Josh Karan on Mayoral control

Tomorrow on Dec. 17, the NY State Assembly Standing Committee on Education will hold hearings on Mayoral control tomorrow, starting at 10 AM.  You can view the hearings live streamed here.  Testimony is by invitation only. 

Josh Karan was a member of the Parent Commission on School Governance, whose 2009 report is posted here.  Other documents created by the Commission, as well as summaries of the proposals of other organizations at the time, are posted here and in this google drive folder, in case you'd like to check them out.  Josh wrote the following about this issue.

Josh Karan: an opportunity to revise Mayoral control and what should happen next

Guest blog by Josh Karan below.  Though I'm not as optimistic that parents will have any say in what happens if and when mayoral control lapses, the Parent Commission which was a part of in 2008 did have a rigorous analysis of what was wrong with mayoral control and how to improve upon it. We invited any parent or parent advocate to be part of our group, held panel discussions with experts on school governance and critical education issues, and deliberated for an entire year before coming up with our consensus recommendations. For those who would like to see what we proposed, you can check out our full report here. -- Leonie

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We have an unexpected opportunity to influence how NYC schools are governed, which could make them more engaging of and accountable to communities. 

Since 2002 the granting of control of the schools to the Mayor by the NY State legislature has required periodic re-authorization.  Presently such granting of power expires July 1, and there has been a deadlock between various factions as to the terms for its reauthorization.

Therefore, according to staff of one NY State Senator, the NYS legislature will be convening a Special Session after July 4 to address the issue of NYC school governance. 

This has panicked proponents of Mayoral Control, including the di Blasio administration, and many others, who view Mayoral Control as responsible for great improvements in educational outcomes.  They are seeking a multi-year, re-authorization, while Republicans and some Democrats, want to link re-authorization to an expansion of Charter schools, and an audit of how the school system has been spending its money.  

Proponents of Mayoral Control have argued that the alternative would be a return to what they assert were corrupt, unrepresentative, local Community School Boards.  

This impasse allows some opportunity to affect the debate, perhaps resulting in the Special Session granting only a short-term re-authorization, while we work to re-invigorate the discussion about the role of parents and communities in the formulation of the structure of decision making for public education, as well as its goals. 

The context can be proposals that a group of us, calling ourselves The Parent Commission, compiled in 2008, when then Mayor Michael Bloomberg first desired renewal of his control over NYC schools. 

At that time, over many months, a group of 15-30 parent activists discussed various proposals for democratic governance of NYC schools, and the mission that should underlie the school system. It issued a series of recommendations which again are pertinent. 

They can be viewed at:  www.parentcommission.org.

Not everyone on the Commission agreed with every proposal, but we came to a consensus, which we offered as the basis for discussion about how our schools should function.  

These proposals are again timely.  They offer an alternative to the binary positing of opposites, whereby the only alternatives are seen as either authoritarian Mayoral Control or the old corrupt Community School Boards.  We believed that pretending there were only two possibilities reflected a failure of imagination in the public discourse, and its capture by those with a point of view about public education that would not well serve the majority of its students. 

Anyone wanting to be involved in talking to legislators about this, please contact me:

joshkaran@mac.com

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A summary of the Parent Commission proposals:

A)  Central Governance Structure 

We recommend a governance system distinguished by an educational partnership that includes the Mayor, a Board of Education whose members will strive toward cohesion and consensus, and new independent oversight agencies to verify financial and academic outcomes, investigate corruption, and respond to parental complaints.

B) Restoration of Community School Districts as meaningful entities

— whereby CEC’s have an important role in choosing the District Superintendent, who in consultation with the CEC and District Presidents Councils, and Community Board will help develop the annual capital plan, the district’s class size reduction plan, the Contract for Excellence spending, and the District Comprehensive Education plan, and whereby CEC’s have the full authority under the law to approve school siting, selection, restructuring, expansion, and reconfiguration of schools, as well as the closing, opening and relocating of all traditional public and charter schools in their districts.

C) Establish an Education Constitution to Proclaim the Mission of the NYC School System to provide the vision and mandates necessary to provide all our city’s children with a truly comprehensive, public and democratic education

Recognize that more than governance must be addressed, because through a variety of governance structures and chancellors over the last 40 years, little has changed for the majority of students, who are primarily low-income children of color.  The Parent Commission sought an explicit and legally binding statement of what education is intended to accomplish, to be embodied in a Constitution for the New York City Public School System that would codify in law a shared mission with core principles, primary goals, and a policy framework that must be respected and upheld by whomever is governing the system. Only in this way can our public servants be held to account for the money, resources, programs and staff needed to provide educational excellence for all.  Some mandates might involve resources for facilities and support staff and class size requirements, while others might involve educational philosophy regarding the use of multiple forms of assessment; the necessity of valuing diversity of ethnicity, race, and class; as well as the educational importance of racial and economic integration of schools. 

Josh Karan on the DOE's new Parent University

Chancellor Wolcott has announced that in the next half year he will be establishing an NYC public school parent training program which he calls Parent University. 

Ostensibly, this is his attempt to fulfill the promise made by the DOE two years ago in return for the NYS legislature renewing Mayoral Control of the NYC school system.

Little information about the content of the training has been disclosed, but there has been some description about helping parents learn how they can help their children with homework, navigating the escalating number of available middle and high school choices, and knowing HS graduation requirements.  I believe all of these are important matters for parents to know about.

However, all of these address contending with a system that increasingly diminishes the possibility of most families in this city to obtain a meaningful education for their children.

Matters pertaining to funding, curricula, teacher and administrator preparation, school lunch, having not been mentioned, seemingly are not areas that parents attending Parent University will be exposed to.  Therefore, the diploma received by these parents is likely to be as vacuous as the diploma that those of their children who graduate NYC high schools receive.

Why is it that the content of this University's courses is being left up to the DOE without involvement by parents and the community which it is supposed to serve?

Who will be making the decisions about this content, its structure, and where the program will be offered? Why is it being done in secret?

As a matter that was legislated by the New York State Senate and Assembly, should not there be a mandate that a broader grouping be involved in such decisions?  One of the holdouts for the Parent Training Program, who was reluctant to totally endorse reauthorization of Mayoral Control without what seemed to be a vehicle for increasing parent involvement, was then State Senator, now Attorney General Eric Schneiderman. 

Since the establishment of the Parent Training Program is New York State law, could not the now Attorney General issue guidelines on the implementation of that program, asserting that it is contrary to the legislation that he helped pass to leave such decisions wholly in the hands of the DOE?

I wish to generate a discussion about these questions, and begin to attract a working group that will seek to present alternative proposals about what an officially created and funded parent training program should include.  This is not the DOE's program; Chancellor Klein fought against this proposal.  This is the program that our communities demanded as a rock bottom minimum for the retention of Mayoral Control.

It is occurring 3 years after it was promised.  We should now be part of the planning for its establishment.

I would like to bring together anyone else who would like to work on this issue, so that in the next 2-3 months we can create an outline that we can organize around to be the basis for a NYC Public School Parent University.

Please contact me if you wish to participate in this effort. --   Josh Karan; joshkaran2@mac.com, 917-923-2584

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For the second year in northern Manhattan, Josh Karan is conducting a District 6 Parent Advocacy Training Program, with funding from the offices of New York City Council members Robert Jackson & Ydanis Rodriguez.

Let the Public Advocate advocate for a new direction for our schools

As one of only three citywide elected officials, the Public Advocate can play an important role in articulating alternative policies from those carried out by the Mayor In perhaps no other area would this be more important than for the NYC school system. because it consumes 1/3 of the City budget, and because the Mayor has untrammeled statutory control to run the schools.

The current Public Advocate, Bill de Blasio, is especially qualified to play such a role, as a public school parent and a former school board member in District 15 in Brooklyn, who considers himself a progressive, community based activist.

Unfortunately, nine months after his election, he has not presented a systematic vision for our public schools, nor a program around which to mobilize change. Recently he released a report criticizing the Department of Education's school co-location policy that has negatively affected dozens of schools by taking important space within them.

Yet even more significant are the threat of budget cuts that threaten to undo the financial gains from the nearly twenty-year struggle of the Campaign For Fiscal Equity lawsuit and the false assertions of the Mayor and Chancellor of immense progress under their regime. These claims have obstructed the adoption of measures which could truly make a difference in the quality of education, such as building more schools, lowering class size, ensuring a broad based curricula, mentoring teachers and principals, and cultivating the civic values of creativity, imagination, and peaceful conflict resolution.

While the reality of little improvement has been apparent to knowledgeable parents and activists for many years, few political figures on the city or state level have been willing to challenge the administration’s assertions of improving student performance and rising graduation rates The recent acknowledgement by the state that their exams and their scoring have become far too easy may provide an opening to change the widespread official perception. It is time for all of us to agree that the gains in test scores were illusory, and that policies such as "credit recovery" which lift graduation rates are just a new name for the social promotion of unprepared students. At best 50 percent of NYC students graduate from high school in four years, and those who do graduate are vastly unequipped for college work or citizenry in a democratic society.

An alternative vision for our schools would begin with support of the policies mentioned above, and would provide structures to train and involve parents, communities, and educators in crafting that vision. It would involve the kinds of recommendations made a year ago by the Parent Commission in its report issued during the legislative debate over mayoral control. (http: parentcommission.org)

These recommendations offer a new direction for democratic participation and ---through the adoption of an Education Constitution --- mandate a vision for the NYC public school system along with the resources needed to implement that vision for all students. The recommendations include a real role for districts, and the formation of a Parent Union.

Such a vision was presented to the Public Advocate's office by activists from three districts at meeting in April, which was organized by him to begin a process of involving parents in defining the salient educational issues facing their families. However, the response at that meeting by the Public Advocate's staff was dismissive, and there has been no follow-up since.

The challenges facing our schools long predate the Bloomberg-Klein administration. Experienced parents, community members, and educators have addressed these issues for decades. Yet the administration’s reliance on lawyers and business executives rather than educators and parents have brought about few valuable changes, much heavy handed disruption, and the waste of billions of dollars in experiments without any basis in research or experience---such as closing schools, firing teachers, narrowing curricula, and expanding the number of charter schools. They have failed to lower class sizes to the levels the city committed to in the CFE settlement, or to eliminate pervasive overcrowding that prevents adequate space for arts, sciences, and physical education, or to develop an effective program for mentoring teachers and principals.

The Public Advocate could be a galvanizing spokesperson to highlight these failures and present an alternative vision. He would best be able to do so by involving those who have been left out of the discussion. Let him convene a citywide education summit, and establish working committees comprised of parents, community activists, and educators, many of whom have retired because of their disagreement with the current regime.

Collectively such a group could formulate a new direction to replace the mayor’s current, discredited policies. The Public Advocate could use the resources of his office to promote this alternative vision in communities throughout the city. That would spur the kind of debate about education policy which has been missing from this city for too long. ---

Josh Karan has been engaged for 30 years in organizing communities to promote democratic public educational excellence. He has been a parent activist for the past 15 years in District 6, Washington Heights/Inwood, in support of the Campaign For Fiscal Equity lawsuit begun in his district.