Yaffed's press conference responding to the revelation of foot-dragging by the city and state in taking action to ensure Yeshivas provide an adequate education to their students

One day after a Department of Investigation inquiry revealed that in 2017, the Mayor had delayed the release of an interim report into the quality of the education received by Ultra-Orthodox Yeshivas students in exchange for the Legislature extending his control over the public schools, the NYC Department of Education finally released its letter to the State Education Department, summarizing the results of its long-awaited investigation into ultra-orthodox Yeshivas.

Even as the DOE letter reported that only two of 28 Yeshivas they visited provided anywhere near a substantially equivalent education compliant with state law, as found via pre-announced visits that ended last spring, they also soft-pedaled the results, with the Chancellor writing that, "The DOE recognizes and applauds the significant progress made as a result of the proactive steps many schools have taken. The DOE is committed to working collaboratively with the schools to assist them as they continue on the path of providing improved instruction."  More on the letter from the Forward, Gothamist and Politico.

In response, Yaffed held a well-attended press conference this morning.  Here is a story about today's presser from the Daily News.

Abbreviated excerpts of the points made are below in the form of  tweets; first from Naftuli Moster, Executive Director of Yaffed, who organized the formal complaint of Yeshiva graduates issued four years ago and has been pressing the state and the city to take action ever since.

Then David Bloomfield, professor of education policy and law at Brooklyn College, who maintains that by interfering in the Yeshiva investigation the mayor himself violated the law, as well as important support expressed for the city and the state to take strong and immediate action, expressed by State Senator Robert Jackson, former Manhattan Borough President Ruth Messenger, and Beatrice Weber, a mom and a grandmother, who is suing the DOE and the Yeshiva that her son attends for educational neglect.

I spoke briefly about the fact that though it is nearly 2020,  it is shameful how thousands of NYC children are still receiving schooling that was basically designed in the middle ages - with high school students consigned to study the Talmud 12 hours a day, with no instruction in English, math, social studies or science -- and with the mayor refusing to take steps to address this for the most selfish of political reasons.

Below the tweets  are the full, powerful statements Naftuli and Ms. Weber made at the presser. 

Good media turnout for ⁦@yaffedorg⁩ press conference pic.twitter.com/SEpwITDJ6n

— leonie haimson (@leoniehaimson) December 23, 2019

.⁦@NYCMayor⁩ don’t trade these children’s future says ⁦@yaffedorg⁩ pic.twitter.com/NdUZGZfvNL

— leonie haimson (@leoniehaimson) December 23, 2019

Naftuli Moster recounts long trail of political deal-making and cover-ups led by ⁦@NYCMayor⁩ that delayed real investigations into sub-par education of Yeshiva students & how pre-announced visits of DOE led to superficial improvements cc ⁦@yaffedorg⁩ pic.twitter.com/jL1WUE7PIZ

— leonie haimson (@leoniehaimson) December 23, 2019

.⁦@BloomfieldDavid⁩ says there was illegal collusion between ⁦@NYCMayor⁩ & Yeshiva leaders. It’s time for action & it’s time for NYS to step in ⁦@yaffedorg⁩ pic.twitter.com/pbyqQuU1so

— leonie haimson (@leoniehaimson) December 23, 2019

.⁦@RJackson_NYC⁩ here to say when it comes to children I will fight for their rights. And if Yeshivas don’t follow the law public funds should be denied them. pic.twitter.com/JXijdJjC02

— leonie haimson (@leoniehaimson) December 23, 2019

Ruth Messenger says it’s Hannukah which means light and we must shed light on this denial of children’s rights . Four years is too slow for all these children denied their basic human rights pic.twitter.com/pbrBGfueDq

— leonie haimson (@leoniehaimson) December 23, 2019

As a mother and grandmother of boys receiving an inferior education in Yeshivas - she saw how her older sons as adults couldn’t attend college or get the job he wants. So she sued on behalf of her youngest son. Her son’s school wasn’t even mentioned in the DOE report. pic.twitter.com/j8lWwoP2nC

— leonie haimson (@leoniehaimson) December 23, 2019

Investigation into DOE's Yeshiva inquiry reveals that the release of an interim report was delayed in return for the extension of mayoral control in 2017

Update: News clips re de Blasio trading delay of release of Yeshiva report for extension of mayoral control includes an explanation of the institutional context from Gothamist: 
   
In a letter to the City Council last year, former DOI Commissioner Mark Peters said he encountered interference and "visible anger" from the de Blasio administration when it came to investigating the yeshivas. Peters was fired by de Blasio after a report showed he had misled the City Council and overstepped his authority by allegedly trying to take over the SCI, which helped produce today's investigation. Peters argued that his ousting came at a convenient time for the mayor. De Blasio appointed Margaret Garnett to replace Peters, and the City Council confirmed her appointment.

Daily News has a debatable quote from new DOI head Garnett:

Margaret Garnett, the commissioner of the city Department of Investigations, said investigators concluded that since City Hall delayed the report in pursuit of a policy goal — to retain Mayor de Blasio’s control over city schools — rather than personal gain, the maneuver didn’t violate rules about obstruction of an investigation.

And yet see this from the NY1 story:

The mayor's office dismissed the DOI's findings, saying, “There’s no ‘there’ there, as evidenced by the finding of no wrongdoing." "Those are not the words I would use," Garnett said of the mayor’s office’s response.
More via THE CITY, Wall Street Journal, NY1, New York Post,  and New York Times .

___
The City’s Commissioner of Investigation and  Special commissioner of Investigation for schools issued a joint statement today on the results of their investigations into the DOE's inquiry into the subpar education received by students in ultra-Orthodox Yeshivas, an inquiry  that began in 2015 after the organization Yaffed and 52 Yeshiva graduates and parents, alleging that at least 39 yeshivas in New York City were failing to meet the state standards requiring a "substantially equivalent" secular education. 

Much controversy has surrounded this issue, based on a suspicion that the political influence of the ultra-Orthodox on the Mayor has prevented a resolution of this issue. In their brief statement, only a few pages long, DOI and SCI reveal that political that a deal was indeed struck in 2017 in Albany between the mayor's representatives and an unnamed State Senator (most likely Simcha Felder) that the DOE would delay issuing any interim report on their investigations in return for extending Mayoral control over the public schools, and that “Following that agreement, the interim report was in fact delayed by approximately one year.”

At the same time, the DOI and Special Investigator conclude that “our investigation found that the agreement had little to no substantive effect on the progress of the Inquiry” which was hampered by other factors, including the unwillingness of the Yeshivas to cooperate.

They also conclude that there is “no evidence of any violations of relevant laws or regulations and did not identify any criminal conduct in connection with the release of DOE’s interim report”.

Most bizarrely, they add, “the evidence did not permit a conclusion as to whether the Mayor had personally authorized the offer to delay issuance of the interim report” which to my mind is so unlikely that it  puts the rest of their conclusions at doubt.

The key passage in the joint statement is here:

In June 2017, a special session of the New York State Legislature was called to vote on extension of mayoral control of New York City schools, among other things. DOI and SCI found that shortly before the vote in that special session, representatives of the Mayor’s Office agreed to delay the release of an interim report summarizing the status of the DOE’s Inquiry. This agreement was apparently made as part of a multi-pronged effort to bolster legislative support for continued mayoral control over the DOE, which was a significant legislative priority for the Mayor’s Office.

The evidence did not permit a conclusion as to whether the Mayor had personally authorized the offer to delay issuance of the interim report. However, the totality of the evidence indicates that the Mayor was aware that the offer to delay had been made, prior to the final push to secure the votes for mayoral control. After being informed of the commitment to delay the interim report, the Mayor personally participated in conversations with at least one state senator and Orthodox community leaders about their broader concerns regarding oversight of yeshivas and how those concerns related to the extension of mayoral control. One witness told DOI and SCI that the City was asked to delay the issuance of the report – then scheduled for summer 2017 – until April 2018. However, DOI and SCI were unable to confirm that any City official agreed to a specific release date or specific period of delay.

The agreement to delay the release of an interim report appears to have had minimal substantive impact on the Inquiry itself. Multiple witnesses told DOI and SCI that, as of June 2017, DOE’s Inquiry was still in its early stages and that any interim report issued at that time would have contained only limited information.

It is hard to know which is more toxic - the system of autocratic mayoral control which I and others critiqued at Assembly hearings this week;  or the damaging political deals the Mayor has made to keep it - which include not just a delay in issuing a report on the Yeshivas in 2017,  but also that same year, his agreement to an increase in the number of NYC charter schools. 

 Before that, as part of the deal to extend mayoral control in 2014 , de Blasio agreed to either co-locate charter schools in public school buildings or help pay for rent in private buildings – a legal obligation which no other district in the state or the nation has been saddled with, and that the DOE is now spending more than $100M per year on.

A question which the DOE/SCI statement does not answer is why the DOE inquiry into the Yeshivas was still in its early stages in June 2017 – given that the initial complaint was made in the July 2015.  See Yaffed’s timeline here.

Another question is what is now holding up the release of the DOE's final report, given that that the DOE visits to Yeshivas concluded last spring and that  “Although the DOE has now visited all 28 yeshivas [originally named in the complaint that are still open], more than four years after the initial complaints, the DOE’s Inquiry continues.”

If the visits ended last spring, why does the DOE Inquiry continue and why has no report has yet been issued?  No explanation is provided.

All this makes one suspect that the political influence of the ultra-Orthodox community with the Mayor and City Hall continues to hamper DOE’s actions and reporting on this issue.

The original concept of having a separate elected school board that appoints a district Superintendent or in NYC’s case, a Chancellor, was based on the notion that education decision-making should be insulated as much as possible from these sorts of political back-room deals.  

Readers, please feel free to leave your thoughts below.

de Blasio continues to favor the privatizers by not requiring parent consent before giving charters access to DOE mailing lists

NeQuan McLean at April 15 protest vs charter mailings; credit: NY Daily News

Update:  NYC parents can opt out of the charter school mailings by entering their information online here.  To do so, you have to know your child's student ID number (OSIS number) which you can get from your school secretary or parent coordinator.

After vehement parent protests and a FERPA privacy complaint submitted to the US Department of Education, the DOE announced they will allow parents to opt out of charter mailings in the future, as the Daily News reported today.  This is NOT good enough, either from a policy or privacy standpoint.

Best practice to ensure student privacy would require parental consent, as the US Department of Education notes -  especially as many parents will not notice the opt out forms in backpack mail or their children may forget to share it with them.  

Best practice from the standpoint of good policy would be for the DOE not to allow charter schools to buy access to this information at all – which only helps them market their schools and expand their enrollment.

NYC is the ONLY district in the entire country that voluntarily helps charter schools expand in this  manner; even ostensibly pro-charter districts like Chicago don’t make this information available to charter schools. 
 At the recent NEA forum for presidential candidates, Mayor de Blasio aggressively postured about how he opposed charter schools:

“I’m going to be blunt with you, I am angry about the state of public education in America…“I am angry about the privatizers. I am sick and tired of these efforts to privatize a precious thing we need — public education. I know we’re not supposed to be saying ‘hate’ — our teachers taught us not to — I hate the privatizers and I want to stop them,” he said.

Charter schools already drain more than $2.1 billion from the DOE budget as well as take up valuable space in our overcrowded public school buildings.  Too bad that the Mayor continues to favor the privatizers in his actions, if not his words.

The email about this from Hydra Mendoza, DOE Deputy Chancellor is below.

---------- Forwarded message ---------

From: Mendoza Hydra <HMendoza3@schools.nyc.gov>
Date: Tue, Aug 27, 2019, 3:22 PM
Subject: Charter mailings

Hi All,

Per my “heads up” text regarding the changes to charter mailings through Vanguard, below please find more specific information.

• Today we are announcing that parents will be able to remove their address from the parent contact list DOE shares with Vanguard.
• Over the past several months, we've heard concerns from families about unsolicited outreach from charter schools as well as concerns from families who want access to this information. 
• We believe creating an avenue for families to remove their addresses meets the needs of all.
• Families will receive a letter and removal form in their back to school packet on September 9th informing them of their ability to remove their addresses. Families will be able to return the removal form within 30 days. 
• Additionally, families will be informed that they can go on the DOE website at any time to remove their addresses from the list.  We will have a direct link.
• Vanguard services for charter schools will be temporarily suspended until October 25 while refusal forms are collected and files are updated accordingly.  Charter schools will still be able to buy mailing lists as other organizations and companies do.
• The DOE will refresh the refusal list  4x per year –  October, December, February and April. 
• This information will be provided to all principals through the PWeekly.

Please let me know if you have any further questions!  Hope everyone is well and ready for the first day of school!

Thank you,

Hydra

Hydra Mendoza

Deputy Chancellor

Division of Community Empowerment, Partnerships and Communication

New York City Department of Education

52 Chambers Street| Suite 320 |NY, NY 10007

HMendoza3@schools.nyc.gov | (212) 374-2486

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Disappointing budget as far as our public schools and class size are concerned

Some  news links: NY Times, NY Post, NY Daily News, Chalkbeat and Brooklyn Eagle. 

The new NYC budget deal was announced between the Mayor and the City Council on Friday.

In terms of our public schools, it included $41M more to hire about 200 new social workers for schools, especially those with lots of homeless kids and $857,000 for seven additional Title IX Coordinators to handle complaints of gender discrimination and sexual harassment.  The budget will also put $250M into an overall city budget reserve to be used during economic downturns that now totals $6 billion. 

The education budget will  include  another $25 million  for the Mayor’s top education priority: 3K expansion into 14 new districts, bringing the cost to around $100M.  If the pattern of previous years holds, the DOE will continue to draw kids out of existing preK centers run by Community Based Organizations  and pushing them into already overcrowded public schools, which in turn will contribute to higher class sizes for kids in grades K-5.

What the education budget doesn't include: any increase in Fair student funding (with many schools are currently at only 90%), no dedicated funding for class size reduction, and no amount to achieve CBO pay parity for preK teachers -- though the Council says they got a commitment from the Mayor to address this disparity though negotiations by the end of the summer.

The only elementary school initiative that I know of is the 2nd grade literacy coach program in high needs schools, which is  now in its third year, funding 242 coaches in 305 elementary schools, according to the DOE website.  The program is supposed to produce two-thirds of students reading on grade level by the end of second grade by 2022, and 100 percent of all second graders reading at grade level by 2026 (long after de Blasio has left office.)

Yet the first year of the program showed no positive impact and the administration has not yet released data from either its second or third year - which suggests it may have had disappointing results as I predicted. Though the news of the budget deal didn't mention this, it is likely that the initiative will continue to be funded next year at the level in the Mayor's executive budget of about $90 million per year.  (There are job listings for this position here.)

In any case we aren't giving up on our campaign to reduce class sizes.  More counselors are great but there this will do little to improve achievement in grades K-5 where class sizes in many schools are still sky high. 

What the DOE said last night about sending school transfer letters to parents and what the mayor said about reducing class size

Last night the Mayor, the Chancellor and NYC Department of Education officials spoke at a Town hall meeting for Manhattan parent leaders at P.S. 153, Adam Clayton Powell School.  A video of the entire meeting is posted here.  Mayor de Blasio and the Chancellor have scheduled these meetings in all the five boroughs as part of their push for the renewal of Mayoral control.  As de Blasio said last Friday at the Senate hearings on mayoral control and school governance, he knows they have to do a better job listening to parents and they will be trying to do so over the next few weeks.

Among the highlights (or low lights)  of the meeting:

Cheryl Watson- Harris, First Deputy Chancellor of DOE, admitted that they made a mistake sending letters to parents at schools that just made the state list in need of Comprehensive Support.  These letters said their children's schools were among the lowest-performing in the state and informed them they had the right to transfer their children to higher-performing schools. See yesterday's post about this.  Though the DOE claimed in the Principals Weekly this transfer option is required by federal law, that is  untrue.  The transfer option, known as "Public school choice" under the previous law NCLB is not required by either the feds or the state.

Rather than simply saying that sending these letters to parents was wrong, Watson-Harris said the letters went out "prematurely" and that the DOE would "support" any parents  "if their option is to go to another school."

See the video taken by Kaliris Salas-Ramirez at the meeting.

See also the video of Mayor de Blasio's comments below  that while he is aware that class size is the number one concern of parents (the issue has come up at every parent Town Hall meeting this year), he is looking for savings in the DOE budget and he cannot afford to hire more teachers to lower class size.

No one followed up by asking why the Mayor can afford to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on hiring more teachers to expand classes for four year old children and now three year olds,  but not a dime to hire more teachers to lower class size in Kindergarten or any higher grade.

In the above video, the Mayor claimed he is building more schools without any help from the federal government or the state, saying "It's our money." Actually, the state provides matching funds for every dollar the city spends on school construction or repair.

He also claimed that they are "making progress in the here and now" on relieving overcrowding and providing more school space.  The reality is that the new five-year capital plan is so back-loaded  that fifty thousand out of its fifty seven thousand new seats won't be built until 2024 or later - long after the he has left office.

By then our schools will likely be even more overcrowded than ever, due to rezonings and rampant housing development throughout the city, as well as the further expansion of 3K in our elementary schools.  This year they added 3K classes to seventeen schools that were already at 100% or more.

When de Blasio leaves office, his record in each of his two terms in building new school seats will be worse than that of any of Bloomberg's three terms. See below - with data taken from the Mayor's Management Report and the new proposed five-year capital plan.

See also this graph from our report The Impact of PreK on School Overcrowding on the projected timeline for finishing seats in DOE preK projects by year compared to K12 schools in de Blasio's first and second terms.  The contrast is stunning:

One more word about the Mayor's evident bias towards PreK.  A few weeks ago, I wanted to see to which elementary schools the DOE was admitting new 3K, preK and Kindergarten students for next year. Given the lack of transparency at DOE, the only way I could figure out how to do this was by logging into the DOE website, creating imaginary profiles for three young children, and searching to see which schools  had openings.  I never completed the application because I didn't want to disrupt or disturb the enrollment process at these schools.

Since then, I have received five emails from DOE urging me to finish my PreK application process for my imaginary three-year old and four-year old children, as well as a personal phone call this morning.  I have yet to receive a single email or call about completing the application process for my imaginary Kindergarten child.

All in all, the Mayor's focus on expanding PreK is so extreme that he has reneged on his responsibility to improve the learning conditions of NYC children once they turn five.