UPDATE 2/17/2022: Belluck did not show up for the PEP meeting last night, and reporter Madina Toure on twitter reported that he had withdrawn, and linked to a Politico article behind the paywall..
Education advocates and parents speak out against appointment of Joe
Belluck to the Panel for Educational Policy
The news that Joe
Belluck, chair of the SUNY charter committee, is going to be appointed to the
NYC Board of Education, otherwise known as the Panel for Educational Policy,
has sparked outrage among many education advocates and parents.
SUNY has authorized
nearly two thirds of the three hundred NYC charter schools, which together are
now costing the NYC Department of Education more than $2.5 billion per
year. These include many of the most controversial and the fastest
growing charters, including Success Academy, which has been found guilty
of violating student civil rights in both the federal courts
and by the State Education Department,
as well as violating student privacy rights by the US Department of Education
and the state. The
Success Academy network is also the focus of an ongoing investigation by the
Office of Civil Rights of the US Department of Education.
According to Leonie
Haimson, Executive Director of Class Size Matters and co-chair of the Parent
Coalition for Student Privacy, “Appointing Joe Belluck to the PEP is like
putting the fox in charge of the hen house – a huge conflict of interest given
how the interests of charters are diametrically opposed to our public schools,
by taking away their resources and space. Moreover, Belluck has allowed
the charter schools authorized by SUNY to violate the privacy of students year
after year, and to illegally push out struggling kids. One has to question
whether he has the interests of any NYC child at heart.”
As Carol Burris,
Executive Director of the Network for Public Education, pointed out,
“Pro-charter hedge funders and other billionaires gave the Adams campaign
nearly $7 million, including one million dollars donated by controversial
hedge-funder and Success Academy board member Daniel Loeb. I guess they’re
getting their money’s worth with this appointment.”
“The fact that Mayor
Adams is appointing a charter school authorizer to the Panel for Education
Policy further underscores the need to reform Mayoral control,” said Naila
Rosario, a public school parent and President of NYC Kids PAC. “We need a
more democratically elected Board of Education that will work to protect and
strengthen our public schools, rather than undermine them for the purposes of
campaign donors who favor privatization."
"I represent the borough of Manhattan on what the mayor calls the Panel for Educational Policy but what is in the law the Board of Education of the City of New York. I see here today parents and their elected leaders and I see teachers from every borough. I see them from every race and I see them from every income level and from every political party. Why is that?
Because I've learned from talking to people is that every parent wants to the same thing for their kids: they want a rich curriculum, they want an experienced teacher, they want small classes, and they want room for their kids in their schools.
But what have I learned from sitting on the Board of Educaiton for three years? I've learned that instead of schools, we're going to build a billion dollar police academy. Instead of a rich curriculum, we get test prep and drilling in math and ELA. Instead of small classes, we get our kids packed 28, 30, 35, 40 in a class and that's wrong.
"But the worst of all this is the people who control our schools, the people who run our schools, the Mayor, the Chancellor, the Regents, they don't send their own kids to these schools. They have one idea of education for our kids and and an entirely different one for their own.
Beyond autonomy, beyond accountability, beyond privatization, the core principle of the Bloomberg administration when it comes to education is condescension: the idea that there's one idea of education for their children and a totally different idea of education for everybody else's, and that's what has to stop."
It was an incredibly depressing event: the total Mayoral takeover of our schools, despite the ostensible legal sunset of Mayoral control.
The emergency meeting of the new Board of Education that was supposed to begin at noon yesterday started late but lasted less than ten minutes. Under heavy police presence, the Borough Presidents entered first, and sat down on one side at the front of the standing-room only crowd at Tweed, as Chancellor Klein and DOE attorney Michael Best sat down on a couch on the other side. Then the new board members marched in.
They include Deputy Mayor Walcott, appointed by Queens Borough President Helen Marshall, in perhaps the most astonishing turn of events; Dr. Delores Fernandez, appointed by Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz, Jr.; Carlo Scissura, the chief of staff of Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz; Jimmy Yan, the counsel to Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer; Deputy Borough President Ed Burke, appointed by Staten Island Borough President James Molinaro; and the two mayoral appointees: First Deputy Mayor Patti Harris and Deputy Mayor for Operations Ed Skyler.
The new appointees thus include not one but three deputy mayors and other BP political staff– with none of them, except the Bronx appointee, Dr. Fernandez, with any educational expertise or experience. According to the Queens Courier, Helen Marshall said “Walcott, a Queens native, was a perfect choice for her….Under this new leadership, it might be temporary, but it’s darn sure going to be good.….”
The board voted first to elect Walcott as its new President. Several Board members claimed that they were only trying to prevent chaos and confusion in the system, and Walcott even said that parents had called the DOE, worried about the start of summer school. If there was any worry, of course, it was because of the frequent remarks by the Mayor himself, who predicted disaster at every turn in order to impose his absolute will. As the Daily news reported, summer school started without a hitch yesterday, of course; and there was absolutely no reason to imagine otherwise.
Most shocking to many of those watching was the way in a resolution introduced by Carlos Scissura, the Brooklyn representative, the new board voted not only to re-appoint Klein with no end date to the contract, (unless they held a new vote to remove him) , but also to sign away all their decision-making and oversight authority to him. They even gave the Chancellor the unlimited authority to unilaterally approve contracts of any amount, including no-bid contracts, with no oversight or no approval process required.
The full resolution in which they did this follows. This vote is not only contrary to the previous practice and regulations of the Board, in which the members of the Board had to approve all no-bid contracts and contracts over $100,000, but also the provisions of every current governance bill in the Senate, including the Silver/Padavan bill, which they also voted with one abstention to urge the Senate to adopt. So much for consistency!
Most importantly, this abdication of their fiduciary responsibilities flies in the face of the numerous recent audits and reports, including those from the State Comptroller and City Comptroller, revealing billions of dollars wasted by DOE because of the abuse of the contracting process. That the borough presidents would give a green light for these practices to continue unabated is especially troubling now, at a time of economic scarcity and hundreds of millions of dollars cut from our schools and classrooms.
This vote would be considered a dereliction of the board’s fiduciary duties if it occurred in the case of any other governmental agency, especially one so prone to abuse. As I said to the Wall St. Journal, "I don't know if they have the right to sign away...their fiduciary duties," said Leonie Haimson, executive director of Class Size Matters, an advocacy group that is critical of mayoral control.
Yet somehow this lack of financial accountability is okay when it comes to our children’s education, because Michael Bloomberg is in absolute charge – and must remain so, into the indefinite future.
Other troubling issues from today’s meeting include:
1- There was less than two hours public notice before the meeting was called to order.
2- No agenda was provided in advance (as the NY Times blog pointed out).
3- Three deputy mayors were appointed to the board, including Walcott by the Queens Borough President, making the concept of any independence on the part of the Board absurd. All other members except the Bronx member were staffers from BP offices.
4- The continuation of the Chancellor’s contract with the Mayor dated Nov. 2002 was approved– with no end date, and without specifying what the terms of that contract might be.
5- The Board refused to allow any public comment before or after the proceedings, unprecedented in previous Board of Education meetings, in my experience and that of others who have attended decades of Board meetings in the past.
6- The Board voted to adjourn until Sept. 10, 2009 – which is more than sixty days in the future.
A very bleak sign of things to come, and yet another manifestation of the Mayor's unaccountable use of raw, political power and his complete subjugation of the Borough Presidents – with the exception of the new Bronx BP, whose representative abstained on the Board’s vote to urge the Senate to approve the Silver/Padavan bill.
When one unnamed Borough appointee was asked by a reporter after the meeting why he voted to let the chancellor continue to have complete power over signing of all contracts, with no oversight, he told the reporter to refer this question to the Mayor's office. When the reporter pointed out that he was a borough appointee, not a Mayoral appointee, he said, "Well, no comment then."
There seems to be no shame and embarrassment about their collective refusal to acknowledge the need for any independent vetting of spending and policy decisions, and to insulate our children, our schools, and the taxpayers from destructive and wasteful policies.
The ten minute session, reminiscent of a perfunctory government meeting after a coup, was so awful that it actually made one nostalgic for the days of the PEP, when at least Patrick Sullivan was there to speak the truth, and some minimal public comment was allowed at the end of the session.
All in all, this was a day that will live in infamy of NYC history. As I said to reporters, the mayor was right about one thing -- the failure of the Senate to vote on school governance did indeed bring back the days of the Soviet Union.
Below are the names, phone nos. and emails of the BPs. Call or email them now.
Calls are more effective, but if you can't phone, please email.
Make it clear that allowing the Mayor to continue to have unlimited authority over our schools, including the power to sign any contracts with no oversight, is an abdication of their fiduciary responsibility to their constituents, and to the need to protect our children from fraud, waste and abuse.
Not to mention, the need to protect them from the flawed and wasteful policies of a heedless administration which remains contemptuous of public school parents and their priorities. One has to ask, whose interests are they representing, NYC parents and taxpayers, or our billionaire Mayor?
Here are some other newsclips, if you have the stomach to read them; the only one to mention the lack of oversight for contracting is, ironically, the NY Post:
Probably they thought it had been produced by DOE’s PR department – but perhaps they'll mistakenly take a look and learn something about the lousy policies of this administration and feel bad about the irresponsible votes they took today.
Bronx BP Diaz Jr: (718) 590-3500; webmail@bronxbp.nyc.gov (remember to thank him for appointing an independent educator to the position – and for her abstention on the vote to support the Silver/Padavan bill – but she did approve the Chancellor's appointment and the abdication of all the Bd’s authority and decision-making powers, including those related to contracts to the Chancellor. )
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This blog is edited by Leonie Haimson, the Executive Director of Class Size Matters and who was a NYC public school parent for 15 years. If you'd like to write for the blog, please email us at info@classsizematters.org
