Welcome to our blog!

You have reached the home of a new blog for NYC public school parents.

This will be the first such blog devoted to the views of NYC parents to my knowledge – though there are hundreds of NYC teachers who already have blogs, as well as lots of education pundits nationwide.

We think it’s more critical than ever before to get the word out how parents really feel about what’s happening to our schools – and what changes we would like to see made.

When I speak to parents in Washington DC or other cities debating Mayoral control, they have absolutely no idea what is really going on here in NYC, because few of them have access to our local news or read any of our papers, except perhaps the NY Times.

It’s critical that we be able to voice our views, in our own words, about how we feel – so that no one can claim, as one reporter wrote before the last Mayoral election, that NYC public school parents were “cautiously optimistic” about the next four years under Joel Klein, or as the Mayor just insisted, most parents are happy with what he and Klein have done, or as the editors of the NY Post would have it, any parent who is critical of the administration is really a puppet of the teacher's union.

We want this blog to belong to all of us, all NYC public school parents, not just Patrick and me. If you’d like to be a regular contributor, please let us know – you can get a password and post directly to the blog website. Just email us at leonie@att.net and Patrick at patrick.j.sullivan@hotmail.com

Or if you prefer, just send us stuff and we’ll post it ourselves as soon as we’re able. We will also post especially cogent emails from the NYC education news list serv, unless their authors specifically request otherwise.

We also want to hear from NYC parents who believe that there are good things happening in our schools that we would otherwise not know about; or potential allies among elected officials or the advocacy community who are working towards improving our schools in ways we should support.

Welcome to our blog; and please join us!

Leonie Haimson
Class Size Matters
http://www.classsizematters.org/