Showing posts with label NYC Parent. Show all posts
Showing posts with label NYC Parent. Show all posts

Saturday, February 3, 2018

Video: Parent Organizing 101 - KidsPac/Class Size Matters Conf Jan. 27, 2018

Two Wonderful stories of parent organizing including Bonnie and Kalmiris of Central Park East 1 fame to remove an abusive and incompetent principal -- who by the way is still working in District 4 and is rumored to be resurfacing in another school. I never get tired of hearing, their story especially since some of us in MORE were so deeply embedded in it. But what do you have to do to rid ourselves of evil vampire principals -- put a stake in their hearts?

Also doing a great presentation was Naila Rosario from Sunset Park, an amazing organizer who started with very little other than trying to get her kid into pre-k and from that experience built a powerhouse.

https://vimeo.com/253303228


Tuesday, February 15, 2011

District 6 Feb. 16 Shael Suransky - the DOE operating concepts pertaining to Teaching, Learning, & Accountability: Teacher-activist Julie Cavanagh will respond

NOTE: Just heard from Julie - she is real sick and can't make it. Suransky also postponed. Even to be rescheduled in April.

Josh Karan a parent leader in District 6 (Washington Hts) has established a program to engage parents in the educational debate.


Tomorrow's session will have Shael Suransky and GEM/CAPE's Julie Cavanagh presenting.
Deputy Chancellor Shael Suransky will present the DOE operating concepts pertaining to Teaching, Learning, & Accountability, to which teacher-activist Julie Cavanagh will be responding. 
Next - March 7:
DOE Charter School Division Chief Recy Dunn will present the DOE view on the value of Charter schools, to which Mona David will respond.
Josh described the program with the hope it will be emulated in other districts:
The purpose of the program is to provide a roadmap for parents --- to enable them to see a way from here to there, after first defining what the here and there mean for them:  Examining what kind of education parents want for their children, and exploring what currently is being provided.  Presently many parents struggle to do any of this -- understand the current system, articulate what they believe the system should provide, and assert what their role should be in the crafting of a different system, operating under different structures, provision of resources, and values.
This is intended to be a pilot program in my District.  Hopefully it will continue, so that after a few years, in time for the 2015 next round of School Governance legislative consideration, there will be 150 to 200 trained and motivated parents in District 6 who will provide leadership to mobilize our community for a different direction for educational policy. 
Kudos to Josh for his proactive efforts. I can't make the event but it should interesting to see how Julie, a special ed classroom teacher in a school invaded by a charter interacts with the 2nd in command of the school system. If you go (sorry, I don't have the location) send a report.

I put up the entire program at Norms Notes:  District 6 Parent Advocacy Training Program

Saturday, August 22, 2009

CIF Response on Parent/Community Organizing Blog Post

I've been having some very good conversations with some leading parent activists since the recent controversial post, Organizing Parents: Harder Than Herding Cats (Much), on the work of the Parent Commission.

I hope you read
NYC parent Benita Rivera's comments in this post: Setting a Wild Fire Under Parent Activism.

I spent some time yesterday talking to lower east side activist and CEC One President Lisa Donlan, batting around ideas on getting teachers and parents at the ground level to work together. Lisa's organizing experience offers some excellent insights.

GEM has potential to become an umbrella group, but GEM is still a teacher based group and we have to figure out ways to make things workable.

I don't know Center for Immigrant Families (CIF's) Donna Nevel well, but CIF is already working with GEM. Donna had asked some GEMers to come up and talk to parents about mayoral control and Angel, Sam and Lisa had an excellent session.

When you get it right, No one seems to notice.
But even when you screw up, good outcomes can result. If new links between parent and teacher activists are forged as a result, we may screw up more often.

Donna Nevel sent in these comments:
Hi Norm,

We read your blog on parent organizing and wanted to share with you a little about some of the organizing CIF does. CIF is a collectively-run organization of low income families of color and community members in uptown Manhattan. Our work is based on popular education so everything we do grows out of parents and community members' wisdom, knowledge, and lived experiences. Our goal in our work on public education is to build community power and to fight for justice and real structural and transformative change to our public education system. We believe that being rooted in the community and having our analyses and strategies for organizing emerge from that reality is critical and fundamental to the work we do. We understand the deep and profound connections between the local struggle and the larger struggle city-wide, nation-wide, and, indeed, internationally and engage in each of these areas.

We have worked closely with our allies in the social justice community on many different fronts and look forward to continuing to work together with others who share a vision of social justice and community self-determination that promote shared leadership, mutuality, respect, love, and dignity.

Also, as you know, CIF has joined GEM and believes that building genuine partnerships among teachers, parents, and community members will greatly strengthen the work we are all doing.

Thanks for all the good work you do,
Center for Immigrant Families collective

Center for Immigrant Families (CIF) is a collectively-run and popular education based organization for low income immigrant women of color and community members in Manhattan valley (Uptown NYC). We build from an approach that recognizes the intersectionality of oppressions, and locate our most powerful resistance as one that can emerge from the strength of who we are as women, caregivers, economic providers, survivors, and, essentially, as the “glue” that holds many of our communities together. We work to unlock our collective imaginations, dreams, visions of the society we want for our families and communities to thrive. We organize to transform the conditions of injustice we face and their multi-layered impact on our own lives and that of our communities.

I just donated to CIF. Click here to do the same.


Friday, August 21, 2009

Setting a Wild Fire Under Parent Activism

NYC parent activist Benita Rivera sent us this insightful essay in response to some of the controversy generated by our post Organizing Parents: Harder Than Herding Cats (Much), which had to be revised because of a misunderstanding of the work of the Parent Commission. Sean and I received just a tad of criticism. Fortunately, most of the comments from parents opened up a serious dialogue and were generally very positive about the work we do. (We'll be posting some comments from Donna Nevel of the Center for Immigrant Families (CIF) as a followup later on. CIF has been working with GEM).

Benita chronicles a lot of the history, naturally from her perspective, of the work of the Parent Commission in its battle against mayoral control. If there are other points of view out there, share them in the comments section.

I have comments myself, especially on the role of the UFT, but don't want to clutter this post up too much. Just check the original organizing parent post for the section on how the UFT sold out the St. Vartas event. That event and its aftermath and the number of community groups that jumped in with the UFT instead of staying the course and following through with the May 1 rally set back the opportunity to build a mass movement that could have grown over the past two and a half years. I still believe that if that hadn't happened, the recent battles to kill mayoral control might not have ended the way they did. But the UFT and Tweed accomplished what they wanted: to split people apart and sow a level of mistrust. The Parent Commission to its credit was a regeneration of some of those activists but was not out to build a movement.

Benita leaves us with hope in her finale. It is worth sharing before you even read the entire essay:

...we really need to work differently from now on, better respecting varying approaches to skinning the fat cats, trusting enough to strategize TOGETHER from every angle-- in order to mobilize more people and make the kind of history that public education in this city, deserves. If we succeed in working differently-- but all together as public education activists and parents of all colors and incomes, I have faith that we can actually spark the fire of change in education policy our city needs. When that happens in the big Apple, I also believe all America will take a bite

That so many sharp, intuitive and active parents pushed back against the power of the massive BloomKlein machine, should be noted as a sign of the major failures of the education deform attempt to control the nations' schools. May they multiply exponentially. GEM and ICE are looking forward to working with them with open arms.



Dear Norm and Sean,

Wow! Seems my attempt to convey a radical opinion started a wild fire of controversy, huh?

So here I am again, respectfully responding to Sean's statement about the Parent Commission (PC), and for the record, giving more opinionated thoughts on them. (You have my permission to post this essay if you wish).

In some ways, Sean was right on, and in others-- just wrong. BUT he gets HUGE props from me for listening to the PC's co-founders, Lisa Donlan and Leonie Haimson's replies, and for being open to learning more. Both you and Norm get MAD respect from me for being the kind of men big enough to publicly admit an error in both mis-characterizing the PC, and then posting retractions.

In an attempt to clarify confusion about who and what the PC is for those who read the blogs and list serves, I'm making known another point of view about this group from a "colorful" perspective that's not often heard.

Please know that membership in the PC was (is?) open to all public school parents and to those who represented parents in education advocacy organizations. It is a completely independent, unfunded, parent volunteer entity and I'm one of its members. I joined in the beginning of the PC's formation and although I have argued some of Sean's very points, I've stuck with them. My position with the PC can best be described by Randy Schutt's Inciting Democracy. "Until you can see the truth in at least three sides of an issue, you probably don’'t understand it. And until you can convincingly argue all three perspectives, you probably can'’t work with a diverse group of people to find a mutually satisfactory solution."

Contrary to anyone who poo-poo'ed the Parent Commission's work, we DID and still DO oppose mayoral control. Only those at the meetings would be privy to knowing that we actually (round-robin) tallied each member's thoughts on mayoral control, and the result was that the Parent Commission was overwhelming OPPOSED. We worked to make that fact known; although at times, some of us were more vocal or got individually sought after for comments by the media, than others.

The PC meet once a month at first, then bi-weekly, weekly, then almost everyday through emails and conference calls. Our purpose was to submit recommendations on the future of school governance to the NY State legislature when the 2002 laws on mayoral control sunset in June of this year. In order to come up with recommendations, we held and actively publicized public learning forums on a host of school governance topics that took place every month before we ever decided anything.

We researched other systems of education and heard from panels of education experts working in a variety of fields, both in and out of NYC. Through these learning forums and by parent committees doing vast amounts of research, we all came to understand that historically, NYC's mayors have always controlled education in some form, simply because they control the budget and allocate the dollars. We discussed and debated the novel concept of having a "partnership" with the mayor rather than giving in to any idea about continued control. We realized that the very word "control" was problematic, and all the more fueled by what Bloomberg/Klein had done with it.

The Parent Commission's Report, recommendations for a completely NEW system, and lobbying efforts spanned a little more than a year of some very hard work. The legislative bill that was drafted by the PC, and sponsored by Senator Shirley Huntley, was written from our recommendations. It very specifically called for an END to mayoral control. The passage of this original bill would have replaced the governance system of "control" with one that recognized and respected all parents as real partners (and that hateful buzz term "stakeholders") in the public educations of our own children.

In answer to Sean's comments about the PC not being representative (enough) of the diverse voices and concerns of Black and Latino parents, I agree.

Could we have done better in outreach, inclusion and representation of the majority of Black/Latino parents in NYC public schools? Absolutely YES.

Did we struggle internally with how to make that happen? YES. Did the issue of race and institutionalized racism as a structural construct in education come up for us over and over? Absolutely YES.

Did any of us have the personal skills or training required to really talk to one another about this, and how it affected our group work and individual thinking? NO. Did many of us try? ALL THE TIME.

Did the PC wind up becoming a core group of well educated, highly articulate, parent-wonks? I think so.

Was that done to purposely exclude any particular group of parents? Absolutely Not.

Was/Is the PC an elitist all White, primarily District 2 group of parent leaders, as some continue to accuse us of being? Absolutely NOT.

A third of my fellow commission members in the core (active) group are Black parents of varying means and backgrounds who hail from Brooklyn, Harlem, and the Bronx. Regrettably, our numbers in the PC remain in the minority, but we STILL counted. (Four of us from the PC made up the seven Black "Ambassador Moms" who twice got some minor notoriety in the press for our citywide prayer and fasting vigils for the end of mayoral control). The PC has a small, but solid group of parents of color that in my opinion, ought to be viewed among this city's many unsung heroes.

Just one example of someone undeserving of dismissal is Rosa Flores from Sunset Park. Her efforts to get other Spanish speaking parents to join her in signing petitions, speaking out at meetings across the city, testifying and representing the too often, unheard concerns of Latino immigrant parents, was nothing short of heroic. Fighting for public school excellence, equity, respect for human rights, democracy and dignity---Rosa was, and still is, a core member of the PC-- and what she stands for matters.

Just in case you don't know, I'm a Black woman who birthed and raised proud Black/Puerto Rican children in a low income household no different than a million others. My son graduated from a failing Title 1 school in a high poverty community and I need to think that my activism, both within and beyond the PC, matters. My concerns to represent the Black and Latino community never ceased to be in the forefront of my fight. And no different than any other PC member, I spent time and energy in communities outside of where I live, like Flatbush, East Flatbush, Brownsville, Bushwick, Crown Heights, Bed-Stuy, East New York, Fort Greene and the Lower East Side, outreaching to involve more parents of color.

It could very well be that the PC's "wonkishness," was one reason why we didn't excite and mobilize masses of parents, or have more of us of color actually attending the PC's monthly meetings. Some might conclude that we were off track with this heady governance stuff, and thus, our efforts were for naught. But there are hundreds and hundreds of petition signatures gotten from parents in communities of color supporting the PC's recommendations, AND MORE importantly, consciousness raised about imperative school governance issues, and what is really at stake with politicians and corporate types ruling over our children's public school educations. (And internal consciousness about Black and Latino parent concerns was also raised for PC members as well!).

The Parent Commission doesn't deserve to be bashed for its efforts. We lobbied, called, wrote, emailed, testified and protested mayoral control with every ounce of energy we had-- and that goes ditto for those of us in the racial and income-level minority who chose to stay with this wonky-group, believing that OUR united efforts on behalf of system-wide change, had importance.

Have we suffered from organizational pains? No doubt. I can speak for myself, knowing that I sought inclusion for, and from every fellow, parent activist of color I know outside of the PC. I reached out to you-- Sean, asking you to consider coming back to the Parent Commission to help us. There was always room for the PC to improve and expand. I think we really needed the kind of brilliance, activism and leadership Sean and others like him bring to any group.

As far as talking with the UFT is concerned, the Parent Commission ought to be applauded. Cutting to the chase, if all this fuss with governance and school business is really about educating children, then teachers and parents are natural allies. For me, it was about time that we just talked to one another as equally interested parties. Regardless of how the system of education was, is or will be governed, we all know parents and teachers are the ones who make education work. I'm happy that the PC initiated a VERY preliminary conversation and every parent of color (except for one who had to work that afternoon) in the PC attended.

Am I a fan of the UFT's politics and leadership? Nope, not in the least. (In fact, the very morning of that talk, I stood with other Black activists outside of a Brooklyn Rubber Room and participated in a press conference denouncing both the UFT and the Chancellor Klein for permitting this abhorrent, embarrassing, emotionally and financially-hideous practice to even exist. Then I went to Trinity Church and prayed to have the peace of mind to participate in a no-deals- made-discussion about how, going forward, teachers and parents can be the allies our children need us to be). If a fish stinks from the head like my mom always said, I just don't see why talking to the "head" in an attempt to bridge some very big and historic divides THEY helped to perpetrate, should be seen as problematic.

Confusing too, is the intel reported on the amendments the PC lobbied for when the hand-writing was on the wall, obvious that the electeds would cave in to Gloom-berg's pressure, power and money. Some PC members did fight bitterly to try to salvage something from Albany for NYC's parents. Added to the efforts made for mandating the DoE to obey all city and state education laws, pleading for a short sunset on the new bill, term limits for the PEP, ELL and Special Ed parents on all DoE councils, a no-waiver-education experienced chancellor, an inspector general, am ombudsperson, a funded, independent Parents Union (IPO), and an Education Constitution that would be result from a citywide, public consensus on the purpose and goals of public education, turned out to be pretty fruitless, but worthy efforts nonetheless. Especially now, in light of a very bad bill the city's children, parents and teachers seem to be stuck with until 2015.

Detected from Sean's response to my original posting mentioning the PC, was a jab at Leonie Haimson, Class Size Matters and the nyc parents blog. Whatever the beef, I don't think it has anything to do with the Parent Commission. Make no mistake-- I readily defend Leonie and her organization for the spirited fight to reduce class size for the good of ALL children and teachers. )When some very illegal stuff was happening at my kid's school, I didn't know her-- but reached out anyway and got great support. Lisa Donlan, another hard-core, well respected fighter, helped tremendously as well). I give full credit to them both for linking up to start the Parent Commission in the first place. They are both fearless, feisty mothers who took the initiative to do something major. I don't always get along with them, don't always see eye to eye because they just can't look at issues from my poverty stricken, Black view point, but I still praise them as visionaries for seeing the need in this city for an independent, action oriented, parent group think-tank, and being brave enough to DO SOMETHING to get it off the ground. Mad love is given to them for that.

But whoever and whatever their foes, fans, flaws or hot buttons.... be they class size, district control or even relationships to education experts (like Diane Ravitch), none of that defined the Parent Commission I worked on, fought for, fought with, and now, have the need to defend.

Every PC member was diligent and committed to doing the work we each felt was important. All members are different. Some income privileged, and many more, not so much-- especially in these days. Some came with delivery styles, views on politics, and personalities I didn't like, and that's vis-versa for how they felt about me, too. Bash us for being top heavy with egos and high I.Q.'s and you get no argument from me. BUT trust when I say that not a single individual or personal cause was ever bigger, or more important than that of NYC's public school parents, their children and futures. No one person ever got to define who we are, what we stood for... and with more support from fellow parents, community and education activists... could have been. But I'm proud of them, and the work we did together. Every one of these people I discussed ideas or brain-banged with, is committed to fighting for educational excellence in every school, for every child, of every color, in every zipcode of this city.

What will become of the PC now that mayoral control is again in place? Don't know, can't yet say.

As individual activists, we all have much to learn. Rev. Dr. David Billings of the Anti-Racist Alliance says that when Black people mobilize, the whole nation moves forward. The PC didn't heed that message, and Sean is absolutely right about the Black/Latino clergy and pols being bought and bound by billionaire bucks. Albany's power brokers would NOT have succeeded if a hundred thousand Black and Latino parents had boarded buses bound for the capitol, stopped traffic on all arteries leading to City Hall, and took to the streets demanding the end of mayoral control. Maybe the tipping point would have even been just 500 of us showing up at any place, many times over in the last three months. My opinion is that the PC should have done better, but that wasn't their mission and even if some of us could have convinced them to do so-- without real training, no one knew how to target the apathy, indifference, ignorance and fear that every other activist group is hampered with when trying to organize and mobilize the masses for social change.

It seems us parent and education activists still have a heap of heavy lifting to do, and that starts with how we perceive one another.

Finally--- what makes this on-going battle over education so very personal to me is the hurt I carry about my youngest being royally screwed by this system's control over his educational opportunities. In a few years, my grandbaby will enter the same system, likely judged as just another poor, Black kid attending a mediocre public school. I continue to confront race and income bias as the root of all evil, and recognize that no single group will ever be able to eradicate the achievement gap and obliterate the inequities by themselves. And so, I remain a soldier with like minded others in the Parent Commission, iCOPE, Neighborhood Schools for Community Control, 3-R's Coalition, BYNEE, GEM, ICE and the Coalition for Public Education. I pray that unity in our common cause will prevail.

But we really need to work differently from now on, better respecting varying approaches to skinning the fat cats, trusting enough to strategize TOGETHER from every angle-- in order to mobilize more people and make the kind of history that public education in this city, deserves. If we succeed in working differently-- but all together as public education activists and parents of all colors and incomes, I have faith that we can actually spark the fire of change in education policy our city needs. When that happens in the big Apple, I also believe all America will take a bite.

Peace.
- Benita Rivera

Friday, July 24, 2009

The City Hall Press Conference on Parent Power, Round 1

Reposted:

It was a fun afternoon around Chambers Street yesterday. The press conference at City Hall was a highlight. (Photo from Epoch Times.)

I went over to the press conference at City Hall after spending some time at the David Pakter hearing (what a hoot!) across the street and taped most of the speeches. There was lots of disdain on the faces of DOE people and many reporters (CBS' Marcia Kramer was priceless) as the much disparaged State Senators Hiram Monserrate and Pedro Espada led the parade in calling for more parent power with a large crowd behind them on the steps of City Hall.

But there were also good speeches by very reputable state senators Shirley Huntley, Bill Perkins and Eric Adams. GEM's Brian Jones and PS 123 parent activist Bill Hargreaves also spoke. I'm working on putting up videos of the non-scoundrels. The Epoch Times has a report with a quote from Brian and a counter quote from the UFT:

Brian Jones, who has been a teacher in Harlem for six years, said that the states’ allocation of funding to create and remodel charter schools is an attempt to privatize education. He is a member of the Grassroots Education Movement (GEM), which seeks to “save our schools from privatization,” said a flier.

Ron Davis of the UFT denied the threat of privatization posed by charter schools by saying that charter schools are public schools that have specialized programs.

The full story is here:
Senators and Parents Protest Mayor’s School Control


City Councilman Charles Barron had a different angle, despite the fact his wife, Assembley woman Inez Barron joined the others:

Barron On Amigos' Mayoral Control Battle: 'A Front' And 'A Fraud

Charles Barron talked to Elizabeth Benjamin at The Daily Politics:


"accused the amigos of trying "to undermine black leadership," adding: "We should have left their behinds over there (with the Republicans)."
"I'm down with stopping mayoral control; I'm not down with Espada and Hiram Monserrate and Kruger and Diaz," Barron continued. "They betrayed the cause for them to go over and try to empower Republicans until they got their little personal agenda satisfied."


"This ain't about mayoral control for them; it's not about decontrol, vacancy decontrol. It's not about the people's agenda. He finally got, Espada, a position he should not have had, and Hiram probably cut some deal somewhere, too. This was never about what they're trying to front about now...It was about Hiram's agenda and Espada's agenda...This is a fraud."

Related:
Wayne Barrett in The Voice on a pending deal - Holy Cow - Debbie Meier was the sticking point!



Tuesday, June 30, 2009

On the Eve of a Glorious Sunset...


Update from Albany and the Parent Commission

If you've been following some of the debates by parents on mayoral control (Debating the Parent Commission Position on Mayoral Control, Tweakers Take a Hit: Time Out From Testing Pulls Out of Parent Commission) the discussion continues:

This report came across on the NYCEdNews listserve last night:

It's looking like we may have something to celebrate tomorrow afternoon. It's looking likely, but it's not certain, that mayoral control will temporarily sunset tomorrow. It seems unlikely that the Senate will rubber stamp the Silver/Padavan bill. If a temporary extension of the current school governance law is approved by the Senate, the Assembly would need to be called back to vote that extension for it to become law. In the interim of a day or two, the sunset would be in place.

A short extension of the current law to provide the time for that full debate would be better than rubber stamping a bad bill and reauthorizing dictatorial control of the sch
ools

One person responded:
I think even a short extension of the bill is a dangerous move. We cannot count on the legislature to do right-when they function they are dysfunctional. The passing of the Silver bill should teach us a lesson. The reason why we are even on this deadline has just as much to do with their power politics as work that we have done. If it weren't for their stalemate, I fear we would have a law that would give the mayor a majority of votes on the board and have him select the chancellor which is totally unacceptable if we want any mechanism for change. We cannot underestimate the money of the Mayor or the long hand of the Obama/Duncan belief in Mayoral control and to charterize and privitize.

I would warn about over confidence, but some people are planning a celebration of the end of mayoral control:

Teachers, Principals, Guidance Counselors, paraprofessionals, secretaries, parents, families and community members will be gathering to celebrate the end of Bloomberg and Klein’s control of the New York City Schools beginning at 4:30 P.M. Tuesday June 30, 2009 in the park on the east side of 52 Chambers Street in Manhattan. At the stroke of midnight, June 30, we will serve eviction papers on Joel Klein to remove himself and his cronies from 52 Chambers Street, The “Boss Tweed Courthouse” immediately. For more information of this celebration, call Nicola DeMarco at 917-374-5220 or 718-884-2069 or email at nickdmarco@hotmail.com


The proposed celebration elicited this response from the DOE's public relations chief David Cantor:
I can see someone disliking the mayor, the chancellor, objecting to the way they run the schools, working to protest and change system. This is just tribalism. David Cantor

Tricia responded

Call it whatever you like, without change to the system, New York's middle class families and the communities they support don't stand a chance under this regime. Between rampant overcrowding, refusal to build schools on the neighborhood level, teaching to the test, and a very public show of disdain and dismissive behavior towards their taxbase, well I can't really think of anything that's serving the needs of my "tribe" for one.

Ellen:
Tribalism? What a strange choice of words? Would you mind defining your term? My dictionary says the most likely meaning "strong loyalty to the group," which I have no problem with. Or did you mean to deem us a bunch of tribal savages? In either case, the group identify has been forged in opposition to the attacks perpetrated upon our families and professions, so it makes perfect sense. Haven't you realized yet what you've accomplished?
Richard:
And the clubby alliance with Jack Welch, McKinsey, Broad, Gates, the Manhattan Institute, Alvarez & Marsal, IBM, Snapple, Edison, the testing companies, the accounting companies, Zuckerman, Murdoch, et. al, which could not care less what parents, teachers etc. on the ground said or thought, that's not tribalism?

Gary:
From a member of the "tribe", Hear Hear! David, perhaps if your bosses bothered to engage in some adult dialogue with stakeholders in the system, instead of throwing tantrums and threatening Soviet takeovers and riots in the streets, things would have been different. Alas, we have a Mayor who reveals himself to be nothing but a spoiled brat who thinks his billions entitle him to get whatever he wants. Maybe some comeuppance will help him mature a bit, but I'm not holding my breath.

And my 2 cents:
Funny you use the term tribalism David. A recent email from Randi used the term "lord of the Flies" in referring to someone who dared call out during her farewell address. You guys have to stop meeting like this. If it is tribalism it is due to the climate you guys created by empowering and supporting so many awful principals . Need I say Rohloff or Reidy and why not check out lehman where so many teachers are deserting a sinking ship? But you guys will turn the other way when an entire math dept at Bronx high school of sci is wiped out. Maybe you didn't notice at yesterday's demo at ps 57 the young teachers who joined in and were so vocal, with some tfa alum. The hostility of so many members of the NY teaching staff has never been at a higher pitch. Keep tossing those spears. People are starting to catch them and throw them back.

Saturday, May 23, 2009

Marine Park Community Set to Protest the HLA Charter School Proposed to be placed within Marine Park JHS/IS 278

No matter where your school is located, you are in the same danger of these privatizers. This case is particularly egregious. Ed Notes wrote about it here. We pointed out that the "lottery" was held in a YMHA on a Sunday afternoon without community notice. There are religious and political implications behind this. A prime issue is how the lie that they would find their own building was used to get approval.

If you can support these parents and teachers, come on down on Tuesday night. I will be there to video tape the event. We should use events like this to call for the state legislature to end mayoral control.

On Tuesday, May 26, 2009, the Marine Park Community will mobilize and protest at the Department of Education Public Hearing at IS 278, 1925 Stuart Street, from 6:00 to 8:00 pm.

Parents and Community members are vehemently opposed to the placement of any charter school within IS 278 in District 22 in Brooklyn. A charter school being dually housed inside the building with the Intermediate School would negatively impact the educational process of the school, harming not only the current students but the community as a whole. The intrusion of the Charter school will greatly limit the students’ access to fundamental spaces in the building such as the gym, library, and lunchroom. The loss of classroom space to the Charter will result in larger class sizes for the IS 278 students. Space restrictions will also cause the students to lose access to lunchtime tutoring sessions with their teachers and programming access to the schools renowned and award winning music program. The Charter School will also cause unnecessary traffic congestion that will endanger the lives of the current and incoming students.

When HLA made its application, at the public meeting June 23, 2008 it specifically stated when questioned that it would not place the charter within any public school, but would be acquiring their own private space. This obviously was not the truth.

For several years Marine Park JHS has petitioned with enormous community support to be allowed to extend itself from a 6-8 to a 6-12 school. This is a much better concept as it group students of the same age group who could continue to utilize all the space without loss of existing programs and create a performing arts school. The DOE has stated that there is no room for this reasonable request yet now states that there is room for an additional school with all its ancillary facilities. We question the DOE’s support of a special interest group over the needs and wants of the neighborhood community.

The dual housing of schools will impede the use of vital facilities such as the gymnasium, library, cafeteria and computer centers. Marine Park JHS currently has approx. 1,100 students and three lunch periods beginning at 10:00 am and ending at 1:00 pm. When would the HLA plan on having lunch for their 150 students (5 and 6 year olds) when they would not be commingling with 11 to 14 year old.

The space utilized by the dual housing of schools will result in a reduction or loss of the access to the rooms required by the renowned and award winning music (both instrumental and choral), drama and art programs that are currently in place at Marine Park JHS. Marine Park JHS is used on an ongoing basis by several local organizations to provide vital after-school activities. These programs include participants from all age groups and from all different schools (public and private). With the siting of this charter and its planned extended day, these much needed services would be lost to the children of the Marine Park community.

Charter schools are fundamentally meant to be housed in Districts with failing schools to offer an alternative educational choice to parents. District 22 prides itself on its long history of success in almost all of its schools. The community did not ask for nor is in need of Charter School intervention. Why is the community being forced to cut services to the children of this community school? Each year that the charter school is housed inside of IS 278, the community will lose more space for its children who want to attend IS 278.

The community has left their opinions to both Deputy Mayor Walcott and Mayor Bloomberg, flooding 311 with calls over the past 2 weeks. Thousands of signatures in opposition have been collected. The community’s outrage has been voiced at every Civic and Public venue available. Senator Marty Golden, Councilman Lew Fidler, Assemblyman Alan Maisel,other elected officials and civic leaders have added their voices in opposition to this plan.

http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/brooklyn/2009/04/29/2009-04-29_marine_park_parents_protest_plan_for_charter_school_in_public_building.html

Wednesday, May 20, 2009

Illustrating Why One Man Rule Has Got to Go

The following interchange between parents Steve Koss and Lisa Donlon on the mostly parent-based NYC Education News listserve is just a sample of the daily fare. I know for a fact that much of the NY Ed press monitor the list. Yet you do not see this parent anti-BloomKlein much reflected. Mostly you hear about UFT opposition, which is basically untrue as all they do is make it look like they are against certain policies so the members think they are really a union. This strong parent point of view along with the many anti- BloomKlein classroom teacher blogs is what is driving some of the opposition. (Leonie Haimson for UFT President, as she often does more to defend teachers than the union leadership.) But the chorus is growing. Probably not in time to stop a renewal of mayoral control. But if the legislature is smart, it would sunset the law again in 4 years. That threat might serve to hold the line on some things.

Here Steve and Lisa talk about the paltry numbers in the recent CEC election, or meaningless straw poll, at the district level where despite an expensive lobbying campaign the Tweedies and their flunkies couldn't come close to matching the old Community School Board 5% turnout. This gang can't shoot straight even with a bazooka.


The DOE's straw web site (www.powertotheparents.org) for promoting straw input from
parents for straw polling as input to straw elections in which to select members
to the straw parent organization Community Education Councils, has posted those
straw polling results in what can only be described as the most laughable and
ludicrous form I have ever seen.

Apparently, in an attempt to make the poll results as useless, vague, and
uninformative as possible, the website lists results in three categories: CEC's,
the Citywide Council on Special Education, and the Citywide Council on High
Schools. In each case, the candidates votes are listed not in total, not even
with numeric counts, but simply by the presumably originating schools of those
who voted, and given only in percents!!

That's right - no vote tallies, just percents. To choose just the very
first example listed for the CEC's, we're apparently being allowed to know that
in District 1, an unknown number of parents from School M015 (no name given,
although it happens to be P.S. 015, Roberto Clemente on East 4th Street in
Manhattan) ostensibly voted for their six (yeah, SIX!!) candidates (for nine
positions) in the following way: 26.09% for Monse Santana, 17.39% for Andrew
Reicher, 17.39% for Edward Primus, 13.04% for Corinna Lindenberg, 13.04% for
David Gerstl, and 13.04% fo! r Waldestrudis Acevedo.

A little very simple, trial-and-error math work yields the probable real
counts that produce these percentages: 23 total votes apportioned to the above
candidates as 6, 4, 4, 3, 3, and 3 votes, respectively. So all you PA and PTA
electors from District 1, don't you feel truly empowered and informed to know
that your #1 vote-getter from the full parental voice across your entire
district may well have garnered a grand total of six votes? Of course, it's
always possible that the votes came in as a multiple of this, such as 46 votes
instead of 23, apportioned instead as 12, 8, 8, 6, 6, and 6.

Who knows? Given the lack of parent interest as shown even in the number of
candidates, however, I'd always opt for the lowest possible set of numbers as
the most likely. It's as if we had a Presidential election and we were only
allowed to know the percent of votes coming from each precinct for each
candidate. No numerical counts, no totals by county or state or anything else.

It's a perfect way to provide utterly useless and meaningless data that
also hides the doubtless abysmal parent response to what was likely a
multi-million-dollar effort staged by Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein to
engage (or should I say, co-opt?) public school parents. Just one more example
of how mayoral control has become mayoral autocracy, with meaningless little
crumbs of "democratic participation" tossed out periodically as "sops for the
saps."

If there had been a genuine response with active parent involvement, the
DOE PR machine would have been in full gear, blasting out press releases and
data and pie charts and heaven knows what else. Instead, it's an abysmal
failure, a deservedly total rejection from parents who are smart enough to know
a naked emperor when they see one, and that emperor doesn't even have the nerve
to release the results in an honest fashion. Albany, please take note once again
of the reality of what you've created, and what you so desperately need to
fix.

Steve Koss

Thanks, Steve, for the lucid and spot-on analysis of the ludicrous
straw poll. Just for the record, there is a 7th candidate for CEC One but
the DoE/their vendor managed to accidently leave her off of the straw poll.


It took numerous calls to both DoE ( OFEA) and vendor
(PTTP) to get them to even admit there was a problem ( someone at Power to
the Parents actually assured me that Anilsa Sanchez was on the website
listing candidates for the straw poll, when in fact, she was not).

The left-off candidate is actually a sitting CEC member, whose candidacy
not only slightly "brings the numbers up," but she also brings the additional
representation of the parents of the district as the law requires of the CEC
membership by virtue of her race, ethnicity, home language status and
type of school she represents.

Autocracy combined with ineptitude- the worst of all possible
worlds? or a necessary correlate?

Bring on the wider lens of multiple view points, the checks and balances of
democratic participation and oversight; save us from the paralysis, chaos and
corruption of mayoral control.

Parents must call their representatives in Albany to let them
know they want the madness to stop, and are depending on their state
electeds to reform this broken system in the next few weeks.

One man rule has got to go!

Lisa DonlanCEC One

Wednesday, April 22, 2009

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

Friday, February 6, 2009

How the NYCDOE Lies? Let Me Count the Ways

Not a day goes by that we are not flooded with information on the kinds of lies and misinformation coming out of the NYC Department of Education and Mayor Bloomberg's office. That objections to the outrages are coming from both teachers and parents is worth noting, though it is ignored by the media (see report on WNYC Beth Fertig report yesterday). I'll be posting some of this when there is time, but it is only scratching the surface. Check with the NYC Public School Parents Blog for consistent updates.

That the school community is totally ignored when school closings are announced or new schools are placed or forced into existing buildings, is not in question by anyone involved. But the BloomKlein spin machine spits out lies by the second. (Today there will be a demonstration from 3-4:30 by parents and teachers at PS/IS 72 in the East NY section of Brooklyn, 605 Shepherd Ave. UFT officials will be there to assure them the closing is a fait accompli.)

Leonie Haimson sent this post:
On Monday night, at the mayoral control forum in Queens, Dina Paul Parks, Senior Policy Advisor to Deputy Mayor Walcott, insisted that parents in general and district leadership teams in particular are consulted and their input is solicited before any decision is made on where to site new schools in the district. The video with her comments are here: Debate on Mayoral control; check it out!

Parent activist Lisa Donlon from District 1 on the lower east side responded. I don't know what most of the labels she is using mean, but you'll get the gist of what Lisa is talking about.
Note in particular the role being played by Tweed's CEO of Parent Involvement, Martine Guerrier, who a long, long, time ago in a galaxy far away, was actually someone who questioned the actions of Tweed when she was the Brooklyn rep on the Panel for Education Policy. That was before B'klyn Boro Pres. Marty Markowitz signed on as a total BloomKlein flunky and Martine started to drift. Then on the day of the big anti-BloomKlein rally in Feb. 2007, she was hired for the $150,000 job by Klein. (See Ed Notes, Say It Ain't So Martine and Leonie's report on the Feb. 28, 2007 Rally to Put the Public Back in Public Education.) From what I hear, Martine has become a virtual spin machine all by herself.


Lisa
I bet someone at DoE tells her (Dina Paul Parks) that is true.
It is not.

One example- tonight was the public hearing for the OPD planned move of Ross Global Academy into Eastside Community High School in District One.

The RGA board discussed the plan in mid October, according to their minutes.
I was informed by OPD in mid November of a plan that was calibrated down to the number of classrooms needed vs the number available, yet no one at Eastside, including the principal, had at that point been told.

The matter has not to date been brought to my DLT for input of any kind although I have informed the members of the plan.

Last spring Martine told CEC members that OFEA had worked with a number of DLT's to plan school closings and new school openings.

I'd be happy to share the correspondence by which I tried to ascertain the validity of the claims; I asked for meeting agendas and attendance lists, that were never provided to back up the claim (that buck stopped at Brian Ellner).

Some of the CEC members in the districts cited by Martine as having had these conversations told me that a sort of shadow DLT was convened by OFEA and OPD to have these discussions.

DLT core membership is defined by state law and Chancellor's Regs but
I had the impressions that these other groups would pass a sniff test.


Lisa Donlon follows up in another post with these questions:

Why does everyone buy into the demonizing mythology of the "bad old days" of school boards?
Why glorify the current system which has many more serious flaws?
Why is the legislature not threatened with a close down when corruption, scandal and cronyism are revealed?
Why are only poor, urban, non-white school systems subject to "control" by autocracy?

Parent Ellen Bilofsky of Brooklyn wrote this email to Beth Fertig of WNYC after her report on the Brian Lehrer show on mayoral control yesterday. (I was on hold to talk about the drive-by diplomas and reports of teachers being pressured to not give kids level one scores after I heard Fertig repeat the DOE bull-stat that Level ones had dropped significantly under BloomKlein without considering the real reason.)

As a public school parent for 17 years, I'm disappointed at your presentation of the issues around mayoral control (although I missed the first few minutes).

For one thing, you seemed to accept the DOE's line that test scores are a solid--and the only--indication of improvement, without questioning the increased focus on those scores. If low-performing schools raise their scores, but the students learn nothing except how to take standardized tests, how much better off are these children?

You also repeated that principles have been "empowered" to control their own schools, without realizing how hamstrung they really are by the DOE's requirements for constant testing and by requiring the schools to absorb some of the services the districts formally paid for but with slashed budgets.

Finally, you dismissed parental involvement under the previous governance system as "theater" and merely "feeling listened to." Yet parent leaders in many districts, and to an extent at the city level, had considerable influence on the policies of their superintendents and had substantial information about district policies and budgets.

I personally felt my years of involvement were denigrated by that comment.

The current DOE turns the notion of "accountability" on its head by being accountable to no one for its policies--not to parents, not to the City Council, not even to the State legislature. Being able to vote the mayor out of office once every four years is not sufficient to hold him accountable for his chancellor's educational policies, when we are voting on his performance in so many other areas. And schoolchildren can't wait four years to rectify the DOE's grave mistakes.

Only a system of checks and balances, with true accountability and oversight, can fix this.

There is much, much more that could be said about the problems of mayoral control and what needs to be done to improve our system without "throwing the baby" of what was done right under the old system "out with the bathwater."

I hope future segments will give a more balanced view (well, actually, more tilted toward the parents' point of view) and will give parents some time to respond.


I'll close with this comment from NYC Parent Steve Koss

So many of us on this listserv believe fervently that the Klein regime's relentless focus on "measurable results" -- graduation rates, standardized test scores, etc. -- has utterly perverted the education process and led to all sorts of machinations to fudge the numbers (credit recovery, scaled exam scoring, discouraging participation in exams, changing student answers, etc.). This is an inevitable outcome of basing people's compensation, performance reviews, bonuses, even their jobs on those "measurable" outcomes. More than 30 years ago, this was formally identified by what is now known as Campbell's Law: "The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decisionmaking, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor."

My point is this. WE all know this is going on, WE all believe that the system has been turned upside, leading to these behaviors, but most of the public and most of the media (especially the major NYC newspapers) either don't know, don't believe it, or simply don't care to report it. Until we can get a respectably large group of teachers and school administrators to get up and, as they say, speak the truth to power, nothing is going to change and we'll remain on this same road to well-measured ruin (although, ironically and tragically, it will look to most like a magnif icent, quantifiable success).

Perhaps we can start collecting/cataloging these stories and get the individuals who report them to also stand behind them (even if anonymously). I suppose I'm being naive, but wouldn't it be great, for example, to have a press conference where people from the classrooms told these stories? What WE all believe and know to be happening will never become common knowledge and public perception until we can get those closest to this to speak out about what they see going on every day in their schools. How can people who care about children's education stand silently by and watch this happening?

Wednesday, July 30, 2008

Gary Babad Aims to Rule the World


When NYC parent Gary Babad announced on the NYC Public School Parent blog July 18 that his GBN News was acquiring the NY Times, more than a few eyebrows were raised.

His press release stated:
"It is unclear just what effects this takeover will have on the Times reporting, or their staff."

Sure Gary. Barely 2 weeks into your tenure as owner of the NY Times, you get this puff piece about you planted in a newspaper YOU CONTROL.

Just another outrageous abuse of power by the megalomaniacal Babad, who just a month before was awarded an exclusive no-bid contract as the sole distributor of NYCDOE press releases.

"Given the size of the DOE public relations budget, industry experts speculate that this contract alone could have financed GBN’s takeover of the Times,"GBN News reported at the time.

The ugly rumor around the street is that Babad's next move will be to buy Bloomberg L.P.