(ThyBlackMan.com) New York City’s Department of Education, much like its police department or its fire department, is bedeviled by as much fraud, graft, mismanagement, waste, and even outright criminality as any large municipal bureaucracy anywhere in the world. I would know. Years ago, I was one of those intrepid souls who waded into the concrete quagmire of mediocrity and social promotion known as the NYCDOE, a perhaps tragically idealistic and naïve young man teaching math and “English language arts”, whatever that is, at public schools in Jackson Heights, Queens and Bushwick, Brooklyn. While there, I witnessed things too bizarre and unsettling to mention here.
Despite daily evidence to the contrary many of us still like to hope, and perhaps need to believe, that the public servants we entrust with the care and education of our children for seven hours a day, five days a week, have at least some small modicum of personal integrity.
Recently, that hope was dashed yet again.
On Friday, July 18 state police at Coxsackie Correctional Facility in upstate New York arrested 40-year-old Sadie Silver, the principal of P.S. 28 in Bushwick, Brooklyn, for attempting to smuggle heroin and prescription drugs to her son who is serving time at the prison on weapons
charges. She was accompanied by Michael Acosta, 34, her boyfriend, and a ten year old child. Silver and Acosta were charged with promoting prison contraband and criminal possession of a controlled substance, both felonies, as well as endangering the welfare of a child. On Monday, July 21, Silver was removed from her post in her school building and assigned an administrative desk job pending the outcome of an internal investigation.
Frankly, this sounds exactly like the Bushwick I remember from my teaching days.
The high school dropout, teen mother turned dope peddler principal is only the latest NYCDOE boss to earn well-deserved public notoriety. In July of last year, Elmhurst principal Minerva Zanca was accused in an affidavit of targeting African-American teachers for dismissal as well as saying that one Black teacher “looked like a gorilla in a sweater”. Such vitriolic remarks were commonplace when I worked in public schools in the city, as was discrimination and criminality, which is why I am always astonished by the ignorance of the general public in regard to corruption in inner-city schools.
The truth behind the carefully crafted Bloomberg-era public relations façade of the department’s slogan “New York’s Brightest” is ugly. I lived that truth. Like most people, I expected to find caring and dedicated professionals among New York’s teachers and principals. But earnest, fresh-faced coeds with a maternal instinct and a genuine desire to nurture young minds were almost nonexistent in the department. On the other hand, backstabbing, bitter, cynical, racist, sociopathic, vicious, career bureaucrats of both sexes were plentiful.
I met hustlers. I met shills. I met simpletons conditioned like trained apes to deliver dumbed down curricula in the arts and sciences that were recorded on paper as often as not – all the while pretending to meet state “standards”.
I am as humble as the next man, but for the good of the public it must be confessed – my department colleagues were not sterling scholars. Most were not even intellectually curious. They were not the sort of people who would have Ivy League diplomas on their bedroom or office walls or who would curl up with Thoreau or Longfellow by the warmth of a crackling fire on an autumn evening. With very few exceptions, they were not the sort of people who could have abandoned the dull toil of New York City schools to teach a policy seminar at a think tank or pen a column in the local newspaper. They had neither the credentials nor the inclination. They had neither the benefit of long hours spent reading thick tomes nor the benefit of the merciless Socratic interrogations my classmates and I endured at an excellent Pennsylvania college years ago. In short, my NYCDOE colleagues fell far short of the lofty title “New York’s Brightest” – intellectually, morally, and ethically.
Ms. Silver’s arrest is the latest chapter in the sad saga of the failure of New York City public schools to educate – or even protect – children. The particulars of Silver’s crimes, the revelation that she is a principal and therefore a person invested with significant responsibility in the school system, a responsibility she betrayed and abdicated as others of similar stature in the department have before her, are all corollaries to the simple, gnawing, frightening truth that our kids are not safe with the managers and teachers of schools in places like Bushwick, Brooklyn.
Bushwick deserves better. New York City deserves better. We must demand to know who the people hired to run our schools and interact with our children really are, rather than believing inane sloganeering from a glossy City Hall ad campaign. Silver’s arrest should raise alarm for every New York City parent because her crimes provided them a glimpse of a depraved culture that pervades city schools – a culture I took a long, hard look at and walked away from. Criminality and moral turpitude are not an aberration among the employees of the New York City Department of Education – but business as usual.
Staff Writer; David Christopher Steele, A.M
This talented brother is a native New Yorker and former educator who taught in New York City public schools and at a New England boarding school. Steele is now an educational blogger and political journalist. He is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and New York University. Follow him on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/DCSteele1.