Wednesday, June 6, 2018

Class Size Matters & NYSAPE protest punitive regs allowing the Commissioner to intervene in schools with high opt out rates, withhold funds or even close them

Update: the comment period has been extended through August 17.  For more on this issue see here.

This afternoon, Class Size Matters and NYS Allies for Public Education sent the below letter to the Commissioner Elia and the NYS Board of Regents, expressing our strong objections to the draft ESSA regulations that were released last month.  

These regulations violate assurances that were given parents that NYSED would continue to respect their rights to opt their children out of the state exams.  Instead the regs would allow the Commissioner to wrongly identify their children's schools in need of "Comprehensive Support," withhold Title One funds and even close these schools or turn them into charters if the opt out rates were judged too high.  NYSUT, the state teachers union, sent a similar letter of protest on May 29.

The Regents will be discussing these regs at their meeting on Monday, June 11.   Feel free to contact Elia at Commissioner@nysed.gov or your Regents member to make your voices heard.   You can also submit comments through July 9 August 17 to ESSAREGCOMMENT@nysed.gov .


2 comments:

Mark's Text Terminal said...

Wow. The late Senator J. William Fulbright had a term for this, and even used it as the title of one of his books: "The Arrogance of Power." I thank NYC Public School Parents for taking up this cause.

Anonymous said...

Page 5 of letter — bottom paragraph — Didn’t you mean “Commissioner” and not “Chancellor”?