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Portrait of Panic

June 20, 2009

A state of frenzy with 10 days left before mayor’s control expires

by Anna Phillips, at 10:11 am

There are 10 days to go before mayoral control expires and one day left of the legislative session. Given the standstill at the state Senate, that equation is leaving both supporters and opponents of the mayoral control in a state of high alarm.

Invariably, their panic is fueled by the complete unpredictability of the situation. No one has the answers to questions about what would happen if the Senate allowed the 2002 law to sunset, as State Senator John Sampson has threatened to allow.

“If everybody goes home for the summer we’ve got 32 school boards on July 1. Mayoral control is over. The clock is ticking and it doesn’t seem like anybody’s doing anything,” said Joe Williams, the executive director of Democrats for Education Reform, which favors preserving mayoral control.

Should the Senate pull itself together and reconvene, either by choice or by force, before the law expires, it remains unclear what kind of bill it will support. A bill has already passed the Assembly, but Sampson and other Democrats have said they want to amend that to add stricter checks to the mayor’s power.

Advocates for those checks are operating under the assumption that change is still possible.

“The battle is not over!” Leonie Haimson, the executive director of Class Size Matters and a member of the Parent Commission on School Governance, declared in an e-mail to various groups that oppose mayoral control, urging people to call and e-mail Democratic state senators.

A policy director at New York Charter Schools Association, Peter Murphy, said it’s “hard to predict” whether it’s too late to amend the Assembly’s bill.

Even if Republicans and Democrats can reach a power-sharing agreement in the next 10 days, the Assembly may already have wrapped up its business and gone home. Any changes to the bill would require subsequent approval by the Assembly.

“The Assembly would be hard-pressed to come back because the Senate decided they would like to do something different,” Murphy said. “The Assembly has largely settled the issue by passing a very reasonable bill that the Senate should just pass and be done with it.”

As the days go by, not knowing who’s in charge is making lobbyists and advocates frantic.

“Literally it is so screwed up on the Senate side,” Williams said. “It’s like you’ve got 100 marbles and you’re trying to throw them up in the air and guess what the shape is going to look like.”

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  • http://www.classsizematters.org leonie haimson

    Joe Williams is the head of a pro-charter school organization as well. There are few if any outside the charter school world who support the continuation of unchecked Mayoral control.

  • Lynette Guastaferro

    Not exactly sure what you mean by unchecked. But I would have to disagree that you have to be part of the charter school movement to believe strongly in Mayoral control and accountability for school improvement.

  • http://www.sinksalive.blogspot.com KitchenSink

    I’ll run for a community school district board! Anybody else in?

  • Pogue

    1. There is no accountability with this mayor. He does what he does without taking into account public school children and their parents. 2. I may not vote for you, KS, but I love the idea of democracy, beacuse I haven’t seen it in NYC in a long time.

  • sodeskune

    The idea that the mayor can be held accountable is laughable. How do we hold him accountable? I thought one way was through term-limits. We decided two terms was enough for any one mayor, instead this mayor decided he was indispensable. So how do we hold him accountable? How has he been held accountable for over-crowding, for shutting down neighborhood schools, for starting small schools that don’t have to take special ed or ELLs for two years if ever? Can anyone tell me how the mayor has been held accountable over the last 7 years for the poor management of the school system? I pray for 32 school boards. Let the sun set on mayoral control and let’s try again.

  • Michael M.

    LG, Can you give us any examples of the Mayor or Chancellor’s direction being affected by the input of others who disagree? I can’t think of ANY.

    Which leads me to… please go to CECD2 (dot ) net and click the front page links to the lawsuit press release and court filing.

  • rick mangone

    If the Senate reconvenes before the July 1 deadline would it not take only 1 democratic Senator to side with the Republicans to pass the Assembly Bill??If that is the case I would unfortunately think that once again the mayor gets his way.

  • herman

    What would happen if the law sunset? You would have to select a Board of Education. You would have to set up Community School Board Elections. What would happen to the structure of schools being in self selected networks? What about budgets and autonomy of a Community District?
    I don’t like the Bloomberg-Klein administration but there would be chaos if everything stopped on July 1st. That is why there will be a compromise between the Assembly and Senate taking dictatorial powers from the Mayor. This is a game of poker and Senator Sampson plays the game well.

  • http://ednotesonline.blogspot.com/ Norm

    Let’s make a deal. Give Bloomberg Manhattan (sorry Leonie) and turn the boroughs over to the people in the outers. Manhattan is all he cares about anyway. The library system has 3 separate systems. Check back in 3 years and see which works best. Experimenting with the kids? What have they been doing all along basing the ed deforms on no research but on market based concepts.

  • http://edintheapple peter

    What happens if the Senate goes home and takes no action?

    1. The increase in sales tax does not happen and the City is in a $880 million hole … another $200-300 million cut in the DOE …

    2. The default for the DOE is a return to the BOE … two mayoral appointees and one by each boro prez … since four of the five current BP appointees routinely vote w/ the mayor maybe nothing changes.

    3. As far as Community School Boards the law called for May elections, two schools of thought, either we dig up the 2002 school boards or wait until May 2010 to hold elections …

    under the 2002 law superintendents were selected by the chancellor and principals by the superintendents, with input from the CSB and the C-30 committee

    so chicken little, the sky will not fall … only get cloudy! and BTW, will all the dems support Sampson in changing the law on the Senate side?

  • Lynette Guastaferro

    What has changed fundamentally is the degree to which schools are empowered to make decisions vs being told and “provided resources and programming” that (while many may have been useful, never aligned at the school level. I do think we need better measures, but I believe in an accountability system being put into place and then giving principals discretion to meet goals. I believe in school level accountability and decision making = and that is what has really improved. I can see improvements in our impact bc we are now working in a structure where schools make the choice to work with us as a partner and have more power how to spend the resources they have (although they are admittedly shrinking.) I am not saying that I agree with every move that has been made. But I have found it possible to make our case at the level of the principal and there are many now who get empowerment, and innovate locally at their schools.

    I dont believe the system that existed before worked for anyone at any level. The current system at least has a logic to it, and as an organization that supports schools, I have found when I dont agree with a central “mayoral” issue, there are those at the school level that are still willing to innovate and when they do it is real – bc some principals have really internalized what school empowerment means. To give you an example, I work for an educational technology organization. The chancellor had believed technology is first and foremost a tool for accessing student data, (although there now is a move to highlight the idea of 21c schools – it is pretty new though) My organization essentially lost all access to the federal funds that supported technology integration services. Much of that funding however never quite meshed with some of the core curricula requirements of schools anyway. So we had to rebuild and make our case directly to principals, we revised our services to align to principal’s goals and found ways to further the agenda of children first where we could find points of common interest. We shrunk some in size, but the result is that we see stronger outcomes from our work. Why? because innovative programming has to be lead by the principal. In the past, the resources all came top down with strings attached. Now schools make their own decisions. Maybe it is because we are practicioners working at the school level that I don’t feel blocked. What stymied everyone before was a diffuse accountability for anything, that made innovation really challenging.

    My original point, not so radical really, was that you dont have to be a charter school to prefer the changes. We are working with a number of public school principals that like empowerment and having significant budget control. If I could get policy makers to listen, I would like to see new and more challenging performance based assessments added to the accountability systems because I believe that would force a more wholistic curricula approach. But I believe we can do it anyway at a local level – where principals – one by one- believe in it – so that it might actually be effective.
    By the way, let me show we what we were able to do in a system that was moving away from ed tech.. workign with an empowered principal…

    http://edupress.wordpress.com/2009/06/19/ps-5-students-in-the-bronx-document-the-impact-of-the-xo/

  • http://ednotesonline.blogspot.com/ Norm

    Lynette,
    Maybe you can be more specific. Exactly what were the stronger outcomes? I was involved in DOE technology at the district level right up to mayoral control and from all reports coming in from my contacts in the schools, technology decisions have been a disaster. What you are getting wrong here is the power to the principal as being key. I dealt with empowered principals for years and they often made terrible decisions about tech. It was often the teachers who had the best ideas and they are often shut out by empowered principals, many of whom told me they didn’t want tech to interfere with test prep. No one talks about empowering teachers, but in the world of BloomKlein, they are at fault for everything that goes wrong.

    In the meantime, I would bet ed tech companies like yours make a pretty penny.

    I challenge people to go into any schools at random and check the level of ed tech skills. I bet whatever they have they got at home and not in school. See how well they can use a word processer, which every student should have mastered by the 6th grade.

  • Lynette Guastaferro

    Norm, we are a non-profit organization. We recently spent a million dollars of funds from our board and another million from foundations to create a school-based writing program that aligned technology to improve writing skills. To understand how we operate, you might compare us to New Visions or a support organization that specializes in using technology as a catalyst to improving learning. As far as student outcomes, we host a number of city-wide events for students where I can literally show you what I mean. Check out our website. http://www.teachingmatters.org and our blog. I need volunteers to judge student work for next year, and you sound like you would be great.

    I agree with you completely that teachers often lead the way on technology. Hence the name of our organization. In fact it is the kids that we can quite a bit from also. However, teachers working without support of principals can really only get so far – especially with technology which requires school level supports that go beyond what a teacher can often manage. Today, we are finding principals who are really interested in bringing technology to enhance learning. And you are right, when leadership doesn’t, it becomes a no priority in the school. However, before you had one part of the districts take it seriously, principals that often didn’t, (some did) some teachers who did, etc etc. I just believe it works better when a school sets goals and is accountable for achieving them. If a principal makes it a priority to innovate with technology or even focus on kids developing technology skills… they really do. In the past, some did, some didn’t. The ones who didn’t wasted those resources provided by districts. If you were in those positions, you know what I mean.

    What pushes anything system wide now is assessment. And by the way I think there is likely going to be an assessment coming down the pike for 21st century skills. It will be required by the state. I am not taking a position yet on the actual assessment, but I do know in those schools where technology as a no priority, most of those kids will have difficulty even taking the test bc they don’t have access to a computer. I think that will push the system to some basic level of computer literacy. Not one that I am happy with, (if you see our programs we focus on thinking skills not so much tech skills) but I agree with you totally, that technology as part of learning is not a central mandate. But yet i find that where principals invite us in to help them focus on this, they generally mean it. And that has meant that we work in fewer schools but see more teachers going deeper with technology enhanced instruction that aligns to other goals the principal cares about.

  • Pogue

    It is a given that ed tech and test prep companies love Bloomberg and Klein. As far as “innovation” goes, it is being smothered by an administration that already had schools producing real school newspapers, city-wide mock trial teams, debate teams, ARISTA, robotics competitions, myriad sports teams, and many other “extra” programs that have disappeared since Bloomie took over. In essence, Mayoral Control has put a vice grip on children’s creativity, real-world learning, and an empowerment in their own education.

  • John Hancock

    Norm, if you walked into my school, you would not have a litmus paper enough understanding of my kids tech skills. What I am saying is you have to have the skill set to know what you are looking for and what to really measure. I find that my control of the system is comparable to a child’s control of their diet based on what the parents buy.

    I challenge any person to walk into anyone else’s house and check the level of saturated fats and unhealthy food. Look at the BMI of most of the families and you know what you would find? See how healthy they are, something that should have been mastered by the 6th grade. The thing is they cannot master what they do not know.

  • http://ednotesonline.blogspot.com/ Norm

    Lynette,

    You certainly seem passionate about your work. You talk about assessment of the work. Let’s start with the writing program you spent a million dollars on creating. I’m not interested in judging the final work. I’m interested in the process – process over product.

    What I would like to see is let me pick 10 kids from your program at random and give them a cold writing assignment without notice to see if they have real skills, not ones that have been massaged. I’d like to see the pre-test you gave them before you started the program and compare it to the skills they have now. I’d like to see where your kids stand in comparison to the rest of the school. In other words, were they creamed? Then let me ask them to write a few months after your program ended to see what they retained. That would be real assessment.

    Now let me deal with Teaching Matters Inc. The name means nothing as teachers are not what TM Inc is about. If I’m not mistaken that company was founded by Elizabeth Rohatyn, Felix’ wife. (He basically took over the financials of NYC after 1975- I and most teachers went on strike, not for salary but to save the school system from what he and others did to it – it didn’t recover for a generation.) A very politically well connected woman. Under the old system where each district ran its own tech, many rushed in to hire TM to get political dibs. We had 4 perfectly experienced tech trainers in my district – I was one. We held classes almost every afternoon till 6 and often on Saturdays. But my boss always needed to find a way to get TM Inc some gigs and we were assigned to assist. At an enormous amount of money. I never saw one TM training that we couldn’t do better. You say non-profit? Let us know what people at the top are making.

    John – I’m not sure I get your point. I know what and how to measure in tech. If they don’t know word processing they should be taught. All I have to do is give kids 2 paragraphs to copy with a few cut and paste situations and I can give a rough assessment of how these skills are bring taught. But beyond that, it is not the teacher who I would necessarily blame. I used to be a computer cluster in the 90′s with floppy disks and almost 30 classes a week with hundreds of kids. Just teaching how to save was a massive undertaking. I used to ask the admin to cycle classes in for 3 months at a time every day so I could focus on retention and then swap grades but all the admin was interested was in getting preps covered, not in creating a program that would work. So I saw each class no more than twice a week and often only once. And with being pulled for coverages, sometimes none. Talk to tech teachers today even with a fortune in laptops sitting around and I hear things are not much better. Naturally kids know more because there are so many more computers in the home.

    Pogue – you nailed it perfectly, as you usually do. I worked for 2 regions under BloomKlein. Companies lined up at the trough to get at that tech money. If an ambitious reporter took on the scandal that tech has been under BloomKlein as it underwent one reorganization after another, they would uncover a hornet’s nest. Never has so much money been spent on so few.

  • http://sinksalive.blogspot.com KitchenSink

    What Lynette is describing is a gift – for teachers. If you want empowered teachers, you need empowered principals, who have an incentive to include teachers’ views in their priorities and decision making. A good principal is not an autocratic decision-maker who doesn’t value teacher leadership, so let’s stop assuming they are all like that.

    The system NEEDS the kind of principal empowerment Lynette describes, because it’s the only way for true teacher empowerment. The principals are the closest to the teachers. I don’t want an empowered elected community school board; I had that as a teacher, and I felt constantly undermined.

    Let’s figure out a way to hold principals accountable for treating teachers well and truly including their views in CEP, etc., planning. I think that step would satisfy a lot of the *stated* concerns of some of the knuckleheads on this blog who want to poke holes in the Bloomberg balloon.

  • http://ednotesonline.blogspot.com/ Norm

    Spending almost 40 years working in the NYC system, I learned that teachers have the best solutions to fixing the problems in education, but have no role in the process. Sure, people who no longer want to teach do rise to certain levels. But I have the most respect for the teachers who just love what they are doing and keep teaching. Once you are out of the day to day classrooms, you lose something. When all the tech decisions were made pre-BloomKlein and post, teachers were often the last ones consulted, though in the early days principals knew so little about tech they had no choice but to let tech teachers make many decisions.

    Speaking as a major knucklehead, by all accounts the level of principal and assistant principal quality is and has always been atrocious. Way worse than teacher quality. The empowerment of so many of these people is handing the keys to the asylum to the inmates. The overwhelming majority of principals have little interest in empowering teachers. Just the opposite. First empower teachers who along with parents should chose the principals who will be truly empowered by the support of the people they serve. Right now they only owe allegiance and accountability to the real knuckleheads above them.

    Most people think this idea is crazy. But it happens in many places in Europe. Let’s try an experiment with 10 schools and see what happens. They will try every insane thing in the world but the earth will get hit by a comet before they give teachers real power.

  • John Hancock

    The Bloomberg balloon does not need holes poked in it, it needs to be deflated!!

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