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.

 

The Terrible, Horrible, No Good $31 million DOE contract with McGraw Hill off the agenda for tonight's PEP meeting!

Update 12/1/22: Daily News has a good article today on how the McGraw Hill contract was pulled from the PEP agenda last night, because of the controversy over huge cost and lack of any discount; the article quotes from comments made at the meeting by teacher Gavin Healy, PEP member Tom Sheppard and me.  

Yet the question still remains whether the contract will be submitted unchanged at a later meeting.  The only comments by  DOE officials about the contract were confusing:  Liz Vladeck, General Counsel, said there would be no loss of "services" during this time, meaning (I suppose) that schools could still order McGraw textbooks at inflated prices.  As the DN quotes her, "We just want to ensure folks understand this means they will be working at risk of financial loss until the contract is resolved,” Vladeck said of the vendor.

The only other DOE official to speak to the issue was Elisheba Lewi, head of DOE procurement, who on Monday had said at the PEP contract committee meeting that the contract "didn't make any sense" to her. Last night she said they "pulled that item from agenda so that we could just ...address concerns that have been raised & we're working very closely with the vendor to get to gain clearer understanding of what the current status is.” Huh?

The Great Minds Foundation textbook contract that also lacked any discount and charged an even higher shipping fee, but at a far lower total amount, was approved.

 

On Sunday night, I perused this month's contract list [ proposals here] and noticed a contract to be voted on during tonight's PEP meeting that was even more ridiculous than usual:  It was a non-competitive contract with McGraw Hill that would authorize DOE to spend $31 million for textbooks at their full list price, plus 7% shipping. 

I tweeted in protest against this ridiculous bid, as surely the DOE, the largest school district in the country could have negotiated a better deal. See, for example, how McGraw Hill textbooks are sold online at this website, with a 30% off for any orders of 25 or more, increasing to a 40% discount for any orders of 1000 or more, with free shipping.  With a discount like this, they could have saved our schools nearly $15 million. 

I also noted a similar, if smaller non-competitive proposal to purchase books by Great Books Foundation,  for  $454,000, with no discount and an even higher cost for shipping: 11

My tweets were quickly retweeted, with many parents and teachers expressing their outrage, and others surprised, given the fact that their schools had never provided textbooks to their students.  Possibly this is because they are too expensive, even as schools are only provided  $58 per student to purchase textbooks. 

On Tuesday morning, the issue was discussed during the PEP contract committee meeting.  See the transcript of the meeting here.  

PEP members Sheree Gibson and Tom Sheppard both spoke out against the contract.

PEP parent member Tom Sheppard said: "$31.6 million over seven years is a lot of money. Right? And I'm wondering, is this mostly online materials is a print material as well. And I guess the reason why I'm asking that question because, you know, my kids are seventh, eighth, ninth and 10th grade, and I think I've never seen them carry a textbook home. So if they've never had a textbook, and we're spending $31.6 million over seven years for a contract with McGraw Hill, I want to know what we're getting for that."

 Sheree Gibson, Queens borough appointee asked, "Is there a discount in there because we did some looking, online advocates reached out to us...what negotiation what percentages are we getting for booking and dealing with McGraw Hill? I am taking into consideration that McGraw Hill is the big behemoth and has taken over a lot of other companies but still if we're doing this type of amount of business with them. I want a deal, I want a break, a discount."

Tom also raised the larger point, that these huge contracts month after month are proposed with little justification or even explanation from administrators, and for this school year already amount  to more than $3.5 billion:

I look at our schools, for example, that have had their budgets cut. And I look at environments where, you know, schools have to make choices about programming right, and what we can keep and what we can get rid of, but, you know, here we are kind of business as usual, over the course of a year voting to approve almost $4 billion in contracts, right? Like there's nowhere in all of this where we can figure out how to save some money so that we don't have to let go over 1000 teachers and get rid of like arts programs and after school programs like I think about that every month. And you know, I would love to know how or what the DOE is doing on an ongoing basis. To evaluate these contracts, the necessity of them, and how we can use cost savings from these contracts to actually keep teachers in classrooms and pay for librarians and those kinds of things.  

Even Elisheba Lewi, chief procurement officer,  admitted that the lack of any discount “doesn’t make sense.You guys have a very, very strong point.”

Yesterday, the Daily News ran a story about the no-discount,  no-good McGraw Hill contract. Reporter Cayla Bamberger quoted math teacher Bobson Wong: ""Someone needs to look into the terrible deals that NYC DOE makes for schools."  Deborah Kross of the CCHS said, "So much money is getting wasted because there are no competitive processes,” and “yet cuts in the classroom hurt our kids and teachers.”

According to yesterday's article,  the DOE said that they planned to ahead anyway with the vote tonight. Then this afternoon, they emailed PEP members that the vote will be postponed, though the other no-discount $453, 966.11 no-discount contract with Great Minds Foundation is still on there.    Here they both are on the latest RA list:

In 2012, McGraw-Hill was acquired by private equity firm Apollo Global Management, for $2.5 billion in cash and debt.  In 2021, it was purchased from Apollo by Platinum Equity for $4.5 billion. Clearly there are gold in them thar hills. 

I urge people to provide comments anyway, urging the DOE to do a far better job in negotiating these contracts, now and in the future. The meeting begins at 6:00 p.m. via zoom. You can log-on and sign up to speak from 5:30 PM to 6:15 PM at: https://www.learndoe.org/pep/nov30/.