The Stupid Mistakes That Mayor Bloomberg And Chancellor Walcott Made in 2012.

It is time to recap the year 2012 and remember the stupid mistakes that Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Walcott has made for the past year. Let's start with the first month of the year.

January - Mayor Bloomberg had a temper tantrum when he couldn't get his way and terminate 100% of the teachers found to be "ineffective" under the proposed teacher evaluation system. I guess 87% was not enough for Mayor moneybags..The Mayor instituted the "turnaround model" that would throw 50% of the staff into the ATR pool and leave the renamed school with a multitude of "newbie teachers", a recipe for educational disaster. The union files a lawsuit and won which resulted in a 58 million dollar loss of much needed funding for the NYC schools. What a knucklehead!

February -  During this month Chancellor Walcott, despite being told that the Teacher Data Reports (TDRs) had large errors and were inaccurate, allowed them to be published anyway.  What ever little good will the Chancellor had with teachers was permanently lost and while it did embarrass some teachers it showed how politicized the DOE was and even parents were up in arms against the Chancellor for publishing such meaningless data while refusing to release FOIL data about his own employees..

March -  Dennis Walcott's DOE decided that many common and everyday words would be eliminated from school tests.  Such inflammatory worlds as evolution, dinosaur, and forty-eight other commonly used words were not to be used in tests for third to eighth grades.  How did our Chancellor responded to this idiocy?

Chancellor Dennis Walcott says lists of banned words are common. “This is not just New York,” he said. “This is across the country.”  What a leader! 

April -Mayor Bloomberg claims that independent Arbitrators would "give a serial ax murder a slap on the wrist".  What an idiotic statement and yet the Daily News failed to take the Mayor to task for ranting such nonsense.

May -Chancellor Dennis Walcott proposed a "generous buyout" for ATRs but forgot to clear it with the Mayor and let it drop.  Good thing he did since his idea of a "generous buyout" was not too generous.  The average ATR buyout would be $14,000 and the maximum was $25,000, not very generous at all.

June - The Racial/Income student achievement gap is as wide as ever under the Mayor and Chancellor as their policies show no improvement in overall student learning.

July -In fact the racial student achievement gap has actually widened!

August - The Jamaica High School fiasco shows that under Chancellor Walcott "children first" rings hollow.

September -High school SAT scores actually fall under Chancellor Dennis Walcott's tenure.

October - After more bad news on his educational policy, Mayor Bloomberg's statement before superstorm Sandy hit that the City is well prepared for it and he will be sending City workers to neighboring communities since Sandy will have a less of an impact that tropical storm Irene. Of course, the opposite was true.

November -Mayor Bloomberg blames teachers and not his failed policies that ignore poverty for his poor educational results, despite evidence to the contrary.  What a phoney!

December -Chancellor Dennis Walcott's tenure is marked with failure as he practices a "double standard" and is a hypocrite to boot.

The future - It looks increasingly clear that the City will lose an additional $250 million dollars in State aid since there is no Teacher Evaluation System (TES) due to the Mayor's stubbornness when it came to the appeals process.  In summary, the educational leadership of Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Chancellor Dennis Walcott in 2012 has been a failure and more educational disappointment is expected for 2013.