spanish, but I'm certified to teach it, and that's good enough for NY State.) This was not a difficult task for me, but I recall hesitating at one word, reading it wrong once, and then correcting myself the second time. A native speaker I know told me he thought some passages seemed like they went through Google Translate.

You may or may not be familiar with the crap that comes from Google Translate. Chinese, for example, doesn't have the same structure as English. I often read things that come through there, though, and parts of speech are wrong, syntax is wrong, usage is wrong, and sometimes passages are barely coherent. Sometimes they aren't coherent at all. Spanish is closer to English in some respects, but as I tell my students--Spanish is Spanish. English is English. That's how I explain differences that don't, at first blush, appear logical. 

Logic doesn't necessarily apply to language. Prepositions, for example, are fairly arbitrary, and don't make sense from one language to the next. Advanced speakers often make prepositional errors. English spelling is not logical at all. It seems natural to us, but it isn't. Spanish, for example, is almost completely phonetic. What you see is what you get. 

As illogical as language is, though, it's a distant second to our testing system. The mandate that we cannot grade our own students is offensive, counterproductive, and stupid. The assumption is that we will boost the grades of our own students so as to make ourselves look better. That may be a good assumption in schools where teachers are pressured to pass everyone no matter what. However, the issue in schools like that is corrupt administration. There's a longstanding tradition in New York City to never, ever address that (unless you're Sue Edelman). Even the very worst principals are simply reassigned to Tweed to sit around and do Whatever It Is they do there. 

The assumption that I will be biased toward my students, or you to yours, suggests that I am corrupt and unfit (as are you). Well, if that's the case, why the hell did they hire us in the first place? If we are inclined to pass people for no reason, we are of no earthly use to our students or school system. I've just looked at my final grades, and it turns out that kids who failed all the tests, kids who cut rather than take them, and kids who failed to do any work failed my classes. Why, then, would I be so desperate to pass them on some standardized test?

Now I know a lot of my colleagues are more than happy to get paid for grading, something we used to do as part of our job. I can't say I miss traveling to other schools to grade the exams of students I've never seen, or negotiate grades with people I've never met. Wouldn't it be better, though, if the city took all that money and devoted it to something worthwhile, like class size reduction? Isn't that one of the only things we know to actually improve education? And how do ostensible leaders like the mayor and chancellor get up in public and claim to care about schoolchildren when they aren't willing to devote money to improving education? Is scapegoating teachers and acceptable substitute? I don't think so.

Back to testing, we haven't really examined the question of why they're taking standardized tests at all. Wouldn't it be more reasonable for me to test them on what I actually taught them, as opposed to whatever the Board of Regents happened to pull out of their collective behinds? I am not an expert on all the standardized tests, but I've given some serious consideration  to the English Regents exams, and it's a piece of crap that measures neither reading, writing, or any English ability I can discern. Despite the absence of the name, all it really tests is Common Coriness, a skill in which I can discern no highly practical application.

The Chancellor Explains NYC Education Budget Cuts

Dear Subordinates:

There's been a lot of talk about the budget. Lots of people are suggesting that we're taking the federal money and using it to cut our part of the school budget. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The fact is we are set to receive $160 million in federal funds, and we're cutting the budget by $375 million. I had one of my assistants do the math, and that means we're only cutting by 215 million, which is hardly anything at all. 

Instead, we're focusing on real improvements. We will embrace data driven policies through the experiential based learning process. We will exploit diverse capacity through the collaborative process. We will seize integrated curriculum within the Zone of Proximity. We will orchestrate student-centered scaffolding with synergistic effects. Now who could ask for more than that? Class size reduction won't achieve any of those things.

Think about it. How many Manhattan penthouses could you buy for 215 million? 50? 100? Do you really think that 50-100 penthouses would provide enough space for us to accommodate the schoolchildren of New York City? And that doesn't even account for the maintenance fees, which would be astronomical. With this kind of money, we could buy some really nice penthouses, and use them for Very Important city employees, like me and my brother, for example. With all those ethics concerns about Phil, it wasn't easy for me to score him this Deputy Mayor gig. And I'm not at all sure about a penthouse with his credit rating. But I digress. 

There's a lot of talk about reducing class sizes in NYC. In fact, the Assembly and Senate just passed a bill requiring it. I can't begin to tell you how disturbing and unfair that is. This lawsuit has been making the rounds since 2001. Now sure it's been affirmed over and over again, but the fact is it's 2022. How unfair is it that our illustrious mayor, the Honorable Eric Adams, should have to deal with it when neither Rudy Giuliani, Michael Bloomberg, nor Bill de Blasio had to do it? 

First of all, all those ex-mayors are losers, except Mike Bloomberg, who staunchly supports Eric Adams. Now Mike could have simply financed the class size reductions himself, but he chose not to. And it's common sense that Bloomberg must know something, or else why would he have all that money? Consider all those school shootings. You hate them, right? Me too. And Mike Bloomberg compared teacher unions to the NRA. The union is quite clearly a special interest group advancing the needs of teachers, as opposed to the needs of Mike Bloomberg. 

Bloomberg also says the reason schools are failing is because your union insisted on staying out long after schools were safe. And as I've said publicly, we need to increase the quality of teachers before we can talk about reducing class sizes. And I'm not the only one who thinks so. Former US Education Secretary Arne Duncan thinks so too. Mr. Duncan is extraordinarily qualified to make this statement. For one thing, he's never been an actual teacher, so he isn't prejudiced. For another, he's very tall, and is pretty good at basketball. How many teachers can say that? How tall are your union leaders? Think about it. 

Duncan boldly made the heroic statement that Hurricane Katrina was the best thing to happen to education in New Orleans. First, lots of troublesome students died. Some moved away, saving valuable public education money, which ultimately went into private hands, thus boosting the economy. Also, it completely wiped out those nasty teacher unions. New Orleans is now a city of charter schools, and well-heeled private citizens are finally making some real scratch from education out there. We could do the same here. 

Honestly, why should we reduce class sizes when so many of you suck so much? Just consider Eric Adams' thoughtful suggestion that we do online classes of 400. Sure, you would lose your jobs, but the city would be well-served. And just think, if we dump you, all those other teachers will have 2,000 papers to grade every day. You will be on easy street, with an economy-boosting non-union gig at Target. You'll get the loan of a cool red shirt and won't have to grade any papers at all. 

When you consider everything, having all online instruction would mean a whole lot of prime real estate wasted on public schools would become available, and perhaps Important People could score more penthouses. And wouldn't our city really be better off with more penthouses? Penthouses contribute to the economy. School buildings are nothing but a drain of resources, like all those teacher cafeterias Mike Bloomberg wisely closed. 

So stick with me, folks, and ask Governor Kathy Hochul not to sign that nasty class size bill. If it doesn't become law, we can move ahead with our plans to offer zero-percent raises to all city employees, streamline our work force by getting rid of dregs such as yourself, and move on to make this a city of people who carry Platinum cards. It's the patriotic thing to do.

Ask yourself this--do you love your country, or do you want smaller classes for hundreds of thousands of kids who don't even pay taxes?

The answer is simple.

Soaring High,

Mister Chancellor David C. Banks

Chancellor on Class Size

Dear UFT members: 

It's me again, your old pal, Chancellor David C. Banks (although I much prefer to be called MISTER Chancellor David C. Banks). My job is very important, and that's why I get paid $364, 000 (plus expenses of course). Gala luncheons don't come cheap, as you know. Or maybe you don't, what with being in schools that don't even have teacher cafeterias anymore. But I digress.

Today I want to talk about class size. Of course Mayor Adams and I want our students to have smaller class sizes, but we don't want to rush into things. After all, it was only 60 years ago that we capped class size because you, the UFT, gave up money to cap it. And we're fine with reducing class sizes if you pay for it. Here's the thing, though--It appears the state wants us to pay for it. We have a lot of expenses. There's my salary, for one. There's my brother's job, and with his record, it wasn't easy to find him one, let alone a plum gig like this one.

And you all know that since we dumped Skedula, it's on us to create a new system. Have no doubt we will spare no expense to develop it. Surely it will cost at least 95 million dollars, just like ARIS, which we introduced as the very bestest thing on earth and then dumped unceremoniously. Sure that was a complete waste of money, and sure, we're the guys who left little children freezing and stranded on street corners when our no-bid contract company failed to deliver, but hey, just trust me, okay?

Of course we would love to make class sizes lower. We simply don't want to pay for it. Now I know you have arguments. For one thing, there are 675 public school districts, and we have worked our way up to 663 in class size. There are TWELVE districts that have EVEN LARGER class sizes, and you should be GRATEFUL we aren't LAST. But NOOOO. You complain, blah, blah, blah, and want me to take money that could go to my salary, or additional neptism beyond little bro, any use it to HELP kids I haven't even MET.

Then there's all of you going on about academic research that suggests smaller class sizes benefit students. Some of you even say it's common sense that if students get more attention from teachers it benefits them. Well, I'll tell you three things. First, common sense is the least common of all the senses. Second, Mike Bloomberg says a good teacher could teach 70 kids at a time, and he'd have fired half of you to make that happen if only you weren't unionized. (And Bloomberg must know something, otherwise why would he have all that money?) Mayor Eric Adams suggests we could have one teacher teach 400 kids at a time on Zoom. Now there's a way to save money, but no, you greedy UFT teachers are still blabbering about class sizes. 

Now some of you think we have more space since we've gone from 1.1 million students to 850,000, and argue that's common sense. But we simply cannot afford to be guided by common sense. We have priorities. Sure, The total five-year cost for additional teachers — $1 billion — is less than one percent of the city’s current $100 billion annual budget. But there are so many other things we could spend that money on. How about a catering service here at Tweed, for example. Do you think we like having to have our secretaries call restaurants? How much could we save on our expense accounts if we had an in house chef?

Now I know that you, as teachers, think you know stuff. But the fact is that the highest paid among you only makes about a third of my salary. That makes me roughly three times smarter than you are. Therefore, you should listen to me. 

It's clear if we have to devote not only the $7.6 billion in additional federal support that has come to our schools, but also the $1.3 billion in state funds through Gov. Hochul’s commitment to fully fund foundation aid to class size reduction, we will be unable to grant the sort of corporate raises around here that Make America Great. Look, Eva Moskowitz is pulling in almost a million a year while I sit here working for chicken feed. And let me tell you, the charter folks who gave Mayor Adams at least six million bucks for his campaign are gonna be PISSED if this comes to pass. Their class sizes could go through the roof, if we can even find them a roof after taking care of those frigging public school kids.

So please, guys, give up the ghost already. It's not profitable for us to pour our extra billions into facilities for school children that don't even turn a profit. This is the American way. That's why all your school cafeterias are closed and you're all eating in your cars. Hey, your car is pretty nice, isn't it? Nicer than that nasty old cafeteria, right? Nicer than those streets we fail to maintain.

So please, call your union leaders and tell them to just stop all this class size nonsense. You know that rather than admit we have all this extra money we'll cry poverty and say we need to fire the social workers and nurses we've finally placed in schools after decades of neglect, don't you? Then we'll say it's your fault, and the New York Post will run an editorial saying you all suck.

You don't want that, do you? Remember, I'm the guy who made a video during teacher appreciation week. What more are you going to want? Please get used to your overcrowded schools and classes, and stop your bellyaching. This job is a calling, and your working conditions ought not to matter at all, even if they are your students' learning conditions.

And that's just one reason you're never gonna catch my ass in a frigging classroom. 

Soaring high,

Chancellor David C. Banks