Great piece by parent activist Brooke Parker with historical perspective on my old District 14 scandals. One of the funny things I found was how when the attacks on the districts came from the proponents of mayoral control they landed on the black and Latino run districts while white -- very much Hasidic run District 14 which had as big a scandal as one could imagine (and the district UFT people were up to their ears in it) was ignored.
http://thewgnews.com/2013/02/public-schools-whats-mayoral-control-got-to-do-with-it/
Public Schools: What’s Mayoral Control Got to Do with It?
At the public hearing to co-locate a
charter elementary school in the only public middle school in
Greenpoint, a parent stood up and asked, “If the NYC DOE [Department of
Education] is doing such a poor job by parents, why don’t we open
more charter schools?”
Those who think the solution to fixing the problems of urban
education is to redirect taxpayer dollars to privatized charters don’t
understand what parents want. We want an end to Bloomberg’s “my way or
the highway” totalitarian mayoral control of our schools. Before hopping
into another dysfunctional relationship with the next mayor, it’s worth
discussing our painful love affair with public education, and an
abusive city DOE, in order to find our way out of this mess.
In 2002, the mayor wrested control of our public schools from what
for thirty years had been the decentralized power of local school
boards. This much authority given to the mayor to appoint the New York
City schools chancellor, set policy, and create budgets was radical and
unprecedented. School boards were erased and the city Board of Education
became the Panel for Educational Policy (PEP). A voting body might
sound democratic, but the majority eight out of thirteen PEP members
are appointed at the pleasure of the mayor. Imagine the public outcry if
the U.S. President were able to assign members to the House and Senate
as a rubber stamp for all of his policies. The PEP has never voted
against Mayor Bloomberg, even as so many of his controversial policies
don’t make any sense for public schools. The one time PEP members
threatened to vote against Bloomberg with the use of high stakes tests
to end social promotion for third graders, Bloomberg removed those
appointees the night before the vote in what was dubbed the “Monday
Night Massacre.”
Anyone familiar with abusers knows that the first step in developing
compliance is to isolate your “partner.” This sheds light on some of
Bloomberg’s restructuring initiatives under mayoral control.
He abolished geographic district groupings of schools into “regions” (a
larger geographic area of neighboring district schools), abandoning
regions in favor of “networks,” a nonsensical, conceptual grouping of
supposedly like-minded schools from across the city. This is what we’re
stuck with today, where my daughter’s network is no longer located in
the community where the school is housed, but shared with other isolated
schools in Queens, Manhattan, the Bronx, and Staten Island. The system
is bizarrely byzantine and utterly disempowering for parents and
community members. Finally, the district superintendent, once charged
with hiring and firing our district school principals, has been
thoroughly neutered. Superintendents aren’t even allowed to visit
their district schools without an invitation.
The great irony of Williamsburg complaining about mayoral control is
that District 14, which includes Williamsburg and Greenpoint, was held
up as a prime example of what wasn’t working with school boards, with
over two thirds of our school board seats held by the Hasidic and
Polish community even though their combined enrollment in our D14 public
schools was less than 7%. Latinos, representing 80% of students
enrolled in D14 public schools, were constantly outvoted on issues that
were critical to their schools, not the least of which was choosing a
superintendent to hire principals and develop curriculum.
The D14 school board, with the help of its 20-year superintendent,
William “Wild Bill” Rogers, was shockingly littered with scandals and
improprieties, from explicitly segregated buildings to 6 million dollars
of public funds funneled into a girls’ yeshiva through payments to
no-show staff for schools with phantom students. The absurd residual of
this corrupt school board’s disregard for the Latino families they
should have been serving is still seen in the oddly named PS380 John
Wayne School, which is located in the Hasidic section, with majority
Latino enrollment, and named after the Hollywood actor because
Superintendent Rogers was a big fan. Students at PS380 sometimes refer
to their school as “Juan Wayne.”
Ten years of the mayoral-control experiment hasn’t lessened
corruption or cronyism; it’s just citywide now, rather than local.
Emails released between former Chancellor Joel Klein and Eva Moskowitz,
CEO of Success Academy Charter Network, revealed the special access
Moskowitz had to the chancellor and the favoritism she received,
all while co-location hearings showed overwhelming opposition to Success
Academy schools by local communities. Who was the mayor serving? Even
as I write this, a Daily News article discusses a recent PEP vote that
approved renewing a 4.5 million dollar contract for Champion Learning
Center LLC, in spite of Champion being found to have improperly billed
the city for 6 million dollars in previous years.
The reaction from parents to the field of mayoral candidates has been
lukewarm, since we know that after the election our only recourse will
be Bloomberg’s snide suggestion to “Boo me at parades.” There are no
authentic checks and balances against mayoral control. Each candidate
simply asserts that she or he will make a better Ruler of All Schools.
Abuse of power is a plague, and accountability to the public is the only remedy. So what can we do?
As it turns out, a lot. And now is the time. Parents can take a
lesson from advice given to victims of abuse: Change the narrative of
power and rebuild the relationships your abuser severed. Don’t believe
the mayor when he implies that public school teachers are your enemy.
Don’t accept that parents should only be “involved” in their childrens’
schools.
Parent involvement just means helping your kid get to school on
time and reading to them. Parent engagement is what we’re after—where
people with skin in the game get a meaningful say in policies that
directly impact our children. In short, democracy.
We need to start taking advantage of some of the systems that are
still in place (due to state laws that Bloomberg wasn’t able to change),
including School Leadership Teams (SLTs), where an equal number
of elected parents and teachers develop their school’s Comprehensive
Educational Plan (CEP) and align the CEP with the school-based budget.
SLTs are designed to be democratic institutions. We can form
advocacy groups within each public school to keep our school communities
informed about what’s happening on the local, state, and national
level. We can end any false competition between neighborhood
public schools through parents working together to ensure that all our
neighborhood schools are great.
We can attend our district Community Education Councils (CECs) and
run for CEC positions (applications available in February). The CECs
are really only advisory, but they can be a powerful mechanism for
gathering community input and setting an agenda for our district. If we
want a local say in our local schools, we need to be ready for it.
We have to press every mayoral candidate to stand against mayoral
control beyond lip service to parental involvement and input, and reform
the structure of absolute power that has been absolutely corrosive
to democracy. Remember, mayoral control has only been in place for ten
years.
And the mayor isn’t the only elected official in town. State
government is just as essential. Mayoral control is a New York State
law, and sometimes it appears that there is gubernatorial control of the
state Department of Education. Governor Cuomo’s Education
Reform Commission came out with a list of statewide
policy recommendations, but didn’t include a single public school parent
on the panel. The list of recommendations reflects this absence. Skin
in the game, people.
Fighting this fight may seem like a lot of work, but sometimes it’s
just a matter of making a phone call or signing a petition. More than
anything, we have to vote every time there’s an election—especially
the local elections.
Democracy is never a fait accompli, but involves ongoing
participatory action. We’ve been conditioned to see mayoral control as
in our best interest, lest “we, the people” misuse our power. Think
about that for minute. Can you imagine our Founding Fathers putting a
special clause in the Constitution calling for absolute power for those
occasions when “we, the people” couldn’t handle the responsibilities
of democracy? Any elected official, be they city, state, or federal,
that believes “we, the people” are too inefficient or vested to decide,
or too lazy or stupid for power, is un-American, and Americans should
vote them out.
The great American philosopher John Dewey describes the charge of
public education as creating democratic citizens who will design the
pluralistic society we will live in together. How can we possibly teach
our children to be democratic citizens, to have the personal,
collaborative, and creative power to make their own worlds, if we have
ceded our own?
There are groups working on policies in support of our public
schools, including our very own WAGPOPS! (Williamsburg and Greenpoint
Parents: Our Public Schools!) To find out more about WAGPOPS!, including
information on the next public meeting, LIKE us on Facebook
at: www.facebook.com/WilliamsburgGreenpointParents.
