The article: "The New Math? Schools Chief Klein and the Missus Add Up 12 Rooms on Park Avenue," prompted some dialogue on a New York chat board that helps impart what is going on between David Pakter and the Department of Education. This article told about the high style in which Klein was living on Park Avenue while Pakter was back in the Rubber Room even after he managed to trounce his EducRAT$' false psychiatric report against him. (The latter reopened allegations against him and sent him back to the Rubber Room.) Read about this ongoing "war" between a rare teacher who has the resources and courage to fight and the power mongers who have the resources to silence the truth.
It is ironic that the same week Klein brought his new luxury condo, he revealed during an interview with Charlie Rose the thing he most remembered about his father. "Work hard and you won't have to stay in public housing," he was told by his Dad. Klein's luxury real estate holdings show that he achieved his goal. Unfortunately, he heads a DOE Kingdom where most of his subjects are low and middle income, and many live in public housing. Perhaps this explains Klein's disdain for the parents of public school children. Why should he elicit the opinion or listen to the ideas of these "failures"? If you don't have big money or big houses you have failed and you do not deserve to be heard. How far is this elitist attitude from the original idea of the public schools by great educators like John Dewy and social reformers like Jane Adams! Perhaps this explains the underlying failure of the public schools; how can they succeed when the people running them hold the general public in contempt?
DPakter says on observer.com's chat board on August 31, 2007:Re: The comment posted by 'Sky' regarding the view from the top I am sure the attached letter, sent to our Park Avenue Chancellor, when he was still making due with 'only' one floor at 565 Park Avenue, went down his Park Avenue garbage shoot faster than a speeding bullet. The response letter received from Mr. Klein's former (disgraced) General Counsel, Chad Vignola, Esq., certainly reached that letter's author with all deliberate speed. See: www.ParentAdvocates.org/nicemedia/documents/ACF1C0C.pdf
If one stands in the middle of Park Avenue and 57th Street, especially at high noon on a sunny day, one cannot help but experience a rapturous sense of almost heavenly inner peace. Many New Yorkers who like to shop, consider this spot on God's earth, the geographic center of the world, as you are about midway between Bloomingdale's to the East and Holly-Go-Lightly's favorite shopping spot, Tiffanys to the West.
New leather shoes or sparkling diamonds- take your pick. And while you are deciding, there is that view. And what a view it is. Whether gazing north or south, you can't go wrong. Lovely green and verdant islands of trees, grass and flowers stretching forever as far as the eye can see. What more could one possibly ask for? But listen a little more carefully and you can hear the sound of virtual cannon balls whizzing through the upscale Park Avenue air. Because there is a war going on between two people who reside along that great green (in every sense) urban lane of power.
David Pakter got there long before his counterpart, the illustrious Chancellor of the New York Schools system, Joel Klein, Esq. And they live on opposing sides of the avenue. Pakter on the west side of Park at 900 and the learned Mr. Klein, Esq. on the east side at 565, the subject of Max Abelson's lively article in THE NEW YORK OBSERVER.
That fact is symbolicly appropriate because the war between Mr. Pakter and Mr. Klein has now been waging for over four years. Though they are both involved in the world of NYC Education, that is about the extent of where the similarities between these two gentlemen lie.
Mr. Pakter is a portrait painter, but he has also taught art in the New York school system for 37 years. He must have done something right because several years ago he was personally decorated as a Teacher of the Year by former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, in a City Hall ceremony, with the Press present, a sumptuous buffet- the whole nine yards as they say.
Mr. Pakter, who has Masters degrees in Renaissance painting techniques, Art History and Amatomy, designed, funded and built, from the ground up, the first Medical Illustration Program in the nation for gifted, inner city, minority students. And by coincidence that all happened on, where else, 57th Street, a stone's throw from stately Sutton Place. At the High School of Art and Design on Second Avenue to be exact, where he taught for 25 years. At that point Mr. Pakter and Mr. Klein's NYC Dept of Education had a very nasty falling out over the fact that Mr. Pakter documented on film that after the former Principal, Madeleine Appell decided not to allow her mostly minority student population to receive "Music Appreciation", she invited a physically adjoining, predominantly White elementary school, to take over the second floor of Mr. Pakter's school to expand their own stellar music program.
My goodness, thought Mr. Pakter, what ever happened to Brown versus Board of Education, 1954 and of course the highly touted No Child Left Behind initiatives. The gifted minority students in his Medical Illustration Program, as well as all the other minority students at his High School were certainly getting left behind- big time. Not to mention, the only so-called "foreign language" they were allowed to study was Spanish. The language most of the large Hispanic population at the school, spoke before they learned English, which at least initially for most of them, was a foreign language.
Mr. Pakter wrote a very long and respectful letter about all this to Chancellor Klein. Mr. Klein was not happy. Not about the situation at the school but about Mr. Pakter's letter. In fact Klein had his former General Counsel, Chad Vignola, Esq. fire off a blistering letter to Mr. Pakter that it was wholly inappropriate for him to take ten minutes each day out of his 90 minute Medical Illustration classes, to teach his gifted students French- a language the school had banned along with every other language in the world except Spanish. We can't let kids learn French by God. They might actually learn there is a place called Paris that has an Eiffel Tower.
Well you get the idea, Mr. Pakter is an innovator and highly energized Educator and in Chancellor Joel Klein's school system that can be dangerous to your health. Mr. Pakter was removed from the school on Sept. 26, 2004. After a long stint in several of Mr. Klein's many infamous "Rubber Rooms" for two years, Mr. Pakter eventually survived a Dept of Education trial for "insubordination" and another saga in which he was Railroaded by Mr. Klein's Medical Office Director, Audrey Jacobson, MD, (whose office suppressed evidence Mr. Pakter was fully fit for duty only to later be forced to recant in writing that knowingly false claim.
The Dept of Education's own hand picked Final Binding Medical Arbitrator, Chief of Psychiatry at Montefiore Hospital, Dr. Charles Schwartz, wrote a scathing Medical Arbitration report that essentially reflected that Mr. Klein's Medical office doctors had severely violated their collective Hippocratic Oaths- as in "Physician, do no harm". The Dept of Education had to repay Mr. Pakter a year's worth of back pay with interest and place him in a new school.
But five weeks after Mr. Pakter began teaching at the High School of Fashion Industries he was pulled out again. The Principal and her Assistant Principal, Giovanni Raschilla, had received strict orders from the New York City Dept of Education to "get something on Mr. Pakter". He was unceremoniously removed in late November, 2006 without explanation and sent to the DOE's most notorious "Rubber Room" in their entire system of "Rubber Room gulags". The tiny windowless "Rubber Room" on West 125th Street in Harlem.
There, as teacher "miscreants" languish each day, as they stare at the room's four bare walls, and like nomads in the desert wish they at least had access to such a basic amenity as a water cooler, the former educators can reflect on whatever it is that got them assigned to one of Mr. Klein's gulags. Mr. Pakter after an entire year of waiting, has just received an Express Mail package from the concierge at his Park Avenue building finally informing him of the "heinous" crime he is charged with. It seems Mr. Pakter, besides being an established portrait painter and expert on the techniques of the Renaissance Masters, is also a designer of jewelry and watches for which he has garnered many international patents and copyrights over the years. Though for over 25 years Mr. Pakter has used fashion accesories he has designed as incentive rewards for students who receive a 90 average and make the Honor Roll in their school, now after a quarter of a century, the NYC Dept of Education, while at the same moment they are discovering the "carrots" approach, and going so far as to let Principals offer students Ipods and ten speed bicycles for high academic achievement, have decided that Mr. Pakter is not permitted to do the same thing.
Or is Chancellor Klein's NYC Dept of Education just looking for one more excuse to Railroad Mr. Pakter out of the system. Perhaps it may be better to let Mr. Pakter himself explain this latest chapter in the ongoing story, "David Pakter versus Chancellor Joel Klein, Esq. et al." Who could possibly be in a better position to know the facts. Watch out for those virtual cannon balls whizzing over your head as you stroll down Park Avenue. The Park Avenue War is far from over.
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