Updates on my job. As long as it lasts.

I'm not gonna link to 'em, but you probably all remember my various and sundry angry, often incoherent rants about the changes I expect with the district following the election of "reformer" Danny Godberg to the board.

Here's an update of some the crap coming my way:

The board elected a new president. This is not unexpected. It is also not terribly good news for the public schools in Milwaukee. For starters, I like Stacie's take: "As he stated numerous times during the minutes-long interview, Ken Johnson is a reformer. He's apparently been a reformer since he got elected. But he never once defined reformer, said what he was planning to reform, or how he was planning on reforming what he was planning to reform." Ahh, the vagaries of fresh power.

More, from the paper:

[Johnson] said he plans "to help empower the superintendent" to move quickly on changes he said had been "held hostage by process." He cited his support for a phonics-based curriculum known as Direct Instruction and for Andrekopoulos' high school reform effort, which aims to create dozens of new, smaller high schools in the city.

I keep threatening--and maybe someday I'll have the chance to get to it--to do a complete take-down of the superintendent's "small schools" baloney. And don't get me started on phonics versus whole language, either; the bane of my existence is students who a) spell phonetically and b) can sound out and read just fine but have no sense of what they just read. I teach as much reading with my regular education high-schoolers as I do anything else. If Ken Johnson really wanted to help Milwaukee students read, he'd work on getting parents reading to their kids, since that, after all, is the best indicator of how well students will learn to read in school.

Former board member Larry O'Neill took five with the daily paper the other day. He's the one who retired, leaving us with a majority on the board hell-bent on dismantling everything from successful high schools to my union.

The superintendent delivered his budget:

[The] budget proposal for 2005-'06 that continues reforms launched by Superintendent William Andrekopoulos and contains no major new steps is based on two big assumptions: That Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle's state budget proposal, calling for a shift of more school funding back to state government, will win approval from the Republican-controlled Legislature; and that the School Board and the administration will win an arbitration proceeding with Milwaukee's teachers union that focuses largely on health insurance costs.

I hate to say it, but there's a good chance that the superintendent will lose on both counts. The Snacilbupers in Madison, of course, will sink Doyle's plan. And the superintendent's own intransigence has left us without a contract for nearly two years. If he would have accepted the union's proposal, we'd be saving a cool $1 million a month or more. But he's got an agenda that has everything to do with rigid ideology and nothing to do with what's best for the kids.

In other budget news, next year we lose another 130 teachers, and more of the central office support staff. Notice that he hasn't stepped up to return the five-digit bonuses he's been raking in, the car, or the health club membership. It's nice that he sacrifices, isn't it?

Finally, on a lighter note, the former administrator of the Mandela School--you know, the guy who bought a couple of Mercedes Benzes with the taxpayer money destined for his choice school--wants to take back his guilty plea in the criminal case. He had blurted out "I'm guilty!" in the middle of his trial. He is blaming it on his previous lawyer.