Assembly hearings in the Bronx: the Parent Commission makes their debut

There were hundreds of parents, advocates and union members filling the seats at the Assembly hearings on governance at Lehman College on Friday. The morning started off with a bang with testimony from a panel of Parent Commission members, putting forward their proposals on how the current governance system should be reformed.

Monica Major, president of Community Education Council 11 in the Bronx, Don Freeman, former principal in the Bronx, Lisa Donlan, president of CEC 1 in Lower Manhattan, Josh Karen of CEC 6 in Upper Manhattan, and Vern Ballard of Community Board 9 testified; a position paper is posted here. Class Size Matters is a member of the Commission and has endorsed these proposals.

The theme of the Parent Commission’s recommendations is the need for a real partnership and collaboration with parents rather than Mayoral dictatorship. We are proposing that the Chancellor and his policies be subject to both state and city law – and that there needs to be a truly independent and responsive Board of Education to provide necessary checks and balances. The Board should consist of 15 members, including six parent representatives, elected directly by Community Education Council members – who themselves will be elected directly by parents in each district. The Mayor will have three appointees, the City Council and the Public Advocate each one, and together the Board will appoint four more members to build up their expertise in specific policy areas, like the needs of ELL and/or high school students. It is our hope that the process of coming together to appoint more members will act as a consensus building exercise.

The Parent Commission also recommends the formation of an Independent Accountability Office, a truly independent Inspector General, answerable to the public, and an Ombudsperson, to respond to and resolve parental complaints. We have also put forward reforms on restoring the role of school districts, strengthening parent input, improving special education, and forming a commission to create a Constitution for the NYC school system. Check our position paper here; the full report will be out next week.

Following the Parent Commission panel, the DOE testified, with Maria Santos the head of Office of English Language Learners leading off. Despite the fact that Assembly member Carmen Arroyo accused Santos of being a liar, I thought Santos’ testimony was among the most honest of any from the DOE in years. Santos admitted that the achievement levels of middle school ELL students has been stagnant, and that graduation rates among this population has been flat. She did not try to spin the data, and twice said smaller classes would be necessary to improve results for this high needs population. (Indeed, the much-praised NYC International High schools for ELLs offer classes much smaller than the city average.)

Santos’ frank testimony was quite a contrast to the arguments of her fellow panelist in the Bronx, Chris Cerf, Deputy Chancellor, who consistently downgraded the importance of class size, criticized class size reduction as too expensive, (citing an hugely inflated estimate of $800 M for a 10% reduction) and said that this reform was not a top priority for the DOE -- despite the state law that mandates a move towards smaller classes in NYC.

Assemblymember Aurelia Greene of the Bronx and Education Chair Cathy Nolan were both very piercing in their questioning of Cerf, and asked him repeatedly why the DOE had failed to reduce class size, and indeed why class sizes had increased this year. Nolan asked him whether he thought the program was voluntary. He admitted it was not, but did not explain if DOE intended to improve their compliance in the future.

Other highlights included the questioning of Cerf and Deputy Mayor Walcott by AM Daniel O’Donnell of Cerf about their policy of replacing the neighborhood zoned schools with charter schools. He honed in on PS 241 – a school in his district, with 45% special education and ELL students, that DOE intends to replace with a branch of Harlem Success Academy, a chain of charter schools which as of this year according to state data had only two ELL students.

Cerf claimed that charter schools have high proportions of Hispanic students, and that DOE didn’t care about what kind of school was offered, as long as it has results. Later Luis Reyes offered testimony that while the NYC public schools have 14% ELL students, charter schools enroll only 4% ELLs, according to data provided him the City Comptroller. (Not surprisingly, the DOE does not make this information available to the public.)

Both AM Mark Weprin and AM Ruben Diaz Jr. were critical about the amount of testing and test prep in our public schools. AM Michael Benjamin asked about the decline of minority students at Bronx Science, his alma mater, and the other specialized high schools. What was interesting is that among the ten or more Assembly members who spoke, there did not appear to be a single one who supported the administration’s policies or Mayoral control in its current form unchanged. Where the Mayor will obtain backing for his continued chokehold on our schools is unclear – but perhaps he is relying on a backdoor deal.

There are accounts of the hearings in the NY Times blog; Gotham Schools, and WNYC radio. On each you can leave comments. Also, check out the Parent Commission website here.

For God's sake, Stop! Look! Listen! Por Dios, ¡Pare! ¡Mire! ¡Escuche! Mon Dieu, Arretez! Voyez! Ecoutez!

Luis O. Reyes, Coordinator of the Coalition for Educational Excellence for English Language Learners (CEEELL), attended a meeting with Chancellor Klein on March 14, 2007, set up by the New York Immigration Coalition's Education Task Force (of which Luis is a member). NYIC had sought the meeting to get the chancellor's response to NYIC's “Education Policy Brief: State Funding, Accountability and Successful Strategies for ELL Students”. The Policy Brief is a blueprint to accompany the promised City and State funding increases for English Language Learner (ELL) students.

According to Luis, “the blueprint calls for a 1.0 ELL weighting, but just as importantly, it advocates for tracking of any new ELL funding to ensure that ELL students, their teachers and their parents benefit fully through quality instruction and support services, with public accountability for inputs and outcomes”.

NYIC had sent the document to the Chancellor and his senior staff including Deputy Chancellor Andrés Alonso and Ms. Maria Santos, in charge of the Office of English Language Learners. But the meeting the Chancellor granted, was with Garth Harries, the Director of the Office of New Schools and Brian Ellner, Senior Counselor to the Chancellor. And as Luis relates in this perspective on the meeting, the Chancellor had an entirely different agenda:

Asked to share his response to NYIC's ELL Funding Accountability Plan and its Immigrant/ELL Success Agenda, Chancellor Klein chose to focus, instead, on two major issues: his proposed Weighted Funding Formula and his New Small High Schools Initiative. He indicated he was surprised that we were not more supportive of his weighted funding formula proposals, which would provide different levels of increased funding for ELLs at the three different levels in the public schools. And, he asserted that the small high schools were critical because they provided options to high needs students (immigrant, minorities); and touted the International HS's with their "high concentration of talent and skills" on behalf of ELLs.

Most of the time was spent on the Chancellor's two issues. On the first, we responded to the first by noting the great difference in scale between the Governor's ELL budget proposal (an additional .5 weighting that would generate an unprecedented $350 million per year in additional ELL-generated funding for New York City) and the City's proposal (a weighting that ranges between $180-$300 per ELL pupil at the elementary level to $360-600 at the HS level). On the second issue, the Chancellor indicated there was a dispute about whether ELLs were proportionally represented in the small high schools. He felt they were. We felt they were not.

The bottom line, in my opinion, came down to whether or not we, the ELL/immigrant advocates, were on board with the Chancellor's initiatives or part of the opposition (what he has categorized elsewhere as the "defenders of the status-quo"). There was no owning up by the Chancellor nor his senior aides to the unwritten 2-year ELL exemption policy that has allowed many new small HS's to not admit ELLs. Nor did he respond to the issue of dismantling bilingual HS programs and leaving Haitian, Asian and Latino ELLs without equivalent options in his new small schools.

While the Chancellor did say that he was "cognizant of all the different issues", neither he nor Harries and Ellner engaged the people at the meeting regarding our comprehensive agenda. Instead, we were pushed to be cheerleaders for the Chancellor's initiatives, aked, in effect, to choose sides. Nor did the Chancellor acknowledge that a two-year $45,000 grant for ELLs to 10 new small HS's was a pittance, if not insulting, in the face of the true need.

I have to say that this was one of the most unsatisfying meetings I have attended with Chancellor Klein or with any Chancellor (and I go back 25 years now!). The truth is, that not engaging ELL/immigrant advocates on our terms, and expecting us to be defenders of his initiatives and proposals, is shortsighted, even patronizing. While understandable, given all the negative reaction to his reorganization plan, he is wrong to set himself up as the one and only champion of change. I believe he believes he's on the side of the angels, fighting for equity and real change.

Nevertheless, his tin-ear response to our advocacy on behalf of ELL/immigrants, leads me to the brink of despair. We did not arrive here yesterday; not even 5 years ago, when he was selected Chancellor by the Mayor. Many of us have been battling the Latino and ELL dropout crisis for longer than we care to say. We have grown older and tired (I speak for myself!) from presenting Chancellors with educational reform agendas premised on the need to respect our languages and cultures while insisting on real reform, real resources, and real results.

If there is one thing I would like to get across to Chancellor Klein, it is that we are neither hired help, nor unpaid flaks, and, certainly, not died-in-the-wool defenders of the status-quo. Do not patronize us! Engage us as partners, not supplicants. If you do not, you too will fail. And, if you do, so shall we. The best chance we have to make a difference will have been squandered.

For God's sake, Stop! Look! Listen! Por Dios, ¡Pare! ¡Mire! ¡Escuche! Mon Dieu, Arretez! Voyez! Ecoutez!

Luis O. Reyes

Coordinator,

Coalition for Educational Excellence for English Language Learners (CEEELL)

March 16, 2007