Submitted by David Simonoff, Mar 2, 2007 22:16

I am a retired teacher who taught the last four years at Brooklyyn Technical High School, once a specialized high school for gifted students, now an empowerment high school, whatever that means. Some have coined it a 'disembowelment' high school. Morale among teachers there is dreadfully low. An extraordinary teacher there, now retired, says it stabs him in the heart to see what has become of his alma mater, both as a student and a teacher.

The system known as the Department of Education, formerly the Board of Education, is irretrievably broken. Students, teachers, parents, the union and the department, all lack an institutional memory. They do not know or choose to forget when the city school system was a star, shining in the firmament, when a single neighborhood cop was all the safety a school needed, when neighborhood schools were excellent without all of today's gimmickry.

At Tech, the previous principal was a crook, who should have gone to jail. The present principal, without tenure, made more than a thousand kids take the American Mathematics Competition: the result: less than one half of one percent got a decent score on a competitive test which became a form of extra credit, totally against the spirit of the test.

Because like the six blind men with the elephant, no one knows: everyone is a little bit right, and all are wrong -- about our dreadful public school system.

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