Mayoral control in the eyes of three NYC parent leaders

The NY State Education Department is holding hearings on Mayoral control, leading up to a report they will submit to the Legislature at the end of March.  The Legislature then has to decide whether to renew Mayoral control, let it lapse or amend it by end of June 2024.  More and more of the few school districts who have Mayoral control, including Chicago, are moving away from it in the realization that it leaves out community voices and contributes to rampant privatization, including charter school expansion.

At the hearings in the Bronx on Tuesday night, parents and teachers who spoke were nearly unanimous that Mayoral control is a deeply flawed system that must be changed.  You can see news clips about the hearings here, and video of the proceedings at the bottom of this page, which also has information about future hearings in December and January, including a link to sign up for the next hearing in Queens on December 18.  

Several of those who testified on Tuesday mentioned the Mayor's failure to lower class size according to the new state law as evidence of the lack of accountability under the system, despite claims by him and the Chancellor that this essentially autocratic system somehow strengthens accountability.  

This question of accountability and Mayoral control was also discussed by two parent leaders, Shino Tanikawa and Jonathan Greenberg, on the latest episode of Talk out of School, which aired on  Sunday on WBAI and is also available as a podcast here and above.  Please listen and subscribe!

Below is the testimony given by Thomas Sheppard, one of the independent members of the Panel for Educational Policy, elected by parent leaders in the Bronx, and thus doesn't automatically vote "yes" for every proposal on the PEP agenda. Currently, the PEP, which was named that by Michael Bloomberg when he got Mayoral control but is still legally the NYC school board, has ten independent members and thirteen members appointed by the Mayor, who uniformly rubber stamp whatever proposal is put before them, usually without any explanation or comment no matter how wasteful or misguided.

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Good evening. Thank you for the opportunity to present this testimony and share my perspective on the issue of Mayoral Control. My name is Thomas Sheppard and first, I am a father of six children, three of whom are NYC Public School students. I also serve as the Bronx Community Education Council Presidents Member on the Board of Education for the City School District of the City of New York, also referred to as the Panel for Educational Policy or PEP. I was first elected in 2020 to serve as the representative of all 32 CEC Presidents and, with recent changes to NYS Education Law, re-elected to serve as the Bronx CEC Presidents Member for the 2023-24 School year.

I am here tonight in opposition to Mayoral Control of New York City Public Schools. Being a member of the PEP for the past 3 and a half years has shown me and the majority of parents in NYC that Mayoral Control simply does not work as a responsive form of Public School Governance. My experience has been that the PEP with a supermajority of Mayoral Appointees working in collusion with the Mayor and Chancellor, routinely ignores the voices of the community, the New York City Council, and even the New York State Legislature, and that the DOE’s bureaucracy often exploits procedures and the law in a way that disenfranchises the students, families, and school communities for which is it supposed to serve.

I can give many examples, but since I only have 3 minutes, I will briefly highlight 3, provide more details in my written testimony, and invite you to view recordings of years of PEP meetings at schools.nyc.gov (http://schools.nyc.gov) for more context.

The examples I will touch on are:

    1.    Every Mayor and Chancellor illegally overusing procedures like Emergency Declarations to circumvent community input on important matters such as the estimated budget.

    2.    The refusal of the Mayor & Chancellor to comply with the Class Size Reduction Law passed by the New York State Legislature last year, with no ability by the community to hold either of them accountable for that decision.

    3.    The Mayor’s supermajority on the PEP with no direct interaction with the community, routinely taking action in direct opposition to the positions of Education Councils and school communities, especially in matters such as significant changes in school utilization.

Finally, I wanted to make a distinction between Mayoral Control of NYC Public Schools and the system of governance itself. I am calling for an end to Mayoral Control in the short term, and a redesign of this system of school governance to one that is community-centered, democratic, responsive, and accountable to students and parents in the long-term. And while that work of redesign happens with all of our community stakeholders and elected officials, a transition from Mayoral Control must include at a minimum, eliminating the Mayor’s supermajority on the PEP, giving students voting representation, and giving the PEP and Education Councils the authority to hire and terminate the Chancellor and District Superintendents respectively.

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to testify before you.

 

Scurrilous fact-free NY Post article about briefings on upcoming CEC elections; please apply to be a CEC candidate yourself!

Yesterday, the NY Post ran a sleazy and fact-free article attacking Shino Tanikawa for a workshop she gave a month ago to inform parents about the upcoming CEC and Citywide Council elections.  Shino is a friend, a long-time parent leader, and currently the well-respected Manhattan representative on the NY State Board of Regents. I refuse to provide a link to the article but it attacked Shino for giving this briefing, because it was co-sponsored by the UFT.

The reporter, Mia Walsh, claimed that the workshop was somehow unfairly biased in favor of pro-UFT positions, even though the two parents quoted in the article who attended the briefing were unable to provide any evidence that would back up this claim:

Two attendees included Deborah Kross, a representative for the Bronx on the Citywide Council on High Schools, and Steve Stowe, president of CEC 20 in Brooklyn....Kross and Stowe found the boot camp to be informative, covering the application process and education law that governs them, but questioned the UFT involvement.

But somehow, they and the NY Post reporter remained suspicious, though they were unable to cite any example of bias: 

"I  think it’s naive to say that the UFT doesn’t have their own interest in all of this,” said Stowe. “That’s something that’s hard to communicate sometimes because the message is that parents have to always support teachers,” he said. 

Parents supporting teachers?  What a radical idea.  

The article also featured a scurrilous personal attack on Shino by Deborah Kross, without bothering to quote any of the hundreds of parents and advocates who admire Shino's principled positions and hard work to improve our schools over many years,  as the former President of CEC2 and as an appointee to many NYC task forces and DOE working groups.

For those who may still harbor suspicions of this briefing, I asked Shino for a copy.  It is posted below.  Please comment if you see any sign of political bias or favoritism to the UFT.  

Parents, please consider running for a position on the Citywide and/or Community Education Councils.  In recent years, a few CECs have been taken over by right-wing zealots, including one CEC which passed a resolution urging the Gov. Hochul to veto the class size bill -- a resolution that was full of factual errors and did not represent the wishes of their constituents, as class size reduction has been the top priority of K12 parents in that same district nearly every year that DOE parent surveys have been given. 

The deadline to nominate yourself to be a candidate is Feb. 15, only ten days away, and the process is simple.  For more information, check out the DOE website here. 

Why the Fair Student Funding Task Force report was never released, and recommendations from eight of its members

The Superintendent of the Boston Public Schools recently announced her intent to eliminate or radically reform their weighted student funding system, because it fails to properly provide for all the programs and services that students need and because it incentivizes principals to overcrowd their schools and classrooms. The same  flaws are inherent in the NYC Fair Student Funding system.

Following widespread protests, the  formula was first adopted by then-Chancellor Joel Klein in 2007, despite serious concerns as to whether it made sense and might lead to increases in class size over time (as it actually did). In January 2019, the City Council passed a law , Local Law 1174, to create a Task Force to analyze the  formula and come up with a report by Sept. 2019 with recommendations on how to improve it.  The below account was written by one of the Task Force members, Shino Tanikawa, to explain why the report was never released; and below her account are the recommendations submitted by eight of the members on the Task Force that the Mayor refused to accept or release.  

I was appointed to the Fair Student Funding Task force by DOE. The Task Force met regularly for 9 months, deliberated, and produced a report ready to be submitted to the Mayor and the Chancellor. Unfortunately during the final review by the City Hall, the report died a quiet death and was never released. 

It became clear the City Hall’s interest was in using the Task Force recommendation to pressure the State to fully fund the Foundation Aid, not to comprehensively evaluate the formula itself. The report contains many recommendations that would require more investment from both the City and the State. For example, we recommended increasing the Base Allocation to cover a wide range of essential staff, such as social workers and school counselors.

In addition, many advocates wanted to include language around evaluating the formula for its impact on class size but we were told the Fair Student Funding has nothing to do with class size reduction (they are wrong). The Mayor has always been reluctant to acknowledge the real need of our school system for smaller classes.

As you can see, one of our major recommendations was that the DOE should develop a class size reduction plan with specific milestones and timelines, especially as "the current funding allocation from Fair Student Funding incentivizes large class sizes in our schools."  We also found that "Nearly 80% of the principals, from 12 CSDs, who responded to a survey distributed by Task Force members identified large class sizes as a consequence of the FSF formula."

The DOE agreed to develop such a plan once our schools received full funding from the Campaign for Fiscal Equity lawsuit, but has reneged on that promise, once again, as it has so often in the past. 

 

Eight of the parent and advocate members of the Task Force, including me,  submitted our own version of the recommendations during the FSF public comment period in April 2021.  

 

I have now shared that report with Class Size Matters. -- Shino Tanikawa

 

Letter from ECC chairs that School Leadership Team meetings should continue!

UPDATE: We just learned that on April 24, the DOE posted a memo saying that School Leadership Teams should continue to meet remotely "in accordance with state law" and that these meetings are still subject on Open Meetings Law:
 
"In general, SLTs should seek to ensure that all members of the SLT are able to attend the meeting and that notice of the date and time of any SLT meeting has been made public 10 days before the meeting...While a public comment period is not required, SLT meetings are an opportunity to hear from members of the school community."

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According to law, School Leadership Teams, made up of half parents and half school staff, are required to meet monthly, to discuss issues critical to the running of every school and to develop the school's Comprehensive Education Plan.  Yet since the school closures due to Covid-19, many SLTs have not been meeting at all.  

In the below letter, Shino Tanikawa and NeQuan McLean, co-chairs of the Education Council Consortium, which represents the parent-led Citywide and Community District Councils, urges the Chancellor to send a message to principals that these meetings should continue to occur monthly, even if remotely, as they are more essential than ever to keep the lines of communication open between parents and school staff, and that they include a Public Comment Period to allow other members of the school community to ask questions and share concerns.  

They also emphasized the need to keep these meetings open to members of the public, as the NY State Appellate Court said was required, according to their unanimous decision in 2016.-- Leonie

Chancellor Richard A. Carranza
Department of Education
Tweed Courthouse
52 Chambers Street
New York, New York 10007

April 9, 2020

Dear Chancellor Carranza,

While Coronavirus continues to spread and our school communities are impacted on a daily and ever changing basis, maintaining open lines of communication between parents, teachers and school leaders has never been more essential.

School closures, and the myriad disruptions to life as we know it—the sudden move towards remote learning, the death of loved ones caused by the pandemic, the pressure of maintaining stability in the face of this all—have reshaped our feelings about what the term “School Climate” truly means. Principals are being forced to bear an unsustainable physical and emotional burden. Families, teachers, staff, and the administrations must be heard.

Our School Leadership Teams are the support system for our schools. We were encouraged to hear that you have mandated that SLTs continue to meet during the pandemic.

We would like you to take this a step farther and would urge you to ensure that School Leadership Teams continue to meet monthly throughout the course of the pandemic, and that you implement a Public Comment Period during SLT Meetings should it not exist in SLT ByLaws, so that school community voices can be heard.

It is vitally important that schools are able to discuss, as a community, what is succeeding and failing in the various arrangements that have been made during the remote learning instruction period, and what assessment and evaluation might look like.

SLT meetings, held online, would provide a critical mechanism for parent input so that views can be considered on many critical issues ranging from school grading policies, methods for taking attendance, scheduling, or any other newly adopted practice resulting from the emergency that we all are experiencing.

SLT meetings should continue to be aligned with the New York State Open Meetings Law, as the 2016 decision of the Appellate Court requires. Announcements of Meeting Dates and times should be shared widely so that school community members and members of the public can be informed as to when the meetings will be held, how they can observe the proceedings, and how to offer comments and feedback.

As our schools have now been closed for nearly four weeks, with no clear end in sight, we would appreciate your prompt reply.

Most Sincerely in Partnership and Service,

NeQuan & Shino
Co-Chairs
Education Council Consortium

cc:
The Honorable Mayor Bill de Blasio
Public Advocate Jumaane D. Williams
First Deputy Chancellor Cheryl Watson-Harris
Acting Deputy Chancellor Adrienne Austin, Esq.

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Website: educationcouncils.org