The myth of accountability under Mayoral control: my comments at the Manhattan hearing last night

Yet another great hearing where the vast majority of speakers, parents, teachers and students speaking out against Mayoral control.  You can watch the video here.  My three-minutes are below.

My name is Leonie Haimson, and I am the Executive Director of Class Size Matters. There are many myths surrounding Mayoral control, including that it somehow provides more accountability.  Yet as we have seen over the last twenty years, when it comes to class size and the basic conditions in our public schools, one-man rule has not provided even the most minimal accountability.

When he first ran for mayor more than 20 years ago, Bloomberg promised to lower class size in the early grades. His 2002 campaign flyer put it this way: “Studies confirm one of the greatest detriments to learning is an overcrowded classroom … For students a loud packed classroom means a greater chance of falling behind. For teachers, [it] means a tougher time teaching & giving students attention they need.”

Yet class sizes increased sharply during the Bloomberg years, especially in the early grades, and by 2013, his last year in office, they had risen to the highest levels in 15 years, By that time, Bloomberg had renounced his earlier pledge, and proclaimed that he would fire half the teachers and double class sizes if he could, and that would be a “good deal for the students.”

Not only did Bloomberg fail to lower class size, but the DOE during his administration also failed to use state funds meant for smaller classes appropriately and according to law, according to not one, not two, but three different audits from state and city comptrollers.

When Bill De Blasio ran for office, he also promised that he would commit to specific class size reduction goals in all grades, and achieve them by the end of his first term.  He made that promise verbally at a mayoral debate on June 14, 2013, and then checked off a box in a document handed to him at the event, while signing this promise with his name . His campaign also pledged to lower class size, according to a different  survey filled out by his campaign. And yet once elected, he renounced that promise, and said he would wait until all the CFE funding was fully provided by  the state. 

Now that NYC schools are finally receiving their full complement of CFE funding amounting to more than $1.3 Billion in additional annual Aid, the State Legislature overwhelmingly passed a law in June 2022 requiring NYC to phase in smaller class sizes in all grades. 

And yet Mayor Adams is doing everything he can to oppose the law, has increased class size for the last two years, and by his actions is making it impossible for the city to comply, by continuing to cut school budgets and slashing the capital plan for new school construction.

I see no accountability in these actions of any of these mayors. Under Mayoral control, instead, autocratic and failed administrations have repeatedly violated laws concerning special  education, bilingual education, as well as student privacy, the last leading to repeated breaches of the most personal information of literally over a million current and past NYC students.

Moreover, the corruption scandals under local school boards were relatively minor in terms of their scope compared to the millions wasted by corrupt DOE officials over the last 20 years.  It is time for this failed experiment of Mayoral control to end.  Thank you for your time.

Radio show on Al Sharpton's involvement in corporate ed reform and overturning term limits

Gary Glennell Toms, known as "The G-Man", interviewed Leonie Haimson last week for his radio show about the involvement of Al Sharpton in school reform, when Sharpton allied himself with Joel Klein and Michael Bloomberg by supporting charter schools, attacking teacher unions, and keeping quiet when Bloomberg successfully overturned term limits.  He was apparently influenced by large contributions from Bloomberg and hedge-funders to his organization, funneled through the political arm of Democrats for Education Reform, and Joel Klein's Education Equality Project, money which helped keep him out of jail when he was indicted for tax evasion.  We wrote about this previously here and here.  You can find Gary's other radio shows on YouTube here.  The interview is below.  Enjoy!

What the NY Post left out: how Sharpton was persuaded to ally himself with Joel Klein & stay mum on term limits

Today, the NY Post ran a story about how Al Sharpton accepts money from corporations in exchange for shielding them of accusations of racism.  It contained nothing very new to report, except for Sharpton having met with Amy Pascal of Sony after the company's embarrassing email breach – though the article offered no evidence Sony has paid him a dime.  

Presumably the Post is targeting Sharpton because of his association with the Mayor: “Sharpton, who now boasts a close relationship with Obama and Mayor de Blasio, is in a stronger negotiating position than ever.”  Yet the main example cited in the article happened years ago, during the Bloomberg administration:

In 2008, Plainfield Asset Management, a Greenwich, Conn.-based hedge fund, made a $500,000 contribution to New York nonprofit Education Reform Now. That money was immediately funneled to the National Action Network [Sharpton’s organization].

The donation raised eyebrows. Although the money was ostensibly to support NAN’s efforts to bring “educational equality,” it also came at a time that Plainfield was trying to get a lucrative gambling deal in New York.

Plainfield had a $250 million stake in Capital Play, a group trying to secure a license to run the coming racino at Aqueduct Racetrack in Queens. Capital Play employed a lobbyist named Charlie King, who also was the acting executive director of NAN.

Left out of this account is the most interesting part of the story.  It's not just that the money for Sharpton was ostensibly for “equity” and funneled through Education Reform Now, the non-profit arm of Joe William’s pro-charter Democrats for Education Reform. The larger context is that ERN was merely a pass-through, and the money was directed to Sharpton through the Education Equity Project, founded by then-Chancellor Joel Klein, in exchange for Sharpton agreeing  to co-chair the group and adopt Klein’s aggressive anti-teacher, pro-charter stance.  Juan Gonzalez extensively reported the tangled story of how these funds went to benefit Sharpton in 2009, and how they helped him stay out of jail when he owed millions in taxes to the IRS.  

Also left out of the Post article is how Bloomberg, the Gates and Broad Foundations also put big money into EEP to Sharpton's benefit, though the DOE flack, David Cantor denied any involvement of either Bloomberg or Gates in emails he sent to our NYC Ed list serv, when I speculated about the involvement of both.  Perhaps he was lied to as well.  See my timeline of events here. In fact, Sharpton’s organization directly received a big portion of the $250,000 donation Mayor Bloomberg gave EEP, the day Bloomberg announced he would try to overturn term limits.  As a result, Sharpton never said a word against Bloomberg’s successful coup. 

Despite big infusions of cash and the coupling of Klein and Sharpton, EEP didn’t last long.  It held a  rally in DC on MLK day in January of 2009, at which Sharpton spoke.  After joining forces with Newt Gingrich, he and Klein met with President Obama.  The organization folded in 2011 when it merged with the similar corporate reform group, Stand For Children.  Sharpton had already left EEP by then, replaced by two Gates grantees, United Negro College Fund President Michael Lomax, and Janet Murguia of the National Council of La Raza. 

Perhaps the Post reporter's omissions are understandable, given that Klein now works for the Post’s owner, Rupert Murdoch, who is also a member of the Billionaire’s Boys Club, pushing for more charters along with his old friend and ally Bloomberg.  But the story should have been told nonetheless. In his new memoir, I highly doubt  Klein explains the full circumstances surrounding his cynical and mutually exploitative partnership with Sharpton.  I certainly didn't read this mentioned in any of the reviews.

New York Times editors sadly return to cheerleading Bloomberg's status quo

Today the NY Times editors returned to their status quo ante position when it comes to the city’s public schools, and sternly warned the mayoral candidates to stick to the dreadful Bloomberg dysfunctional and autocratic policies of school closings and privatization.

Much of the editorial, entitled “A New Education Mayor,” reads like it was written by City Hall PR machine, without any reference to reality: “He swept away a byzantine bureaucracy that had defeated his predecessors and created clear lines of authority.”

Nothing could be more byzantine – and without any clear lines of authority -- than the inexplicable networks that have replaced the district structure.

“Mr. Bloomberg’s policy of closing large, failing schools and replacing them with smaller schools is unpopular with teachers, many of whom have to find jobs elsewhere in the system. And some adults have emotional ties to a school, however terrible it has become.”

This is totally dismissive of the terrible impact school closures have on communities and the children in these schools. 

The editorial is similarly dense about the damaging impact of charter co-locations:

“In a few extreme cases, critics say, the regular school students are treated like second-class citizens in a building that once belonged to them.”

A few extreme cases, critics say? The loss of classrooms, art rooms, access to library and gym – and the inequitable conditions that result -- are all too common among co-located schools.

This editorial is a huge contrast with the far more accurate May 19 editorial that clearly recognized the failure of the Bloomberg policies and criticized administration figures who complained that some of the mayoral candidates wanted to take a different tack, called “Education, Vision and the Mayor’s Race.”

Here’s what that earlier editorial said about school closures, less than two months ago:

“Yes, Mr. Bloomberg has shown disdain for consultation, as in his rush to close underperforming schools without the full and meaningful involvement of affected communities. The system needs to strengthen neighborhoods’ connection to schools and reconnect with parents who feel shut out.”

And here’s what it said about the awful co-locations:

“And while charter schools can be a path to excellence, they can also cause problems. Shoehorning them into existing school buildings over local objections can alienate parents and reinforce among students a harmful sense of being separate and unequal.”

But my favorite sentence in the earlier editorial was this:

“But after 12 years, this mayor’s ideas are due for a counterargument. The critiques the candidates are offering hardly shock the conscience, and their complaints about the Bloomberg administration can be heard from teachers and parents in any school in the city.”

Exactly.  The fact that the New York Times editorial board, which had consistently ignored the protests and discontent of parents and the evident damage that Bloomberg had done to our schools, and had now appeared to awaken from its somnolence and emerge from its insulated fortress, made me hope that the situation had improved.  I speculated that perhaps there was now a Times editorial writer who actually knew a NYC public school parent, or even had a child in a city public school herself.

No such luck. Inadvertently or not, this earlier editorial has now been omitted from the list of Times education opinion pieces here.

What explains this schizophrenia? Was Brent Staples, the Times education “expert” and reliable Bloomberg ally, on vacation when the May editorial was written? Will we see any more trenchant education critiques from the Times before the election?  Sadly, this prospect now seems unlikely.

Autopsy of the failed teacher evaluation deal

In all the conflicting accounts between the city and the UFT about the collapse of the teacher evaluation negotiations, there is one clear point of agreement:  the Mayor refused to accept a two year sunset for the plan. In this, he was deeply wrong for disallowing the city to pilot what is essentially an experiment that could go badly, for both teachers and children.  Meanwhile, 90 percent of the districts in the rest of the state, appropriately, have a one year sunset on their teacher evaluation systems.  As I commented on the Schoolbook site, this insistence that the plan should be set in stone, with no sunset, shows Bloomberg as an arrogant wannabe Mayor-for-life. 

• On the UFT site, Edwize, Leo Casey posts what appears to be a DOE document, showing that the two year sunset had been accepted by the DOE before the Mayor blew the deal out of the water.  This evidence further contradicts Bloomberg's claim that it was the UFT who tried to slip the sunset provision in at the last minute. His claim is also inconsistent with what Ernie Logan has revealed, that the DOE had already agreed to an even shorter sunset of one year with the principals union, before Bloomberg blew up their evaluation deal as well.

•  Casey also reveals that towards the end, DOE tried to change “numerous scoring tables and conversion charts” that would incorporate the different components of the evaluation plan, including the growth scores based on student test scores, and that the DOE and the UFT then agreed to form a committee that would work on the scoring tables after the agreement was signed.  This suggests that even before the mayor rejected it, the deal was not really complete but could have faced serious conflicts in the future.

• There’s a good piece in the Village Voice with lots of quotes from Bruce Baker of Rutgers, about the fact that the state still owes NYC billions of dollars in funds through the CFE decision, and  that the Governor should not be allowed to cut $250 million, as he has threatened, because of the city's failure to come to an agreement.  If so, he will merely be hurting the children of NYC who deserve these funds no matter whether there is a new teacher evaluation system or not.  The article also contains links to Baker’s analysis, showing that the growth scores that would be included in the plan, required as part of Race to the Top,  are particularly unreliable, and the problem with “[these] policy prescriptions is they're trying to do it in a particularly dumbass way."

• Yoav Gonen reveals in the NY Post that the man who was primarily responsible for these dumbass prescriptions, Arne Duncan, called the Bloomberg and the UFT to urge them to make a deal.

• Meanwhile there is NY State Education Commissioner  King’s statement that the city and the UFT still have a “legal obligation to continue to negotiate,”  I suppose because the State promised this in return for getting RTTT funds, but whether anyone will take this seriously is doubtful.