Education advocates and parents speak out against appointment of Joe Belluck to the Panel for Educational Policy

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 Belluck did not show up for the PEP meeting last night, and  reporter Madina Toure on twitter reported that he had withdrawn, and linked to a Politico article  behind the paywall..  

An article about this appointment was in yesterday's NY Post.

For immediate release: Feb. 15, 2022

Contact: Leonie Haimson, leoniehaimson@gmail.com; 917-435-9329

 

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."

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Testimonies of three mothers, speaking about how their children have been affected by the unacceptably large classes in city schools

The testimonies of parents, educators and advocates at the class size hearings at City Hall on Friday were so powerful that I am going to post many of them on this blog.  Here is video of the proceedings -- nearly six hours.  The hearings would have lasted even longer if many of the parents who wanted to testify hadn't been shut out because the room was too crowded. Here's an article about the hearings from Chalkbeat.

Below are the heartbreaking statements of three mothers, Alexa Aviles, Emily Hellstrom, and Naila Rosario. None of these their children were served adequately because of the unacceptably large classes in the city's public schools.

The plight of English language learners is also mentioned in Alexa Aviles' testimony, who asked, can you imagine such a child in a class of 32? It would be like trying to learn in Times Square on New Year's Eve.

NYC parents tell the Mayor to stop stalling and stop giving charter schools access to student information

Video and press release below about our press conference this afternoon.  Sorry for the low quality- it was broadcast on twitter live. 

For immediate release: April 15, 2019

For more information contact: NeQuan McLean, 347-470-4975, educationcouncils@gmail.com

NYC parents tell the Mayor to stop stalling and stop giving charter schools access to student information to market their schools

This afternoon, in front of the NYC Department of Education headquarters, NYC public school parents told Mayor de Blasio to stop bowing to the charter school lobby and halt the practice of giving charters access to student personal information to market their schools.  Instead, they said, he should listen to parents’ concerns, stop violating their children’s privacy, and cease this practice, which by helping charters expand, causes the loss of funding and space from our public schools.

In recent weeks, Chancellor Carranza has repeatedly promised parent leaders, both publicly and privately, that this practice would be discontinued, but the Mayor has yet to make a commitment to do so, and in the last few days he has said that he has not yet made a decision.  

Said Johanna Garcia, public school parent and President of Community Education Council in District 6 in Upper Manhattan:  “It is unconscionable that this practice continues. For more than a decade, parents and advocates have complained to DOE about the privacy violations incurred by allowing charters to access our children’s personal information without our consent.  I filed a FERPA complaint to the US Department of Education about this practice in November 2017.  Moreover, I am not aware of another school district in the country that voluntarily makes this information available to charter schools and undermines our public schools in the process."

NeQuan McLean, co- chair of the Education Council Consortium and the President of Community Education Council in District 16 Brooklyn said: “My mailbox is continually flooded with deceptive promotional materials from charter schools.  As a result of expensive marketing campaigns and the damaging co-location policies of the DOE, my district has been overrun by charters.  The Mayor repeatedly says he listens to parents; we are saying loudly and clearly that he should end this practice now.”

“Not only is personal student information unnecessary for appropriate marketing, providing access to it is an unacceptable violation of student privacy,” said Mark Cannizzaro, president of the Counselor of School Supervisors and Administrators.

Shino Tanikawa, the co-chair of the ECC and a member of NYC Kids PAC, agreed: “For years, DOE has ignored parents’ complaints about this practice, which started in 2006 when Joel Klein agreed to help Success Academy charter schools expand their “market share” as Eva Moskowitz put it in an email.  The result is that this year, more than two billion dollars has been diverted from our public schools. Why should our supposedly progressive Mayor continue this practice, when he promised parents he would defend our public schools in the face of charter encroachment? “

Leonie Haimson, co-chair of the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy, pointed out: “In Chicago, after student information was disclosed to charter schools by the district, resulting in parents receiving postcards urging them to enroll their children in their schools, this sparked a huge controversy and led to an investigation by the city’s Inspector General.  As a result, the staffer who released the information was fired and the district apologized to parents . Right now, in Nashville, their school district is defying a state law requiring districts to make parent contact information available to charter schools, and last week appealed a court order to do so.  NY State has no such law, and in fact, our state law bars the use of student data for marketing purposes.”

Naomi Peña, parent of four public school children and President of Community Education Council in District 1 in the Lower East Side, said: “For years, I along with other public school parents have been subjected to glossy flyers from charter schools, which have received donations from hedge fund billionaires to help them advertise in this way.  Charters also spend thousands of dollars on social media buys, TV and radio ads, and plaster their posters all over our subway.  Meanwhile, our public schools don’t have the funding to promote themselves in this way – and if they did, do we really want our public schools spending money on ads that should go to improving learning conditions for our kids?

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Parent organizing 101: how parents can get schools built in your community or oust an abusive principal!

Check out the video below of our Parent Organizing 101 workshop from our Jan. 27 Parent Action Conference.

First Naila Rosario explains how the DOE failed to find sites or build schools for the overcrowded Sunset Park community in Brooklyn, even though funding for these schools had been allocated in the school capital budget for 20 years .  Yet when Naila, parents and community activists got organized, they managed to have all five schools sited and in the process of being designed and built in a year and a half.

Then Kaliris Salas-Ramiris and Bonnie Massey recount how the parents of Central Park East 1 in East Harlem managed to oust their abusive principal after a powerful organizing effort, which also took about a year and a half, in the face of huge resistance from the District 4 Superintendent Estrella and Chancellor Carmen Farina.

Naila's powerpoint presentation is here; and the CPE1 powerpoint is here, in case you want to take a look and share it with others.  Video thanks to Norm Scott.



Parent KidsPac Conf Organizing 101 Jan 27 2018 from MORE-UFT/GEM on Vimeo.