Thursday, August 23, 2012

Data Rave at Club Diablo Anyone?

And the good news is you can wear that white jacket right up til Christmas in this sartorially addled backwater and nobody will be offended

O.k. edumofos we all got our first peek at L.A.'s extinguished educator yesterday. "Judy" Eliott. I am not sure if the "Judy" is her own contrivance or if the B-lo News just likes to call her that the way they call fired grants administrator "Debbie" Buckley in some misdirected girlfriends sneaking a Newport in the third floor lav paradigm. I think it bears some investigation though as anyone who allegedly comes from here should know damned well better than to run some kind of chummy bullshit on the denizens of Twitter's rudest city on earth and the 3rd poorest in the Milky Way. Don't come around here calling yourself Judy til one of us roobs (I use that spelling intentionally in deference to Roger Price's excellent sociological treatise The Roob Revolution. If you haven't read it you need to.) pisses her off and she becomes Dr. Eliott, the close collaborator of Dr. King.  And I don't meant THE Dr. King either, I mean that charter school rookie Cuomo lowered the bar for so he could take the gig and spread the message of crisis that will lead to more corporate reformer takeover of our beloved public schools. O.k. now back to Judy. What if I wanna double down on chummy and call girlfriend Jude? Is that cool ? Well I am cause there's less than 2 weeks left before we take up the brush again so screw it. Jude has an amazingly predictable and downright side splitting vocabulary. In one half hour fleece and greet she ejaculated the following gems :

  • I'm a collaborator. We can agree to disagree. My role is to help fix schools. Ahh...
  • I would say the commissioner has the final say?  note the fake interrogative here as if she's afraid to own the reality that she is an errand girl/spy for Albany
  • My hope is we use data to make improvements that need to be made. Yes, the data will drive us. Can we just hire a dewey eyed do gooder from TFA for $8.00 and hr. and make him mop the 7th floor too?
  • One thing I'm looking at is return on investment.   So are we Jude!!!
  •  I'm looking at data.  Of course you are!!! Klonsky uses this line ironically on his blog calling himself a retired teacher who's just looking at the data.
  • I'm a systems thinker.    Home Run with that one.  
  • Results will set you free.  They set Michelle Rhee free from her gig in D.C.  Except that she got them by cheating...
  •  What have we been doing for a long time that are not fruitful for folks. You mean like handing over our educational responsibilities and autonomy to out of town frauds who rip us off and screw everything up even more ? Amen Jude. And again thanks for the "just folks"use of that folksy pronoun. I feel like I am coming home.

Please bear with me friends as I realize I am coming at this from an extremely bemused and skeptical point of view. Did anyone fail to notice that James Harris and James Williams have all ready been through here with their promises of a better world and left nothing but beer cans, Chop House silver and candy wrappers as far as they eye can see. In a contest of damage done Williams is Mike Tyson of educarpetbaggers. While Jude comes with her carpetbag full of a quarter million L.A. paid her to get rid of her, she is the white crazy haired female surrogate of her predecessors in this flyover expert role. And what's even more bizarre is that she's been ordered upon us by the charter school teacher who roared, the data crunching Commissioner of State Ed who prefers to eat lunch alone and look at data over interacting with colleagues. Yeah. This is what you get when you put a data nerd who prefers his own company to that of others in a job that demands serious people skills. You get ordered to overpay a persona non grata in the form of an unfunded mandate. But the good news is you don't have to call her "Dr." And in retrospect she was named but couldn't be appointed until L.A. cashed out all of her chips. In a word her appointment turns out to be a disappointment on many levels. Here's to working less than an entire month for one of the largest salaries in the Board of Ed. payroll. I am sure the Board members you outearn in a week are eager to collaborate and have a pajama data party with you at the AKA Sorority house. Lord Help Us.   

   

5 comments:

  1. Thank goodness for a little sanity on these here Internets. You have hit it yet again, good sir. I'm liking the Jude name. I hear she prefers Dr. J, but we will go with Jude. Jud? Could we shorten it even more to Jud? Man, we are in for quite a year. Did you read the board meeting blog? Of course you did. It sounds like a bunch of people who need serious medication. Just all of the bullshit acronyms and crap that JUST DOESN'T MAKE SENSE to those of us who think in a normal fashion and actually care about the kids and not the flipping data.

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  2. OMG are you really the COOLest guy on the planet or what! You've nailed this one too! Thanks for making this pathetic situation laughable in some aspects .

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    1. I totally...agree...coolest guy...speaking up and always hitting NAIL ON HEAD. Excellent job....

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  3. Hey! How about instead of being used as PR tools for Say Yes and Dr Pamela Brown on September 4th, all teachers gather in front of City Hall to show solidarity with the Chicago Teachers Union as they bravely fight to defend public education in the city of Chicago? Hijack the busses?
    Our two new leaders, Judy and Pam, will have their noses stuck so far up the data-hole that they won't even miss us at this shameful giant photo op. Who wants a lousy box-breakfast anyway?
    These people are freaking crazy!

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  4. Anon,
    We always meet somewhere on that day...call Phil and see if he will let everyone know. Sounds like a good idea. If we keep quiet and lazy for much longer, that will be a message to the reptilians and their financial backers that we really shouldn't send.

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