The Debate Over Community Education Councils

We haven't been doing much on the Tweed outrages against parents, leaving that to parent groups led by Leonie Haimson. I've been following the action on the NYC Education News listserve on the bogus community education council scam being perpetrated by BloomKlein to give the appearance of outreach to parents. This may rank amongst the top outrages by the local branch of the ed deformers. If you are not on this listserve, you are missing out on the parent view of BloomKlein. The list is monitored and responded to by Tweed officials. Only some of the items make it to the NYC Parent blog. (Read Gary's latest about the Somali pirate being offered the opportunity to do community service for the DOE - and maybe preferring a life sentence.)

Beth fertig of WNYC has been reporting on the CEC issue here:
http://www.wnyc.org/news/articles/by/beth_fertig



Here is a partial response to Tweed's head of PR David Cantor by Leonie on the listserve. Ed Koch was making robocalls to get parents to vote in what is really not a vote but a straw poll. The DOE is desperate to beat the 5% turnout in the old days of school board elections since BloomKlein has used that low figure to claim the old system didn't work. So they desperately try to get the numbers up in a meaningless election by creating phony grass roots "parent" groups funded by _____ (fill in the blank.)

David: is this $13,466 for the Koch robocalls in addition to the $500,000 that Grassroots is receiving? Or is this cost included in their contract? And are you planning another round of robocalls?

Has the date for the straw vote been extended again to April 29? The vote was originally supposed to take place between April 6 - 12 – then it was extended till April 22, and now till April 29, I have heard. I assume this will be more expensive. Who’s picking up the extra cost – the contractor or DOE?

Finally, what’s the no. of parents participating so far?

As someone mentioned last night at a PA meeting, I’m not sure why PA officers should pay attention to the straw vote anyway – even if it was a fully informed vote, since presumably it will not be disaggregated by school.

Thanks,
Leonie Haimson