NYC parents: the best and the wisest, but utterly ignored

See Diane Ravitch’s latest and superb column in EdWeek:

John Dewey wrote that what the best and wisest parent wants for his own child is what the community should want for all its children. That's a good starting point. What does the best and wisest parent want for his or her own child? Certainly, that parent would want a school with small classes, which guarantees that her child would get personal attention.

Class size is a pretty good indicator of what most people mean by quality. If you visit the most elite private schools, you can bet that they don't have 32 students in a class. On the Web sites of such schools, one learns that classes are typically 12 to 15 students to a teacher. Such luxury is unheard of in most public schools, with the possible exception of schools in tony suburbs. Many of those who pronounce that class size doesn't matter send their own children to schools with small classes.Another indicator of quality is the presence of the arts. The best and wisest parent would not want his child to go to a school with no teachers of music, art, dance, or other arts. Yet we know that in most of our public schools today, the arts have been sacrificed to make more time for test-prepping.

In this case, the majority of NYC parents are “the best and the wisest.” Over and over again, in the DOE own annual surveys, public school parents say their top priority for their children’s schools is smaller classes, followed by more enrichment. And yet they are completely ignored by an administration whose own children attend schools with just these attributes.

One might add, what private school has merit pay tied to standardized test scores? Or spends millions to create teams of teachers and bureaucrats to engage in “data analysis” supposedly to help “differentiate” instruction, while doing nothing to reduce class size?

What private school has adopted what is likely to be the next priority of the administration, according to Chris Cerf, which is to further “individualize” learning through online computer instruction, rather than give students an opportunity to receive more feedback from actual human beings? As Joel Klein has said, if he gets his way, he will cut the teaching force by another 30 percent.

Not a single private school that I know of would stand for such priorities, and certainly none of the elite schools where the officials determining educational policy for our public schools sent their own children to school.

Mayor Bloomberg: Spence (average class size: 16-18); Chancellor Klein: Miss Porter’s (average class size: 11); Photo Agnostopoulos (DOE’s Chief Operating Officer) Dalton (average class size: 15)

Obama: Sidwell Friends (average class size: 15).

Instead of taking heed of the DOE's own parent surveys, the mayor continually tells parents to butt out when it comes to issues like school overcrowding, and only involve themselves "in the micro issues of their child’s education, like the child’s attendance, behavior and grades."

While supposedly favoring parental "choice" he also has said that parents should have no say in "setting educational policy."

This paternalism also imbues the US Department of Education under Obama, as Diane points out:

Are these the priorities of President Obama's Race to the Top Fund? Absolutely not! The president's Department of Education will dispense nearly $5 billion, not to reduce class sizes, not to expand access to the arts, and not to improve the beauty and functionality of our public schools, but to incentivize the workforce with merit pay; to increase the privatization of struggling schools; and to compel teachers to teach to admittedly poor tests by tying teacher pay to students' test scores. Let's get back to the new federal education agenda. Seeing how little has changed from Bush to Obama in education policy, I want my share of that $5 billion back.

Bloomberg to parents: butt out!

See the recent Bloomberg interview in The Villager:

Bloomberg said parents need only be involved in the micro issues of their child’s education, like the child’s attendance, behavior and grades. It does not make sense for parents to be involved in larger issues like overcrowding, because those issues take years to resolve, Bloomberg said.

“When you’re talking about siting schools, you’re not talking about parental involvement,” he said, “because the process from deciding you want to build a school, siting it and building it and moving your kid in, your kid’s going to be through graduate school by that time.

Surely they would be in graduate school if we left it up to the Department of Education.

"These things don’t happen overnight. You’re talking about a different group of people who want to have some input: community activists. Nothing wrong with that, but it’s not parents.”

No, actually it has been parents who have been forced to work and to work hard, finding sites, pushing the DOE, and lobbying their elected officials over and over again to ensure that there is enough space so that their kids can have decent class sizes, art and music, and can attend neighborhood public schools.

Parents have been forced to site every new school in Manhattan over the past eight years, and many schools throughout the city, because of the incompetence and disinterest of the Mayor and his appointees at the DOE. We’ve had to do our own enrollment projections as well, since the high priced consultants hired by the DOE seem unable to figure out that the rising birth rate and the development boom throughout the city, unleashed by the Mayor's policies, might actually lead to more children needing a seat in a public school.

He continued, “Parent involvement should not be parent control. We have professional principals, administrators and teachers — experts. They should design the classroom.”

That’s why there are few if any educators in control at DOE?

Bloomberg then described the improvements he has made in sharing information with parents about their children’s performance and their children’s schools, including parent coordinators, school report cards and surveys.

But what’s the point of those surveys, if they have no effect on what goes on in the classroom? Every single year, parents say in the DOE surveys that their top priority is smaller classes, yet every year the Mayor and the Chancellor violate state law by refusing to reduce class size.

This is not new. The Mayor has repeatedly expressed his disdain for the views of parents and their right to have a voice in how their children's schools are run. See this story from the NY Post in May : “Bloomie to school parents: back off!”

“Mayor Bloomberg said yesterday that parents should butt out of trying to dictate educational policy as the debate over mayoral control of the schools intensifies. "You do not want parents setting educational policy. You do not want parents telling teachers how to teach. Teachers would not be happy about that," Bloomberg said on his WOR radio program. "That's what you have professionals for," he added. …”

Why? Perhaps because he knows that despite all his billions, he cannot buy our silence, or our support.

See also letters in response to Bloomberg's comments from parent activists Tina Schiller and Tricia Joyce in the Downtown Express.

Yet more evidence of Bloomberg's utter disdain for NYC parents

See the article, BLOOMY TO SCHOOL PARENTS: BACK OFF, in which the mayor insisted on WOR-radio that “parents should butt out of trying to dictate educational policy as the debate over mayoral control of the schools intensifies."

"You do not want parents setting educational policy. You do not want parents telling teachers how to teach. Teachers would not be happy about that," Bloomberg said on his WOR radio program. "That's what you have professionals for," he added.

What’s particularly obnoxious is that while Bloomberg is contemptuous of parents and says educators not parents should be in charge, the reality is that he has disempowered both parents and educators in his effort to privatize and corporatize the system. Indeed, only two out of twenty of the top bureaucrats at Tweed are educators. The truth is that Bloomberg wants to bulldoze over everyone who stands in the way of his destructive and inequitable policies.

His evident unconcern about the dangers to our kids from the swine flu and his refusal to close schools where up to half of the students are absent reminds me of his insistence on eliminating bus routes in the middle of winter two years ago; or his refusal to allow students to carry cell phones to school because, as he put it, all they will use them for is to call their parents to ask what’s for dinner.

Below are more comments from Steve Koss, public school parent and former teacher:

The level of contempt this Mayor has for public school parents -- and the citizenry in general -- would be astonishing in any public figure, but in a man who is ostensibly running in an upcoming election, it's simply extraordinary. Every time he opens his mouth, words come out that reflect a billionaire's arrogance, aloofness, and lack of empathy for and understanding of ordinary New Yorkers' lives.

The Mayor tells everyone not to worry about flu, that just because there are a few people sick, "That it doesn't mean you stop living." Until a beloved Queens teacher and assistant principal dies and the Mayor dismissively rationalizes continued school operation with 40-60% of the kids absent as a day care issue.

Norman Seabrook, union head for corrections officers at Rikers Island complains about the spread of flu among inmates there, and the Mayor's typically sarcastic response is, "If he is an epidemiologist, it's the first time I've heard of it." Nor, the last time I heard of it, was Mr. Bloomberg.

Parents want a meaningful voice in the policies affecting their children's education, and the Mayor tells them by radio interview to butt out, that they're neither needed nor wanted. And while he's at it, he reverts back to his usual scare tactics that any parental input is tantamount to destroying what he's built (such a bad idea??) and that it will automatically return NYC public education to "the bad old days."

It would be pleasant if just once, this Mayor at least acted like cares, even if inside he could care less. Of course, Mr. Bloomberg doesn't have to worry about offending parents or anyone else, since he has already haughtily subverted their will on term limits and bought and paid for both the City Council and the election itself.

If you think about it, it's simply astonishing to realize that later this year, hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers will be voting for this bitter, intolerant, humorless, and affectless individual (I can't bring myself to use the words human being) as their Mayor for another four years. Or more, if Mike decides he wants to stick around. After all, what Mikey wants, Mikey gets, no more how much it costs him or how much pain it inflicts on the average New Yorker about whom he cares so little.

-- Steve Koss

Setting the record straight; why NYC should not win the Broad prize

It is widely expected that after being nominated three times, NYC will win the Broad prize tomorrow for most improved urban school district. We faxed the following letter to the foundation today, to set the record straight.

Dear Eli Broad and the Broad Foundation:

We urge you not to award the Broad prize to NYC this year. As parents and teachers, we have witnessed one incoherent wave of reorganization after another over the last five years, leading to unnecessary chaos and in many cases, disruption of educational services. None of these changes have been planned or undertaken with any consultation of the stakeholders in the system.

In the first phase, when districts were dissolved and schools placed into regions, a year went by when thousands of special education students were denied referrals and/or essential services. Now regions have been dissolved, and districts re-instated, but without the ability or manpower to supervise and provide support to individual schools. More recently, the Department of Education instituted bus route changes in the midst of winter, which left thousands of shivering children in the cold, and others as young as six years old who were given Metro cards and expected to take the subway by themselves.

Instead of transparency and accurate information, we get spin and PR. Though overall, the amount spent on education has risen, there is no evidence that a larger percentage of resources has gone to the classroom, despite repeated claims by DOE. Instead, each year the headcount grows of highly paid officials at Tweed, as well as the number of multi-million dollar consultants.

Though test scores have risen, a careful examination shows that for the 4th and 8th grade state exams, there was more growth during the four years before the administration’s reforms were put into place than in the four years since. Moreover, as recent news reports have revealed, the 4th grade exams in both ELA and math were much easier in 2005, when the largest gains in NYC performance occurred, putting into doubt their validity.

And while the city claims a rising graduation rate, the way in which the DOE calculates this rate excludes thousands of students “discharged” from the system to GED and alternative programs each year, none of whom are counted as dropouts. What is most disturbing is that the number of these students continues to rise, as the City Comptroller has pointed out. Without fully accounting for the fate of these students, as the DOE refuses to do, there is no way to assess whether graduation rates have actually improved. Even according to DOE’s own unreliable calculations, the six year graduation rate is no higher than it was in 1996.

With nearly every change they have made in recent years, this administration has ignored the input of parents, and continues to show its contempt for our concerns, including the need to communicate with our children before and after school and help ensure their safety through the use of cell phones. Though the City Council has passed a law that would allow students to carry cell phones to and from school, the administration has said they will not comply with this law, since they claim unilateral authority when it comes to our schools.

The DOE is similarly scornful of the legitimate desires of parents for their children to be educated in smaller classes. This was the number one priority of parents in the recent DOE survey, though the administration continues to attempt to obscure these results. Our classes remain the largest in the state by far and some of the largest in the nation, without any significant improvement in five years. The State’s highest court concluded that class sizes were too large to give NYC children their right to an adequate education, yet in 2006, an audit showed that the city created only 20 additional classes with $90 million in state funds meant to reduce class size. Despite the audit’s findings, the DOE has refused to adopt any of the recommendations of the State Comptroller to improve compliance.

On your website, you have said that you will take into account the views of stakeholders, including parents and teachers, in awarding the prize. We urge you to consider these facts, and withhold this award from the NYC Department of Education until it is more legitimately earned.

Yours, fifty one NYC parents and teachers

For the letter with footnotes and full list of signers, click here.

What's for dinner? Bloomberg's comments re cell phones

As reported below, yesterday the Mayor vetoed the legislation that would grant students the right to carry their cell phones to and from schools -- and would obligate DOE to set up a process to make this possible.

The Council passed the original bill 46-2 and is expected to override his veto easily, though the administration has already signaled it doesn't intend to comply with the law in any case -- which sets up a legal battle as to whether the Council has the authority to ensure this right for students.

Today on his weekly radio show, Bloomberg once again trivialized parents' concerns about what would happen in emergencies such as another 9/11, when several downtown schools were evacuated and it was impossible for them to locate their children for many hours, and also about unsafe situations that occur regularly when students are traveling to and from school.

Instead, the Mayor said that parents just want to tell their children what’s for dinner:

”If your question is do you want to have fish or chicken for dinner tonight, that’s not something we should pull your kid out. If it’s an emergency, call the school. If it’s not an emergency, it has to wait. There’s nothing more important for our children than getting them the education they’re going to need to survive and you can’t have both.” (You can listen to the full radio show here.)

Council Speaker Christine Quinn, who is taking a rare step in openly defying the Mayor, released a statement, which said in part:

“We believe our legislation puts the onus on the DOE to provide that a student who arrives at school with a cell phone in the morning should have that phone for use when traveling home at the end of the day.”

NY Times: Lack of Interest in Parent Councils

Today's NY Times examines the low interest in the Community Education Council elections. What's unusual about the article is that the Times, normally very deferrential to the Bloomberg agenda for the schools, here devotes considerable space to air parent views. Here's one parent leader:

Rob Caloras, the council president in District 26 in northeast Queens, a district known for its excellent schools and high levels of activism by parents, said that only five people were running for the parent council.

“It’s kind of sad,” Mr. Caloras said. “We’ve lost people who were on the council. They went back to the PTA because they feel it’s much more important to be active in their children’s schools than waste their time here.”

In District 27 (Queens) Andrew Baumann was the only candidate to show up at a forum where candidates were to address parents.

“The mayor and the chancellor really don’t want us involved,” said Mr. Baumann, who calls himself a reluctant candidate for a third term. “When you’re running a big corporation, you don’t ask the guys on the loading dock what their opinions are. The way I see it, we’re just pushing a box from one side to the other in a warehouse.”

What the article fails to mention is that Chancellor Klein hired accounting firm KPMG to manage the election process. But their poor management was a major factor in the low turnout at the candidate forums. PTA officers eligible to vote and even candidates themselves were not told of the forums until a few days, sometimes hours, before they happened.

Click here for the full article.

Who are the real special interests when it comes to our schools?

On Monday, Mayor Bloomberg held a press conference where he castigated critics of his risky restructuring and funding proposals, calling them "a small chorus of people who are calling for a return to the good old days", who represent "special interests," like the National Rifle Association.

"You always do have the problem of a very small group of people who are single-issue focused having a disproportionate percentage of power," he said. "That's exactly the NRA."

Others might think, on the other hand, that it is he and the Chancellor -- a very small group with almost dictatorial powers over our schools -- who are the real problem.

Given the fact that among the many critics of their proposals are parents legitimately concerned about what these funding cuts might mean for their children, in terms of the loss of experienced teachers, class size, or essential services, I don't know how he can call us "special interests."

For an excellent critique of these funding proposals, and how they treat public education differently from all other municipal services, see this discussion from the Educational Priorities Panel.

Can you imagine if the city funded firehouses or police stations based not on the actual salaries of the employees, but on average salaries citywide – essentially forcing police captains to try get rid of their most experienced officers?

The attitude reflected here – seeing teachers as disposable resources -- goes against everything that the administration pretends to say about respecting them and honoring their profession.

I am also frankly sick and tired of the Mayor and Chancellor attempting to label any critics of their half-baked, risky schemes as defenders of the status quo. As I told the Staten Island Advance yesterday:

"We want smaller classes, we want more arts funding, we want less testing, we want more input from real stakeholders on the ground....We have been asking for real changes for six years and they have kept their ears shut to us."

In fact, many of us have been calling for real change in our schools long before Bloomberg even thought of running for Mayor, and Joel Klein was still a prosecutor living in DC.

On the other hand, the Mayor surrounded himself yesterday with people who had signed onto a letter of support - with none representing either parent or mainstream education groups. Most of the organizations represented had financial interests with DOE or had received funding from the city or Bloomberg's own charitable donations.

Several had applied to be a partnership support organizations. Many of the news articles, including the NY Sun and the NY Post, pointed out how many of these organizations were dependent on Tweed's largesse and thus were clearly reluctant to bite the hand that feeds them.

What was not pointed out, though, is how many had been the recipients of large no-bid contracts from DOE.

Last spring, CityYear (which contributed not one, but two signers to the letter) received a five year, no-bid contract for $11 million through 2012, “to help children learn to read, encourage children to stay in school and to care about their communities.” (The sixth year, and more millions of dollars, are to be contingent on follow-up questions “to be asked of CityYear.”)

Or what about the New Teacher Project, whose director also signed onto the letter of support? Last April, Tweed officials submitted a two year, $2.2 million no-bid contract for the Project, based at the University of Santa Cruz in California, to provide training for teacher mentors. Yet the internal DOE committee rejected it. The reasons listed? "Insufficient justification for request" and "Should be competitively bid."

So the contract was re-submitted for even more money in May, and this time was approved, for $2.8 million! There's accountability for you.

And parents are the special interests, according to the Mayor!

In any case, the fact that the administration asked its contractors to sign onto such a letter shows how isolated and desperate they have become, to resort to an ethical and PR blunder almost as bad as New Visions asking their grantees for kickbacks.

TWEED HOSTAGES RELEASED

April 5, 2007 (GBN News): A potential confrontation was averted early today when 12 members of the Chancellor’s Parent Advisory Committee (CPAC) were released by the N.Y. City Department of Education after being held captive at Tweed Courthouse for over 24 hours. The committee members had gone to the DOE headquarters for a meeting, but apparently made a wrong turn down a restricted hallway and were immediately seized by school safety officers. The captives were the subject of intense negotiations between the DOE and those attempting to obtain their release.

The Tweed Courthouse has been disputed territory since Mayor Bloomberg took control of the city schools in 2002. CPAC, an elected group of parents which is supposed to advise the Chancellor on educational issues, is technically a part of the DOE and meets at the Courthouse. However, the capture of the committee members is only the latest in a series of frustrations as CPAC attempts to gain access to officials and information at Tweed.

During the negotiations, Chancellor Klein and Mayor Bloomberg had been intransigent, insisting that DOE territory was intentionally violated. “We welcome parent involvement”, the Chancellor stated, “but Tweed is not their place. If they have a problem, they should see their parent coordinators”. Mayor Bloomberg added, “We value our parents, but they should be at PTA bake sales, not trespassing on our property. Tweed is for business people, who know best how to run the schools.”

Upon the release, a statement was issued by Chancellor Klein’s office, stating, “While we are entitled to put the trespassers on trial, the DOE has pardoned these CPAC members and gives their release to the parents of New York City schoolchildren as a gift.”

However, while the release of the captives was portrayed by the Chancellor as a magnanimous gesture, it appears that there may have been a more practical reason for the change of heart. According to a source at the DOE, with the recent elimination of the school lunch budget by corporate “turnaround” consultants Alvarez and Marsal, the DOE was unable to obtain funding for the detainees’ meals. Apparently, even the DOE was unwilling to run afoul of the Geneva Convention by “not meeting standards” for care and feeding of prisoners.

Community Education Council in District 1 Opposes Restructuring, Calls for Smaller Class Sizes

At a press conference yesterday, the Mayor lashed out at proponents of smaller class sizes for our overcrowded schools. Perhaps he should read the resolution passed by these parent leaders elected to represent the parent agenda in District 1 of Manhattan and recognized by the Department of Ed. This resolution follows similar ones by the Citywide Council of High Schools, Stuyvesant High School and other elected parent bodies.

DISTRICT 1 CEC RESOLUTION

PASSED AT MARCH 22, 2007 CALENDAR MEETING

WHEREAS, District 1 has requested information regarding school-specific impacts and District structure along with other questions for which information or answers were not provided;

WHEREAS, This plan is being implemented in a reckless and hasty manner;

WHEREAS, After having reviewed the Department of Education's Children First: and Fair Student Funding Plan;

WHEREAS, By financially penalizing schools for having experienced teachers over time, will likely lead to a less qualified teaching force in our schools, which already have nearly double the attrition rate of teachers more than anywhere else in the state;

WHEREAS, Reaffirming the fact that some of our schools and classrooms in District 1 and city-wide are severely overcrowded and our children's quality of education is suffering from this ongoing crisis;

WHEREAS, Many schools are being penalized for low levels of achievement as a result of this overcrowding, which is out of their control;

WHEREAS, Research and our own experience in District 1 strongly indicates that reduced class size makes a big difference in a child's education, and will lead to higher overall graduation rates;

WHEREAS, the best way to retain effective and experienced teachers is to improve classroom conditions by lowering class size;

WHEREAS, Smaller classes has been one of the top priorities of District 1 parents, school leaders, teachers, New York City Council Members, Assembly Members and many constituents for the last twenty years;

WHEREAS, The state's highest court found that classes in NYC schools were too large in all grades to provide our children with their constitutional right to an adequate education;

WHEREAS, Despite claims from the Department of Education, state data shows that there has been little or no progress in reducing class size since that decision was written, and in some key subjects, class sizes have actually risen;

WHEREAS, An audit released last March by the State Comptroller's Office found that with $89 million in state funds targeted to create 1,586 additional classes to reduce class size, the city had only created 20, contrary to the language and intent of the law;

WHEREAS, Despite billions of dollars in added funds, the Department of Education does not intend to reduce average class size in any grade higher than 3rd, and to use only 2% of the extra funds for smaller classes;

WHEREAS, This would leave our children still deprived of the attention they need in classes that are up to 60% larger than the rest of the state; doubtlessly contributing to an unconscionably high dropout rate in our high schools, and a 43.5% four-year graduation rate according to the State Education department;

WHEREAS, Despite claims to the contrary, there is no independent evidence that in the last round of reorganization, $200 million was ever redirected directly into the classroom;

WHEREAS, As a result of that reorganization, thousands of special education students were not evaluated in a timely fashion and many were denied their right to mandated services, in accordance with the Federal Law, and the Department of Education also cut spending on
special education by $445 million in one year;

WHEREAS, the following year, despite claims that more funding was being driven to the classroom, total dollars spent on general education declined by $144 million;

WHEREAS, according to the Educational Priorities Panel, a smaller percentage of the overall budget has gone to instruction each year;

WHEREAS, the head count and salaries of Tweed employees has grown substantially, and continues to grow, with a projected increase of 12% in spending for Tweed staff next year;

WHEREAS, In contrast, our schools are still under-funded, and under this new system, up to half of all schools may have their budgets further cut, despite $1.1 billion in planned additional education spending next year and more than $5 billion over the next four years;

WHEREAS, The implementation of a similar proposal, supposed to make funding fairer, and more flexible caused one of the largest educational crises in Great Britain's history, with the threat of massive teacher lay-offs and children actually sent home from school after only four days of instruction, until an emergency supplementary bill to provide additional funding for schools could be passed;

WHEREAS, Sir Michael Barber, the Chief Education Advisor at the time for Prime Minister Tony Blair, is now a top consultant at Tweed, and helped devise this new proposal;

WHEREAS, There is no evidence of any school system in the world that has adopted weighted funding like the proposed Fair Student Funding, and has made significant progress in student achievement;

WHEREAS, Though DOE claims that many principals in the empowerment zone last year used their additional funding and flexibility to hire extra teachers to reduce class size, principals reported that they were simply sent more students by Tweed as a result, erasing any
chance of actually providing them with smaller classes;

WHEREAS, The administration has admitted this may have occurred in many instances, and yet refuses to promise that it will not happen again;

WHEREAS, For many middle and high school teachers, given their huge class sizes and teaching loads, just spending 5 minutes out of class conferring with each student, and another five minutes correcting his or her weekly homework would take an additional 40 hours per week;

WHEREAS, The Department of Education has just contracted with IBM for $80 million to produce a new data management system whose function and purpose is supposedly to help teachers individualize instruction to meet the needs of each student, and yet with class sizes of 30 or more in many schools, and teaching loads of 150-180 students, it will continue to be impossible for teachers to do so;

WHEREAS, The new accountability/grading system is also potentially dangerous, and may lead principals to discharge, transfer, suspend, and otherwise try to rid their schools of low-achieving students any way they can, since their jobs will depend upon raising test scores sufficiently;

WHEREAS, The data reported by Department of Education regarding class size, graduation rates, and many other measures is often inaccurate and unreliable, so the new formula for assessing the progress of schools will be based on similarly erroneous metrics;

WHEREAS, In trying to impose a new system citywide without adequate consultation, careful thought, or testing, education officials have previously caused grave problems, most recently as in the bus route fiasco;

WHEREAS, For all the above reasons and more, in numerous public meetings, parents and teachers have urged the Department of Education to stop this new reorganization from going forward, because of the substantial risk that rather than improving our schools, it will lead
to further chaos, instability, and budget cuts, and may result in class sizes growing even larger at many schools;

RESOLVED, That the Community Education Council in District One rejects the Department of Education's Children First proposal and calls upon the Mayor and Chancellor to designate that an adequate amount of CFE funds, be utilized to reduce class size in all grades throughout all
New York City public schools, so that our children will finally receive their right to an adequate education and a better chance in getting a quality education, by giving them a more solid foundation towards their future.

Rally to Put the Public Back into Public Education

The rally on Wednesday at St. Vartan's Cathedral was fantastic – dedicated to "Putting the Public back into Public Education. " Over a thousand angry NYC parents, teachers and students, giving voice to their frustration about this administration’s total disregard for their views, and their opposition to the new proposals that will bring more chaos, disruption and budget cuts to our schools.

One personal highlight was Robert Jackson, founder of the CFE lawsuit, former public school parent, and now head of the City Council Education Committee. RJ ran into the audience to pick up a Class Size Matters sign, ran back onstage, and held it up while speaking passionately about the our bill in the State Legislature that would require smaller classes in all grades.

The most elequent speakers, in my opinion, were NYC public school parents Tim Johnson, Chair of CPAC, and Jane Hirschmann from Time Out from Testing, who blew the top off the cathedral and completely outdid the elected officials (other than RJ, of course). I hearby nominate Tim and Jane as our next Mayor and Chancellor.

Others in attendance were City Comptroller Bill Thompson, Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum, Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, Queens Borough President Helen Marshall, Bertha Lewis, head of ACORN, Lillian Rodriguez-Lopez, President of the Hispanic Federation, and Randi Weingarten, President of the United Federation of Teachers.

Another personal highlight was to be able to introduce so many members of the NYC Education List serv to each other in person, who up to that time had only communicated with each other online.

One of those in the audience was Diane Ravitch, eminent historian. I brought her over to Mike Meenan of NY1, who interviewed her on camera while Diane told him how in her study of over two hundred years of the history of NYC public schools, the people running Tweed are unprecedented in their collective hostility to the whole notion of public education. I hope Mike includes her remarks in a future segment.

Diane will be speaking March 27 at 7 PM about the so-called Bloomberg "reforms" at St. John's University, in a meeting open to the public. More details soon.