It's Getting Personal

Just thinking a little more about our intrepid local "journalist" Mr. Donn Esmonde who fell for the "reformer" spiel hook line and sinker and took it upon himself to pontificate that BTF and Buffalo teachers are to blame and people like Lawyer Steve Polowitz and his merry band of privatizing "reformers" have all the answers to Buffalo's educational woes. 

I have read on several occasions where Esmonde himself has stated for some sake of disclosure that his wife is employed as a Buffalo Public Schools teacher. In other places I have read speculation that he will likely disappear the way the comments section did from his newspaper in their next round of buyouts/retirements. Now I can't say with any certainty that the latter is true but hell he couldn't say with any that the Chameleon's alternate reality was true either but that didn't stop him, so let's just assume it is. 

Assuming Donn is going to be staying home and working on his book  (don't they all have one laying around?) and preparing brown bag delicacies for Mrs. Esmonde to take to work for a few years, let's just imagine the Chamelons get their reptilian way and WaterChameleon Elementary Charter School begins taking applications from Buffalo teachers. Say as a special baksheesh for the pro charter press releases Donn floated in the community, they sneak Mrs. E into their prized faculty, not all of whom will even be certified teachers but oh well.

In the words of Co-lead applicant Emilio Fuentes,  “There are a lot of adults who are going to get a haircut: no benefits, lower salaries…I’m sorry, but I’m not interested in adults; I’m interested in children.”    I wonder how our journalist would feel to see his wife welcomed to work under these conditions. I wonder too if his retirement package from The Buffalo News would be rich enough that they could fall back on his health care and his other benefits not to mention his retirement earnings since Mama would be in line to take a haircut from the Barber of No Illusions. 

Yeah I'd agree if anyone said Hey c'mon you're getting kind of personal there, Mr. Crowley. Fucking right I am. This entire "reformer" pose is personal. They finger point and blame and bad mouth people who went into debt on student loans so they could teach in some of the toughest places any teacher does business. Then they sigh and ask rhetorically Can't we stop all the finger pointing ? They ignore the elephants in the urban equation -- like poverty, unemployment, single parent or in many cases Grandma families, Drugs and drug violence, gangs, mental illness and a dearth of positive role models. Somehow these "reformer" clowns look at this devastated equation fraught with dysfunction at every level and insist that kids from broken homes, broken neighborhoods with absent, incarcerated or ineffective parents surrounded by gangs and street violence on all sides should magically get all A's in school. They don't look at the whole picture and the whole equation, the look at a standardized test score and say AH-Ha ! these teachers and their unions are to blame. Many of us take that very personally.

Before another Elmwood Avenue hipster with a box of Just for Men in his medicine cabinet comes out swinging at Buffalo teachers or public school teachers anywhere I'd like to see him just once take a look at the snakeoil these parasites are peddling. Maybe he can ask some of the hard questions of this bunch, especially why they have to lie and obfuscate and misrepresent their true motives and their real results if what they propose is so wildly successful and undeniably noble.