Our oped today on why Mayoral Control needs to be reformed

Please read our oped in Gotham Gazette, co-authored by Shino Tanikawa of CEC 2 and NYC Kids PAC, why mayoral control needs to be reformed to incorporate checks and balances and more parent input.  It begins this way:

On May 12, a Quinnipiac poll was released showing that two to one, New York City voters believe that the mayor should share control over our public schools with other elected officials. On Tuesday, Public Advocate Letitia James issued a report, calling for improvements to ensure sufficient checks and balances and more parent input in school governance. We agree.

We make the case that when it comes to transparency, accountability, parental input, and checks and balances, the existing governance system is highly flawed, and we provide many examples. 

As one Community Education Council said, “CECs still lack a seat at the table in planning what happens in their respective districts. The new engagement is additional phone calls…We're still toothless lions when it comes down to any real power.” Another concluded, “As it stands, CECs are largely ignored by the DOE.  When we write resolutions they go unanswered. When we give input at hearings our input is ignored.”

The oped concludes: Absolute power does not work at the federal, state, or local level. It leads to poor policies and encourages corruption. It certainly does not work when it comes to our public schools.  

Please read our oped and also check out the excellent report by Public Advocate Tish James which makes many similar points. Thanks!
 

Letter to the Board of Regents about the need for parent input in the search for a new Commissioner

Public school parents, the most important stakeholders of our educational system, have been completely left out of the discussion when it comes to policy making at the state level.  We believe that for the sake of our children, this must change, and that the search for new Education Commissioner is the time to begin.  See letter below sent today to the NYS Board of Regents, along with more than one hundred parent leaders and organizations that signed on in support.  A pdf of the letter with the full set of signers is  here.

May 8, 2011

Dear New York State Board of Regents:

We, the undersigned parent and community leaders, urge that there be an open and transparent search for the new Commissioner of Education, and that you appoint a significant number of public school parents to the search committee, to ensure that parents have input into the final choice.

Over the next few months and years, the State Education Department will likely make critical decisions about the future direction of our children’s schools, relating to school closings, charter schools, testing, graduation requirements, Contracts for Excellence and school funding, the possible elimination of seat time, and the expansion of computer-based testing and online learning.

The State Education Department is the primary government agency whose responsibility is to hold districts accountable throughout the state. Parents are the most important stakeholders in the school system, and yet, too often, the Department has not been accountable to parents, has not been transparent in its decision making, and has rarely consulted parents as to our views or priorities for our schools. 

For example, the Department appointed a sixty-three member task-force to come up with a new system of principal and teacher evaluation, but failed to put a single public school parent on the taskforce.

It is critical that the next Commissioner of Education should be receptive to parent input, transparent in his or her decision-making, and hold all the school districts accountable to the law and equitable policies.

To ensure that this occurs, we believe that public school parents should be an integral part of the selection and appointment process.

Yours sincerely,

Leonie Haimson, Class Size Matters

Sue Dietrich and Ben Greene, co-chairs, Chancellor Parent Advisory Council, NYC

Dr. Hazel N. Dukes, President, President of the NAACP New York State Conference

NYC Coalition for Educational Justice (CEJ)

Alliance for Quality Education

Margaret Chin, NYC Council Member

Mark Mishler, Albany, Parents Across America -NY State

Mark Friedman, Mary B. Adams, Howard Eagle, Rochester Community Education Task Force

Patrick J. Sullivan, Manhattan member of the Panel for Educational Policy, NYC Board of Education

Susan Polos, SOS Katonah-Lewisboro, Parents Across America – Westchester NY

Michele Faljean, President, Staten Federation of PTAs, NYC  (and about 80 others)

Upper West side community blasts charter co-location

But is anyone listening?

Apparently, the DOE plans to spend $500,000 at this time of fiscal distress to reconfigure Brandeis HS to make space for the elementary charter school, Upper West Success, including building a new, separate cafeteria.

Unmentioned by the NY1 reporter below is that Zoe Stein, the one parent speaking up for the charter school placement in the video, who says her local public schools "isn't good enough" for her child, is the wife of Gideon Stein, a board member of the Harlem Success Network. Stein is also a partner in Argyle Holdings LLC, which, according to Wikipedia, is a real estate development company of luxury residential properties in Northern Manhattan.

Click here, to add your signature to protest the co-location, which the local Community Board, Community Education Council and all the local elected officials oppose.

And come to the protest rally tomorrow, Thurs. Jan. 27 at City Hall Park, against the mass school closings, charter co-locations and privatization, more info here.

Charter school expansion without parent input blocked

Yesterday, the NY State Legislature refused to pass the governor’s proposed doubling of the charter school cap, without including a condition that no charter school could be forced into a school building without the approval of parents whose children already attend school in the building. The mayor and the charter school lobby refused to accept this condition, so the charter school expansion was not approved.

This expansion was proposed, not so that public education in this city would be improved, but so that NY State's chance for federal "Race to the Top" funding might be enhanced. (For our earlier coverage of the flaws of the Race to the Top, including how it ignores the findings of research and the priorities of parents, see here , here and here.)

As Speaker Silver said, “Unfortunately, Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein were willing to sacrifice the creation of 200 more charter schools rather than accept any limitation on their unchecked power to ignore the voices of parents and displace traditional public schools from existing classroom space.”

Thanks to all of you who called your legislators; NYC parents won a big one yesterday!

Juan Gonzalez writes about why having parent input in charter school sitings is so important, in today’s Daily News. In case you’re keeping track, the only Democratic State Senators who signed onto the governor’s bill for charter school expansion with no parent input allowed were Ruben Diaz Sr. of the Bronx and Craig Johnson from Long Island.

For more on what happened yesterday, see Gotham Schools and Times.

Learn, NY parents -- about Learn NY!

The NY Times blog and Gotham schools ran stories about the new organization founded by Bloomberg to keep control over our schools – formerly called MASS, but now renamed Learn NY.

"... the group unveiled a Web site dedicated to spreading the Bloomberg school-reform gospel, a hub filled with fact sheets, carefully culled news clips and grassroots platitudes. (“We will listen. And we will be heard.”) One section, promoting the “real results” of mayoral control, takes a page from the global-warming-is-real play book. “It’s not just a feeling,” it declares. “It’s really happening.”

In interviews with reporters, the group’s director, Peter Hatch, “offered what he called “opportunities for improvement” (he rebuked the term “criticisms”)—among them, finding ways to give parents more input, make city finances more transparent and nurture independent analyses of school data.”

I expressed skepticism to the Times reporter that Hatch would propose ways to give parents more actual input – rather than simply suggest more public hearings. As any NYC parent knows by now, we’ve been subjected to hundreds of hearings, and never once has this administration really listened to anything we’ve said. If Bloomberg or Klein had been had been interested in our views, after all, they would have included questions in the parent survey about whether we agreed with their policies, but this they refused to do.

“Leonie Haimson, a critic of Mr. Bloomberg’s efforts and executive director of the nonprofit Class Size Matters, said she saw the group’s efforts as an attempt to preempt an onslaught of criticism from parent groups. She said she was skeptical of the group’s proposed changes to the mayoral control law. “What we want is real input, giving us some actual say in school policy,” she said. “Hearings are meaningless.”

While Hatch denied to reporters the organization has received funding from Bloomberg himself, he refused to disclose his contributors, though he admits to having “millions” to work with. His refusal to disclose the sources of his funding make his protestations that DOE’s own spending should be “more transparent” rather unconvincing, to say the least.

And the way in which Brian Keeler, the group’s media consultant, whom we had dubbed "the Mayoral control troll" left anonymous comments on our blog promoting Mayoral control, without disclosing his identity, does not bode well for this group’s sincerity about the need for more transparency.

From Gotham Schools:

“Leonie Haimson of Class Size Matters has already done impressive digging into the group’s media strategy. A spokesperson for the group confirmed to me today that the blog commenter Haimson noticed voicing his passion for mayoral control is indeed on the payroll of Learn NY. Brian Keeler, an online-media specialist who ran unsuccessfully for state senate in 2006 with the help of a following he built at Daily Kos, has been posting positive comments on this blog, Leonie’s, and others. He is also an employee of the Web design firm that built Learn NY’s Web site and will write a regular blog on the site, the spokesperson, Julie Wood, said.”

The Times article confirms that the MirRam group has been hired as one of the lobbying firms that will try to push Mayoral control through the legislature. As noted previously, MirRam’s chief lobbyists are Roberto Ramirez, formerly chief political boss of the Bronx, and Luis Miranda, who is also head of CFE’s board. The other lobbying group that will work on this campaign is Brown, McMahon and Weinraub, one of whose principals, Tom McMahon, is the brother of CM Michael McMahon of Staten Island, who is now running for Congress.

The Mayor and the DOE won't stop there, of course. Along with the nakedly political campaign of saturation subway ads, etc. being pursued by the Fund for Public Schools, Elizabeth Green of Gotham Schools in a separate article has the goods on how Garth Harries, head of DOE’s portfolio office, used a retreat paid for by the Gates Foundation to persuade charter school and small school operators to help proselytize for continued Mayoral control;

There was also a lot of worrying about what is probably a bigger potential obstacle: The possibility that, come 2009, when the state Legislature votes on whether to keep, abolish, or alter mayoral control of the public schools, the system could be organized in a completely different way. There was no question on which side the Department of Education stood. At the end of the first day, a group that is fighting for the preservation of mayoral control of the public schools, but which has said it has no formal ties to the Bloomberg administration, spoke about its political plans. Chancellor Joel Klein also gave a speech passionately declaring that the successes that have happened would endangered if mayoral control was abolished.

Our tax dollars hard at work.

A parent in the Broad award focus group speaks out

As widely anticipated, the Broad Foundation gave its prize to NYC today -- despite the letter we sent yesterday, asking them to withhold this honor as it was not legitimately earned.

Unmentioned in the announcement of the prize, of course, are the millions of dollars that the Broad Foundation has given NYC and the innumerable ties -- both financial and ideological-- between the foundation and the DOE.

As mentioned in this AP article, the Foundation says that "it conducts focus groups with teachers and parents" before awarding this prize.

Below is a statement from David Quintana, parent leader in Queens and a member of the group of parents that met with the researchers from the Foundation a few months back. It is remarkable that even with a hand-picked group of parents, DOE could apparently find no one who would say anything good about their administration of our schools.

As one of the four (4) parent participants in a focus group held at Tweed for researchers from the Broad Foundation, I am disappointed in the fact that NYC received the Broad Foundation prize today.

This group of parents, handpicked by Martine Guerrier of the Department of Education (DOE), expressed uniform disappointment with the various changes put into place by DOE, the lack of transparency and accountability, and the lack of consideration given the views of parents about what their children really need to succeed.

Clearly the Broad Foundation did not take parents views into consideration when awarding this prize to NYC today.

I feel that the DOE is totally dismissive of parents views and makes short shrift of our concerns for our children (i.e. - class size reduction, cell phone ban, school bus fiasco, numerous reorganizations of the DOE, et al.)

thanks,

David M. Quintana

District 27 Presidents Council - Recording Secretary; District 27 Representative to Chancellors Parents Advisory Council, Queens Community Board 10 - Education Committee and Queens Borough President's Parents Advisory Council member

More from Klein on "unleashing" greatness

In the same NY Post interview in which the Chancellor recently made his controversial comments about the need for "rigorous standards" for 3, 4 and 5 year olds, he made a number of other revealing statements, including proposing that 10^th graders should be tested and steered either to vocational programs or academic classes where they can be prepared for college:

“Klein also sees a future with kids "testing out" in 10th grade and either proceeding to two more years of high school and then college, or a vocational school, depending on their grades and ambitions.”

This was one of the major recommendations of a task force report that Klein sat on earlier in the year – created by Marc Tucker of the National Center on Education and the Economy. Tucker is a real educational entrepreneur and serial enabler of many of the worst ideas in education – including the adoption of high stakes testing in states.

Tucker has been quite influential, despite the fact that according to his bio in Wikipedia, his only degrees are in philosophy and American literature, with a Masters in Telecommunications Policy and classes in “theater engineering." The report that Tucker released was called “Tough Choices or Tough Times” and you can read the exec. Summary here: (in pdf) The report provoked much criticism and even ridicule when it was released earlier this year – including the notion that all public schools nationwide should be privatized and operated by “independent contractors” -- or organizations like his.

Yet another notion Klein mentions in the NY Post interview is that “"You can't mandate greatness, you can only unleash it. But you can mandate adequacy."

Klein's view that one can only "unleash" greatness underlies DOE”s latest phase of reorganization – a radically decentralized system of schools run by principals with little central oversight or direction. See the recent postings of Deputy Chancellor Chris Cerf in EduWonk – in which Cerf argues by giving principals broad powers, so much individual creativity will be released that the overall system will thrive :

”Only by empowering schools with broad decision-making authority within the context of real accountability for results can we stimulate innovation and maximize the creative powers of our committed educators. Only then, can we move school systems to the next level.”

Why the disconnected decisions of 1500 principals, many of whom are severely constrained by overcrowding, an incoherent organizational structure, and a system of accountability that doesn’t take into account their schools’ differential conditions, will lead to greatness is hard to understand. It is certainly not based upon research or the experience any district in the country. Instead, I fear that it will lead to even more inequality of opportunity for our neediest students -- as is happening right now in New Orleans.

Why? Next year, when all NYC schools will be graded A to F, based almost entirely on test scores, and principals will risk losing their jobs based on these grades, the incentives will increase to restrict admission to the most high-achieving students, and to get rid of all the most troublesome, low-achieving students as soon as possible, whether by forcing them to transfer to other schools, discharging them to GED programs, or giving them long-term suspensions.

Though the trend in these outcomes is hard to determine, given DOE’s lack of transparency, there is compelling evidence that both long-term suspensions and discharges have risen significantly under this administration. There is also very good chance that these trends will now accelerate– because oversight will be almost non-existent, and the new system doesn’t measure any of these factors in evaluating schools. Indeed, the Accountability office continues to deny that these problems even exist.

Finally, there are Klein’s concluding words in the Post interview:

"You can't make significant change . . . without there being a certain amount of resistance and pushback," he said. "There are lots of people who are not resistant [to change], but I simply didn't communicate effectively about what [the change] was. They didn't fully understand. They felt things were moving" and they weren't part of it."

What do people think -- was the overwhelming opposition of parents and teachers due to their not "understanding" what the changes were – or more the result of dissatisfaction with the changes themselves and the autocratic manner in which they were imposed?

In each phase of the reorganization, the views and opinions of educators and parents were discounted and ignored, and faddish notions of how to improve our schools substituted in their place. This is still happening, as evidenced by Klein's remarks in this interview. Certainly, those leading the charge at Tweed could have done a far better job communicating their decisions ahead of time – but it may be that they chose not to do this, knowing this would give stakeholders more time to analyze their proposals, evaluate them fairly, and then mobilize resistance.

Klein on his 5 year anniversary: "In the end you gotta let your poor heart break a little”

Next week Joel Klein will have been Chancellor for five years – one of the longest serving in NYC history. On the occasion, he sat down for an interview with Mike Meenan of NY1. Some excerpts:

Despite all the reorganizations, he admits that in some ways there has been little change.

Klein: "Any fool can lower class size by the numbers. The question is can you lower class size at the same time you maintain and improve teacher quality?"

If any fool can do it, why can't he? Especially given the fact that there are now almost ten qualified applicants for every teaching opening.

"Klein says he's all for class size reduction, but wants to take time finding the right teachers. It’s a go slow approach ...."

Slow indeed. At this rate our grandchildren will still be waiting.

"It’s a little bit like that song ‘The Glory of Love.’ You know, you gotta give a little, you gotta take a little and in the end you gotta let your poor heart break a little,” says Klein.

Some would say there's been a lot more taking than giving. Fewer classes provided in nearly every grade under this administration -- leading to no discernible progress in this critical measure, despite falling enrollment.

"He's often accused of running the system from the top down. Klein insists he does seek the input of parents. "Let me say to you, I consult broadly and extensively,” says Klein."

Hmm. Wonder which parents he consults -- parents of private school students? Asked what the proof of positive change is:

"Klein says the proof is coming, most visibly with every school now getting a report card. "You don't need any lingo, right? A, B, C, D, or F. People get it,” says Klein. "

What mark would you give the Chancellor? NY 1 lets you grade his performance.

News on the parent survey and what the Mayor said about us

Yesterday, some of us who participated in the survey focus groups asked parents to return the new survey, due to be distributed this week, with its questions crossed out and a suggested statement on the top saying “We want real parent input – as well as smaller classes, less testing, and new priorities at Tweed to deal with the real problems in our schools.” (You should of course feel free to substitute whatever sentence you like about what our schools really need to improve.)

In response, the Mayor said at his news conference that those of those of us who are calling for real change only want to “subvert the system and sit around and complain and not make it any better.”

No one who participated in the focus groups was ever out to “subvert the system.” We volunteered in good faith and spent many hours over two days, to provide realistic and relevant suggestions so that this survey would be useful. We were told that our input would determine the questions asked. Instead, most of the issues we cared about were censored, for no apparent reason.

Moreover, those who signed our letter include members of CECs, President’s councils and other active, engaged parents who work hard every day, for no pay and little recognition to try to make this system work better for our kids. Not one of them can be called a slacker or a complainer.

We were all extremely disappointed that our input was ignored – and that questions about class size, overcrowding, the amount of testing and test prep in our schools, the curriculum, the principal’s attitude towards parent input and involvement, and/or whether there is a functional School Leadership Team in our schools were all omitted.

There is also nothing in the survey that relates to the specific needs or satisfaction of two populations especially badly served by our schools: ELL and special ed students. Instead, there are many questions that did not come from us and whose rationale is difficult to explain.

For example, here’s one: “How often during this school year have you contacted a teacher or other adult at your child’s school to share with them important information about your child’s learning?” The choices given are “At least once a week” (!), “About once a month”, “ Once every few months”, “Once or twice this school year” or “Never.” The same question, with slightly different variations, is repeated four times– and for no apparent reason, except to put the responsibility on us if our children are not getting the education they deserve.

In the press release yesterday, the Chancellor proclaims grandly: "Our ads say, 'When one parent speaks, schools listen; when one million parents speak, schools change,' and it's true. I'm looking forward to learning from our parents, teachers, and students.”

His statement implies that if we all just responded to the survey, he would listen to us and adjust his priorities accordingly. Yet from the very beginning of the process, representatives from DOE and KPMG made it clear that no questions would be allowed that pertained to any systemic problems at our schools, the style of leadership at Tweed, the many restructurings, and/or whether any of the administration's changes have helped our schools succeed.

So it is highly disingenuous for the Chancellor to claim now that that he expects to “learn” anything as a result of the survey, when the survey was explicitly designed to omit any questions that might pertain to his leadership or overall direction.

Moreover, even on the school level, the results of the parent survey will only account for 3-5% of any school’s grade. Instead, 85% of the grade will be determined by test scores, as filtered through many manipulations and formulas that no one will understand. For more on this see our blog here:

Last year, I emailed Jim Liebman, the head of the accountability initiative, and asked him whether there would be any accountability system proposed for those running Tweed. He responded this way: [YES, SYSTEM IS IN DEVELOPMENT.]

Rather than waiting forever, we will design and distribute our own survey, which will include not only questions that were left out of the censored version, but also about how we feel about the direction of those running Tweed-- who once again, have shown how little regard they have for real parent input, even when it come to the design of the parent survey itself. More on this, soon.

For news about the parent survey and our call for a boycott, click here for News 4 and here for Channel 7 news. Here for WNYC radio. Here are links to articles in the NY Times, NY Post, and Daily News.

The parent survey is posted on the Class Size Matters website here, along with our letter to the Chancellor and his response. Take a look, and remember to send it back, corrected – with a demand for real parent input, and your own priorities addressed, whatever they might be.