The Public Educational Agora: How Should School Systems Be Governed/Ruled?

Although mayoral control does not sunset until June 30, 2009 it is looking increasing likely that the NYS legislature will be taking a careful look during this session.

The City Council, the Office of the Public Advocate, the Supervisor’s Union (CSA), the Teacher’s Union (UFT) and a range of other organizations are creating plans or carefully exploring modifications in the current law.

A number of universities and foundations have sponsored forums to explore mayoral control.

A threshold question: Is the current system of mayoral control flawed, or, is it the implementation by the current chancellor?

Diane Ravitch reminds us that from 1873 until 1969 all members of the Board of Education were appointed by the mayor: mayoral control.

The Decentralization Law of 1969 created Community School Boards and called for an elected Central Board of Education. The proposed election did not pass scrutiny under the Voting Rights Act, and, the law was amended: five members of the Board were appointed, one by each borough president and two were appointed by the mayor. Each of the chancellors, selected by the Board, ran into “trouble” with the mayor and left … I believe nine chancellors in 32 years!

Under the current reiteration the former Board of Education has been folded into the City as an agency: the Department of Education, the chancellor serves as a commissioner of a City agency.

The Board was replaced by the Public Education Panel, that serves at the discretion of the mayor. Community School Boards have been replaced by Community Engagement Councils, with no statutory roles.

A recent Atlantic Monthly (“First, Kill All the School Boards”) article pillories the school board system and Ken Wong in The Education Mayor points to the many advantages of mayoral control, citing many examples from Chicago, that has had a mayoral control system for many years.

Some argue that chancellors only served for a few years, until dumped, in effect, by the mayor, that constant change in focus is inimical to student progress, and, by giving a mayor total control brings both stability and responsibility to the school system. The “too many cooks” theory is that too many stakeholders result in paralysis, and an ineffective system.

Critics of the current system point to a “deaf” mayor and a chancellor who has no responsibility to the many stakeholders, who, in effect, rules rather than governs a school system. A complete absence of accountability. An arrogant leadership that does what it pleases, including, the misuse, actual falsification of data.

 The harshest critics question the entire concept of a public school system lead by publicly elected officials. They proffer a wide range of choices: public schools run by educational management organizations, some not for profit, other for profits, charters and vouchers. The marketplace would determine success or failure of schools. The governmental authority will simply monitor, not run, schools.

To quote Thomas Wolf, “You Can’t Go Home Again,” recreating the hazy past is never possible … what kind of school system will provide the most effective education?

A vital question that is increasingly engaging the public agora.

Phlebotomy: The “Bleeding” of the Weakest and the Most Vulnerable

 

Two hundred or so years ago the height of modern medicine was the “bleeding” of the fevered and the ill. An incision was made and heated suction cups were attached to the body, the letting of blood allowed the “harmful vapors” escape the body.

Today it is the Chancellor who is the scarificator, making the incision into the flesh of the children in our school system.

Last week Joel Klein and Katherine Grimm  were battered for three hours by the City Council  as they tried to explain a budget cut of 5%, and perhaps 8%.

Department officials said this week that they were considering reducing several of their new school accountability programs. They are weighing whether to allow the highest performing schools to be excused from annual quality reviews by consultants or parent and teacher evaluation surveys. They are also considering changing the way schools choose and pay for support services like teacher training. The officials said they did not plan to scale back annual report cards on schools.

There are many hundreds, perhaps as many as a thousand teachers who are sitting in Reassignment Centers, aka “rubber rooms,” and serving as Absent Reserve Teachers, (ATRs) working as occasional substitutes because the Department refuses to place them in a permanent position.Tens of millions of dollars being wasted:  Idealogy trumping reality.

How about the $80 million ARIS “data warehouse,” that is increasingly looking like a huge disaster. And, how much money is being spent on those Learning Support Organizations? Why not ask schools … do you want to retain ARIS, Support Organizations, or, have the dollars come out of your school budget?

What would an 8% cut look like?

Let’s look at a school, maybe your school …

Go to the Department web site  and type in your school (district, example 08 for District 8, letter denoting boro, example X for Bronx followed by the school number) in the “Find a School” space.

Click on the number/name of the school on the left side of the page.

Click on “Statistics” on the left hand column.

Scroll down and click on “Budget Summary.”

You have the up-to-date school budget – the budget system is called Galaxy.

At the bottom of the pages is the total school budget – calculate a cut of 8%. On the right hand side of each page you will find the ”average teacher salary” for your school.

MS 201, in District 8 is a newly identified SURR school, in fact, in the bottom one percent on the 07 State ELA exam.  An 8% cut in MS 201 budget would be $358,584, a loss of 5.8 teaching positions.

Who do you excess? The only guidance counselor …? and leave 70 kids with mandated counseling needs unserved. The dean …? who would deal with the 150 “incidents” already reported this year? the Math Coach? the ELA Coach? or, maybe, just jack up class size 6-8 kids in every class?

The last place to cut must be the classroom …

The Chancellor should have been standing on the podium with Randi Weingarten and the parent leaders at the March 19th rally. He should be in the forefront, not making excuses and defending his castle.

A fatal flaw of mayoral control is a chancellor and a school board totally in the thrall of the mayor. The City may very well be facing dire fiscal circumstances, however, the decision where and how to trim city services must be a transparent process with the lead educator fighting for children, not making excuses, and leading the bloodletting.

Who Speaks for the Children? An Autocratic Mayor and a Subservient Chancellor Harm the Defenseless

 

Who speaks for the children?

There is growing national debate over school governance. The historic model around the nation is elected school boards. The school boards represent the community, parents and taxpayers, hire a superintendent, and set policy for schools. This model is increasingly coming under attack . The eduwonks are rejecting the centuries old concept of elected school boards and proffer the education mayor.

Although the self-styled experts have hopped on the mayoral control bandwagon the recipients of school services and the funders of school services are not so enthusiastic.

Bills have already been introduced in the New York State Legislature that would restrain the powers of the education mayor .

Events of the last month have crystallized the debate. The economy is struggling and the City faces a budget gap. The Mayor announced cuts across the board, including an immediate 1.75% cut all schools and a five per cent cut for all schools next year. The Chancellor blithely snatched the money out of school budgets, with nary a word of criticism, or, any plan that would cut Department funds without impacting schools.

This Wednesday, March 19th, a range of organizations, the teachers union, parents, advocates and electeds will rally to oppose the cuts.

The Chancellor, in the thrall of the Mayor, has been silent.

The budget cuts are directly impacting services to children in each and every school. Other choices are ignored: cutting budgets of Support Organizations, cutting salaries of non-union Tweed staff, reducing Tweed staff: the cuts “take bread out of the mouths of babes,” and, apparently for Tweed, that is acceptable.

The Chancellor cannot both be the defender and the enemy of education. He cannot on one hand give his stock “Education is a Civil Right” speech and then ignore the civil rights of children by cutting school budgets.

As the education community engages in a debate over mayoral control an obvious flaw is the absence of representatives of parents and children, an absence of any checks and balances, an absence of any role for those who fund schools.

An educational mayor and Quisling  chancellor harm us all.

The Picador Precedes the Matador: The Toreadors Begin To Encircle Mayoral Control

A political trivia question: What do Connecticut, New Jersey and New York have in common?

They all had governors who resigned due to “ethical improprieties,” aka foolishness … two of them, thinking, to quote Alan Dershowitz,  with an organ other than their brain.

The feeding frenzy of the media has totally buried education news.

On Tuesday, a combined meeting of the New York State Assembly and Senate selected three members of the Board of Regents, they reappointed Geraldine Chapey and appointed two new members, Betty Rosa and Lester Young.

Rosa was the Community Superintendent in District 8 in the Bronx and highly regarded by the Bronx political and educational pre-Klein establishment. Young was Community Superintendent in District 13 in Brooklyn, served a year under Klein as the first Director of the Office of Student Placement, Youth and Family Support Services (SPYFSS).

Both spent decades working their way up through “the system” and represented all that Klein has been so busy tearing down.

On the legislative side two bills have been introduced in the Assembly that “nibble away” at mayoral control. One bill would require public hearings on school closing with time limits
 and the second would create community district education council principal selection committees.

The debate over mayoral control models is heating up as legislative bodies and the think tank/not for profit/university community begins to chime in. Diane Ravitch at Pace University, the panel discussion last week at the New School (that will up on a video feed within a week).

There are a number of schools of thought:

* the picador approach: weaken mayoral control now, nibble away at the power of the Chancellor, send a clear signal, and remake the entire system next year.

* the “iron is hot/do it now” approach: there is a growing consensus that mayoral control must be redesigned from the top down  … if you wait until next year, in the midst of a mayoral election, election politics will “eat up” any attempt at a reasoned approach to designing a new system. Remake it now.

* the “mayor or the model” approach: would we be so incensed if we had a different mayor? Is it the model or the mayor: do oppose mayoral control or is it the Bloomberg/Klein approach? Why not wait until after the November, 2009 election?

* the “cynical” approach: let mayoral control sunset, a new Mayor is elected and would have to negotiate with the legislature …

The transparency and sunlight of the current governance debate is the essence of a democratic society. All the stakeholders are chiming in … as the months pass the debate will only increase providing the legislature with an early window for changes. 

And, of course, a new governor, getting up to speed on the range of issues, is another ingredient in the stew.

It will be an interesting spring.

“When You Walk Through the Garden You Betta Watch Your Backs,” Lesson for the School System from The Wire.

    

“Deserve got nuthin’ to do with it.” – Snoop

For five years we have glimpsed the hardscrabble lives of the underside of inner city Baltimore. The petty, unfeeling bosses, whether elected or union officials, police brass, newspaper editors or leaders of schools and school systems, basking in their own importance as lives slide into oblivion.

To quote a Carcetti aide in tonight’s The Wire: ”everybody’s getting what they need because of some make believe” … could be the motto of the Klein administration.

Have the lives of kids and teachers changed in the six years of Children First?

Well, teachers do earn 40 plus percent more … I credit Randi Weingarten, certainly not Joel Klein.

Just as the police brass in The Wire “jook” stats to show a decrease in crime, the brass at Tweed “jook” edustats … the parallel is eerie! (“Shining up shit and calling it gold”)

Unfortunately for kids the life in classrooms has not improved: class size is huge, the inexperienced are too often anointed as principals, dropout rates are staggering, student pregnancy rates, crime, and, the scions at Tweed “keep on shining.”

For some the act of teaching is noblesse oblige, a stop along the path of life before moving on to “real work.” For others it is a lifelong task, learning and teaching, and fighting for that elusive better world.

For our billionaire mayor and his confreres the answer is the marketplace. Whether it is an approach to poverty, or, pollution, or schooling, the answer can be found in the laws of supply and demand.

In Manhattan, million-dollar condominiums are bargains while in East New York kids come to school hungry.

A few days ago the New School University sponsored a panel about school governance, “Who Should Rule the Schools.” Klein was the keynote and has been spouting the same speech for six years, “Education is a Civil Right,” it’s a pretty good speech, but, like the brass in The Wire he is not interested in solutions, just the appearance of solutions. The panelists shredded Chris Cerf, Klein’s mouthpiece, and, the five hundred in the audience were equally unkind.

Daylight Saving Time is here, crocuses are in bloom, Mets and Yankee opening day is three weeks away, the teachers still spin out those lessons: the writers, actors and directors of one act plays, aka lessons, each and every day.

And I lift my glass to the Awful Truth

which you can’t reveal to the Ears of Youth

except to say it isn’t worth a dime

And the whole damn place goes crazy twice

and it’s once for the Devil and it’s once for Christ

but the Boss doesn’t like these dizzy heights –

we’re busted in the blinding lights

of closing time.

Leonard Cohen

Punishing the Heroes: Bushwick Community High School

Each fall the New York State Education Department reviews data from the thousands of schools across the far reaches of the State and identifies schools who are moving away from Adequate Yearly Progress – the No Child Left Behind measurement rubric.

The SED then enters into a “negotiation” with the Department of Education … the Department preemptively closes some schools, and others end up on the Schools Under Registration Review (SURR) list.

This year the Department announced the closing, actually the phasing out of 14 schools, and another seven: six middle schools and one transfer high school, ended up on the SURR list.

A State team, made up of a Regional Superintendent (fka, BOCES) and his/her staff members, a CSA rep, a UFT rep, a parent rep and SED and DOE reps make up the team, usually 10-12 folk. They spend three days in the school, observe teachers, interview supervisors, teachers, parents and kids, and review school data and student work. In the evenings they write the Report, and, on the fourth day read the Report to the school community. About two months later, after the SED “massages” the draft, the Report is released to all.

The Report is made up of “findings” and “recommendations,” and, in rare instances, can suggest that the school should be closed.

The only high school on the list this year is Bushwick Community High School, a transfer high school. Transfer High Schools only accept students who have been failing to accumulate credits and pass Regents exams in other schools. Bushwick Community will accept kids with zero credits.

They accept the most at risk students … kids who have been stumbling for years, kids well along the path to dropping out of school. Needless to say most of their kids do not graduate in their cohort year, four years after they entered high school, and, some may never graduate. In 2006 Bushwick had a 46% dropout rate … however … 54% of the kids did not drop out.

Bushwick works with kids on the edge of the abyss, rather than nurturing the school the Department threw them off the cliff.  Not a surprise.

The P-schools, schools for pregnant girls, also an at risk population, also not surprisingly, did not have “good data.” The solution: close the schools!!  What happened to the kids? The Department has no idea … in theory they would return to other schools, and, maybe, enroll in schools with LYFE programs. In reality, most probably dropped out …

Bushwick Community is a wonderful school … a creative, caring, dedicated staff that is proud of what they accomplish. The Department, that counts widgets rather than the lives of young people, failed to explain to the State the mission of Bushwick. Hopefully the State Team will realize that Bushwick is a special place … that should be cherished … and, hopefully, will not face the same fate as the P-schools.

Defending Frankenstein: Will Schools Be Ruled by the Mayor, or Governed by the People?

Buddy Cianci  is a charming scamp who was Mayor of Providence and spent some time as a guest of the federal authorities. In his ribald biography, Prince of Providence  he avers, “Beware, the hand you bite today maybe attached to the ass you have to kiss tomorrow.”

For months Bloomberg has been a flirt: will he, or, won’t he? He finally let the cat out of the bag; in an op ed piece in the NY Times he formally announced he will not be a candidate for President. The NY Sun speculates that his withdrawal  begins the era of the lame duck.

As elected officials reach the end of their tenure they begin to think of that legacy thing: the edifice complex.

For Mike, of course we have the West Side Stadium, Oh! Right! It never got built. How about congestion pricing? Nope, it also seems to be dead on arrival. In fact, anything that requires the approval of the New York State Legislature is in jeopardy.

When your mayoralty ignores, reviles, abjures, and generally treats the Legislature with disdain, it might be difficult to get them to approve anything.

Mike should have taken Buddy’s advice.

On the national level it is mayoral control that has resonated. Other mayors around the State are beginning to consider a mayoral control model for their cities. The think tanks have made Mike and Joel into iconic figures: fighting the big bad teachers union, firing the democratically elected school boards and replacing them with totally powerless councils, playing with pay for behaviors for students, letter grades for schools/principals, using student data to rate teachers, etc. All the reforms du jour.

As Mike begins to emblazon his crest on mayoral control he has to confront a minor obstacle: the law sunsets, aka, expires on June 30, 2009.

The New York State Legislature, those very same guys and gals who have been kicked around for the last six years are the very same who have to renew the law.

The Center for NYC Affairs at the New School is sponsoring an interesting panel, “Who Rules the Schools?” on March 6^th. Joel Klein is the keynote speaker: panelists:

• Chris Cerf, Deputy Chancellor for Spin Control
• Ernie Logan, the Principal’s Union
• Carmen Colon, representing the Community Education Councils
• Alan Maisel, NYS Assembly, who has introduced a number of bills to limit the powers of the Mayor
• Meryl Tisch, NYS Regent.

  

This will be the kickoff of the administration defense of their Frankenstein.

Will Bloomberg negotiate changes in school governance this spring, that may defang his chancellor but retain the core of mayoral control? or,

Will he risk waiting until the spring of 2009, in the midst of the mayoral election, with conflicting governance plans from a range of contending candidates?

With only a few blips the mayor has ruled the City without opposition. 

The founding fathers confronted the same issues in the infancy of our nation. In Federalist Papers,  # 51

Madison and Hamilton muse on the concentration of power:

But the great security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department, consists in giving to those who administer each department the necessary constitutional means and personal motives to resist encroachments of the others. The provision for defense must in this, as in all other cases, be made commensurate to the danger of attack. Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.

 

For too many New Yorkers the current administration has further enriched the already rich and ignores the working folk. The solution for all problems, whether schools, or, poverty, are market driven. Pay kids for passing tests, pay teachers for teaching “harder” and paying the working poor for “positive behaviors.” The City Charter has created an imperial mayor, who has “ruled” the City, and promoted his own ambitions. It will be interesting to see how the clash of ambitions impact control of the schools.