The Public School System In NY Never Gets Rid Of "Bad" School Administrators

Jolanta Rohloff

It seems that "bad" administrators are not bad enough for the NYC DOE to get rid of, so they are just moved. "Bad" teachers, however, are attacked until they retire or resign or are fired, even if there is no investigation or nothing proven that they did to incur punishment in the first place. (See the story of Steve Ostrin).

We all might remember Jolanda Rohloff, right? She made a mess of things at Lafayette High School, and was finally removed and made "Principal" of the Staten Island Rubber Room. While at Lafayette she dismantled the Gifted and Talented Program, just like Carmen Farina did when she was Principal at PS 6. No one went after Mrs. Farina, as she not only removed the G&T curricula, but was one of the first to implement "fuzzy math" school-wide in order to dumb-down the students in her school and then District 2. My daughter wrote an article when she was nine that not only infuriated Carmen and resulted in my daughter's removal from the 4th grade Math Team, but was published in the Riverdale Review and I posted it on my website. She never fully recovered her self esteem, but she did succeed in entering the Center For Talented Youth (CTY) program in Math and English in 5th grade, despite the attacks she received at PS 6 for wanting traditional math like her sisters (my other daughters went to private school for grades k-6).

Curious about the "bad administrators are re-used" policy, I followed Bruce Irushalmi as he was moved from position to position until he retired.: 

 The way the NYC BOE works is to re-hire personnel who were "caught in the act" so that, we believe, these people already indicted for crimes and/or corruption will maintain the code of silence for the on-going illegal activity in the District offices:

For example, Bruce Irushalmi worked for the Region 1 office during the 2004-2005 school year, despite a Stancik investigation and indictment in 1992. Region 1 superintendent Irma Zardoya's office told parentadvocates.org on August 1, 2005, that Mr. Irashalmi "retired" at the end of June, 2005, and the website does not reflect this, yet.
We previously wrote:
Mr. Bruce Irushalmi is working in the Bronx, in the Region 1 Office (which oversees Bronx Science), and was found to be engaging in possibly criminal conduct when he was Executive Director of the NYCBOE Division of School Safety, as a report by Ed Stancik shows (Private Interest Over Public Trust: An Investigation Into Certain Improprieties By the Leadership At The Division of School Safety)!!!

Bruce Irushalmi is baaaack...
Learning Support Centers
Region 1
Districts: 9, 10*
Irma Zardoya, Superintendent

1 Fordham Plaza
Bronx, NY 10458
718-741-7090

Bruce Irushalmi, Director of Student Placement, Youth and Family Support (we do not know if he assists in the getting rid of teachers in Region 1 Schools).


November 22, 2006

Brooklyn Principal’s Leadership Turns Many Teachers and Students Into Critics

By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN
LINK

This month, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg delivered the keynote address to a conference of philanthropists at the William J. Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock, Ark. He took the opportunity to extol his administration’s efforts to reform the New York City school system. And he singled out the Leadership Academy, a $77 million program intended to develop new principals, calling it “a huge success.”

Closer to home, at Lafayette High School in Brooklyn, there may be some difference of opinion. There, a graduate of the academy, Jolanta Rohloff, has managed in well under two years as principal to antagonize a large number of students, teachers and alumni. The ill will, she says, is a result of her efforts to improve a troubled school.

Ms. Rohloff has dismantled the school’s program for gifted students and pushed scores of recent immigrants into English-only classes that they say they cannot understand. She has reduced students’ grades in classes based on their marks on Regents tests, provoking several formal grievances by teachers whose original grades were overruled. She has made a series of provocative statements, including one comparing Lafayette to a Nazi death camp.

The list of complaints goes on to include having a student mural painted over and distributing textbooks two months into the term.

A common theme emerges in all, which is the view by Ms. Rohloff’s many critics that she is an abrasive, autocratic leader, bent on imposing her agenda and intolerant of dissent.

“The morale here is well into negative figures,” said Patrick Compton, a social studies teacher at Lafayette for 21 years.

His colleague, Rick Mangone, chapter leader of the teachers’ union at Lafayette, said, “Teachers are worried about how she’ll react, not how to teach.” He added, “She uses fear tactics.”

Kamilah Brathwaite, 16, a junior who represents Lafayette on a citywide council of high schools, offered a strikingly similar observation.

“The majority of the students are not pleased with her,” Kamilah said in an interview. “She brings out policies by just throwing them on students. She doesn’t consult with us. She doesn’t want to hear anybody else’s input. It’s whatever she says, goes.”

Ms. Rohloff does not deny or disavow her actions. In an interview this week, she portrayed herself as an educator who had to act swiftly and decisively to reverse a “culture of failure” at Lafayette before the Department of Education decided to close the school entirely.

What is undeniable is that Lafayette was a mess before Ms. Rohloff took over in September 2005. Under her predecessor, Alan J. Siegel, the school registered a graduation rate of about 45 percent and Regents scores below those even at schools with a similar profile of largely poor, largely nonwhite students.

Lafayette also became notorious for bias attacks by African-American students against Asian-American classmates.

In November 2002, assailants beat unconscious Siukwo Cheng, 18, a top-ranked student and valedictorian candidate.

The United States Department of Justice alleged that education officials “deliberately ignored” such episodes. Under a consent decree in June 2004 between the Justice Department and the city’s Department of Education, Lafayette was required to enforce a strict policy against harassment.

SO, Ms. Rohloff, who had been a teacher and administrator for more than 15 years before entering the academy, took over a school needing and presumably wanting improvement.

She does get widespread credit in the school and the surrounding Bath Beach neighborhood for restoring safety. Under her watch, Lafayette was taken off the list of “impact schools,” those with chronic violence.

Her main mission, she said, has been to raise academic standards, by such means as ending the tracking of students by ability and harshly evaluating teachers she considers inadequate. Until her arrival, she said, Lafayette’s poor reputation had “been like a magnet,” attracting substandard teachers from other schools.

Last June, at the end of her first year at Lafayette, she gave unsatisfactory ratings to 9 of about 120 teachers. Under previous principals, about two a year would get the “U” mark, which can lead to dismissal.

In the process, Ms. Rohloff, 54, acknowledged, she has created enmity and enemies. “They aren’t sure of themselves,” she said, referring to her opposition among faculty members. “They’re afraid they’ll fail. So they feel threatened.”

Whether any of the principal’s measures have worked remains uncertain. The state will not release statistics on the school’s graduation rate and standardized test scores for the 2005-6 academic year until early next year.

Ms. Rohloff said she has increased the number of students passing enough Regents exams to earn a Regents-endorsed diploma.

“This is a school that has been troubled for a very long time, as evidenced by declining enrollment, poor graduation rates and the issues addressed in the consent decree,” Andres Alonso, the deputy chancellor for teaching and learning, wrote in an e-mail message.

“Jolanta has begun to improve results for students, which is what matters most,” he wrote. “It’s not easy to change the culture of a school without courting criticism and opposition. Hopefully, the school community can come together and focus on the kids.”

In many ways, Ms. Rohloff’s tenure has been divisive from the outset. After she offered teachers overtime pay to decorate hallways and uniformly reduced the semester grades of students who failed the Regents exams in the same subject, the Department of Education said Ms. Rohloff was not following its policies.

While Ms. Rohloff viewed herself as an advocate for students, the students themselves objected to her decisions and her way of expressing them.

Adana Austin, 16, a junior, had chosen to attend Lafayette because of its Gateway honors program. When she heard last spring that it would be shut down, she went with other students to plead with the principal to restore it. At that meeting, Adana recalled, she said Ms. Rohloff asked, “What’s wrong with you, coming to public school expecting a private-school education?”

In the last few weeks, several dozen recent immigrants from China signed an open letter beseeching Ms. Rohloff to reverse a policy that moves them rapidly into classes like social studies and physics that are taught entirely in English. As a result, the letter stated, they are failing courses and falling behind in graduation credits.

“I paid 200 percent attention to what teacher was lecturing, still could not understand anything,” said a translated version of the letter, which was written by Mei Ling Chen. “When everybody finished their class assignment, I was still looking for the definitions of the new words using my electronic dictionary. With the help of my dictionary, I got all the words that I need to ask a question. Yet it turned out I could not even understand the teacher’s explanation.”

Ms. Rohloff explained her stance on the gifted and immigrant students the same way: Lafayette needs to become one school, not a collection of separate groups. The gifted program, she added, was too expensive to operate because some classes had only a dozen students.

As for the faculty members, the principal faces nearly 10 grievances related to both the grade changes and accusations that she pressured teachers not to seek help from their union on various matters. Ms. Rohloff said, on the latter issue, that she was offering personal assistance and was misunderstood.

Relations probably reached a nadir several weeks ago, when Ms. Rohloff held a meeting to respond to the widespread criticism. During that session, by her account as well as that of several teachers, Ms. Rohloff said that just as her father had survived Auschwitz, she would survive Lafayette.

“The real question,” said Mr. Compton, the social studies teacher, “is can Lafayette survive her?”

Samuel G. Freedman is a professor of journalism at Columbia. E-mail: sgfreedman@nytimes.com.

 The curse of Lafayette High School? A brief history of scandal
by Anna Phillips, at 6:07 pm

Add Michael Soet, the high school principal who paid teachers to attend holiday parties and recently allowed booze at prom, to the long list of principals who’ve had problems at Lafayette High School.
The large Brooklyn high school closed in June and it currently houses five new small schools, most of which have had their staff and students in the headlines. So far, only two schools — Expeditionary Learning School for Community Leaders and Kingsborough Early College Secondary School (which was not happy about moving into the building) — have managed to avoid public controversy.

International High School: In July of this year, a report by the Special Commissioner of Investigations found that principal Michael Soet allowed adults to drink alcohol at the school’s prom. He also paid teachers about $5,000 in overtime to attend the prom and, in previous years, had paid them overtime to attend holiday parties. Commissioner Richard Condon did not recommend that Soet be disciplined and Soet remains the school’s principal.

High School of Sports Management: In 2009, a student sued the Department of Education and principal Robin Pitts, claiming that the school had failed to protect him from severe racial harassment. Michael, the student, alleged that teachers looked the other way while his classmates taunted him for being white and that when he reported the bullying, administrators informed his attackers, which led to more bullying. The student’s mother claimed that school administrators denied her son a safety transfer, so she pulled him out of the school. Pitt is still the school’s principal.

Life Academy High School for Film and Music: In June of 2009, principal Kaia Mashariki was spotted vacationing at a Florida resort when, officially, she was supposed to be chaperoning students on a field trip. At the time, Mashariki was already under investigation for claiming unearned overtime and taking long, unauthorized absences. She is still the school’s principal.

Lafayette High School: Before the school closed in June, the Post revealed that Lafayette High School principal Jacqueline Boswell had pressured teachers into giving a half-dozen students passing grades they hadn’t earned. These students then graduated as part of Lafayette’s last senior class before the school was phased out entirely. One of the students Boswell graduated had hardly shown up to the high school for classes, much less passed them.

Five years before Boswell appeared in the news, there was Alan Siegel, a Lafayette High School principal who was found to have spent about $1,800 in Title I money on a social event for school staff at the Staten Island Hilton Garden Inn. Advertised to staff as a Title I Administrative Planning Conference, the event was mainly a social dinner and school staff were encouraged to bring their spouses. During Siegel’s tenure, Lafayette HS also drew lawsuits over bullying of Asian American students.

When Siegel retired — staff say he was forced out — his replacement, Jolanta Rohloff, soon became unpopular with students in staff. In the two years she was at the school, students staged a walkout and Rohloff was accused of inappropriately paying teachers overtime to clean their classrooms (though the DOE reversed its position on this). Recently, she was assigned to oversee a Staten Island rubber room, but was removed after getting into a physical fight with a teacher over a time card.

Searching for reasons why one school building could house so many problems, a source said, “It must be the water!”