credit: Epoch Times |
Last night there was a lively education
debate sponsored by the CSA, the principals union, with all the Democratic mayoral
candidates and Tom Allon, who is running as a Republican. I was busily
tweeting throughout.
Except for a rather tiresome exchange as to who had the
best public school alma mater, it was an
interesting discussion, well moderated by Liz Willen of Hechinger and Pedro
Noguera of NYU. ( In case you’re interested, Liu went to Bronx Science;
Allon attended Stuyvesant; Bill Thompson graduated from Midwood HS; and Bill De
Blasio’s son attends Brooklyn Tech. Chris Quinn said she wasn’t “smart enough” to go
to Bronx Sci or Stuy but actually she grew up on Long Island.)
Each
of the candidates had his or her high points:
· Bill
de Blasio got the biggest applause of the evening; when he said that come
January, Eva Moskowitz of Success Academy Charters will no longer “have the run
of the place”; i.e. be running the school system in the city;
· Chris
Quinn pointed out that there's no evidence that merit pay for teachers works;
· Tom
Allon said we need an expanded capital plan and innovative ways to
finance school construction to reduce overcrowding;
· John
Liu pointed there was no evidence that the schools had improved under Bloomberg by our test scores on the national exams called the NAEPs;
· Bill
Thompson said that the past ten years of damaging policies were the result of
non-educators running the system, and that we need to focus on improving
schools rather than closing them, as happned in the Chancellor’s district when
he headed the Board of Education.
They
all liked community schools and wrap-around services, as promoted by the UFT (though
I'd like them to confront the reality that there is little or no room in most of our schools, which are already hugely overcrowded); they
all said there was too much testing; they all promised to consult parents
and teachers more; and most of them supported a moratorium on school
closures and co-locations, all that is, except for Quinn and Allon, who said the
implementation of these policies could be improved.
There
was a general consensus that the obsession with small schools by this administration was misguided,; and most agreed that the networks aren’t working and we
need our geographically based districts back. The only one who differed
on that point was Quinn, who maintained that some principals liked their
networks, and they should be able to keep them if they wanted to;
though there didn’t seem to be many principals in the audience who agreed about this. It turned out (as I suspected) that she was talking about
the New Visions network, which has been fierce in protecting its revenue and
turf. Tom Allon and De Blasio also got into an argument about whether De
Blasio’s plan to raise taxes on the wealthy to pay for Universal preK would
cause rich people to move out of the city (there’s no evidence for that, by the
way.)
At
one point, Liz Willen asked the question of a student at Wagner MS named Sophia:
what would they do about the chronic problem of excessive class sizes? De
Blasio said we would have to wait for the CFE money to come in. Liu said
the city had enough money to solve this, if we made it a priority. The
others didn’t think there was much hope and seemed stuck in the status quo;
extremely disappointing considering smaller classes are the number one priority of
parents and a constitutional requirement, according to the State’s highest
court.
Anyway,
if you want more detail you can check out my tweeting at @leoniehaimson at twitter.com or see the articles at Epoch Times and GothamSchools.
It is essential that our next mayor is one who really cares about the children in our public school system. They must be willing to work with the UFT,realize how much damage high stakes testing,excessive paper work,co-location favoring charter schools and excessive class size has done to our children and teachers.
ReplyDeleteThey must appoint a chancellor who is not a puppet,but actually has worked in the school system and is allowed to have their own opinions about what is going on.Goodby Mr. Walcott.
Bloomberg's m.o. has been to strip the schools of effective, qualified administrators(from Chancellor down to A.P.) and replace them with inept, unqualified, ruthless CEO's who are trained to destroy teachers and schools. They do this by removing coherent curriculum, resources, effective programs, the arts, etc...
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