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Sullivan's Return

Back from the recent past, citywide panel gets first member

Renewed mayoral control is only a few hours old, but Manhattan’s borough president has already announced his pick for the soon-to-be revived citywide school board.

Borough President Scott Stringer said he would reappoint Patrick Sullivan  to the Panel for Educational Policy. The PEP was eliminated on July 1 when the city’s school governance law expired and will soon be resurrected now that the law is back in place.

Stringer first appointed Sullivan, who is a a senior vice president at Chartis International — an insurance corporation — and a public school parent, to the panel two years ago. He quickly became the board’s most vocal critic of Chancellor Joel Klein’s educational policies. Stringer explained the decision today via phone while sitting in a noisy lower Manhattan diner.

“I thought it was important today to make it clear that we’re going to have an appointee who has a reputation for being the most vigilant and the most independent member of the PEP,” he shouted. “He calls it the way he sees it.”

In July, when borough presidents and the mayor rushed to create a Board of Education, Stringer appointed his legal council Jimmy Yan. “I needed someone who could grasp the legal issues that would be involved,” he said. “It very well could have been Patrick. He didn’t necessarily want to do it.”

Stringer said he did not know when the PEP would be reconstituted, or whether the other borough presidents — who appoint five of the 13 board members — would rename their previous appointees. The DOE did not return calls for comment.

The new mayoral control law would bring few changes to the panel, Sullivan said. “The mayor has the super majority and he’s shown that he’ll replace anyone who disagrees with him,” he said. “There’ll be more votes on contracts and on changes in school configurations, but I don’t expect him to lose any votes.”

Sullivan said he was undecided about how he would vote on the mayor’s plan to end social promotion for fourth and sixth graders, which the mayor has said would be the panel’s first order of business.

“I would like them to release the RAND studies,” he said. “I don’t see why they would ask for the vote without releasing the years of research.”

The borough president said he had concerns about ending social promotion. “We have to make sure that if we’re going to leave kids back, that there’s a real mechanism to support them. It’s something that our office has been very critical about.”

  • Pogue

    Finally, some good news on the depressing, leave-the public-and-educators-out-of-it, educational front. Go get `em, Patrick.

  • http://nycpublicschoolparents.blogspot.com Patrick J. Sullivan

    Anna,

    Thank you for covering this announcement. But I want to make clear that neither I nor the Borough President support social promotion. Children should not be pushed ahead unprepared. But educational policy must be more than a press release. Principals and even the test vendors have overwhelmingly criticized retention decisions based solely on high stakes tests. And what interventions will be provided for struggling students?

    An administration that prides itself on making use of data to drive decisions is sitting on the results of perhaps the most comprehensive analysis of grade retention policy ever undertaken. Let’s have those results released to the public and have an informed discussion. This policy is simply too important to be reduced to slogans.

    Patrick

  • http://www.classsizematters.org Leonie Haimson

    the only good news we’ve had on the education front in three months.

    thank god for Patrick. He is the only accountability mechanism we have.

  • Michael M.

    Thank you, Scott! For setting a high standard of excellence, courage, and wisdom for PEP membership.

    And huzzahs to Patrick. Less than two hours after the article was posted, and with no other PEP appointments yet made, Patrick has already shown the conscientious perspicaciousness that has become his hallmark.

    Let any potential appointees by the other borough presidents or even the mayor himself take note, and DECLINE the honor unless they too are willing to place the interests of 1.1 million New York City children above political loyalty.

    On that note, it is striking that the Mayor himself has decreed that the first order of business of the reconstituted PEP will be the same order of business over which the Monday Night Massacre took place: social promotion. Not a coinkidink.

  • canwetalk

    Congratulation to Patrick for his reappointment to the PEP position. When educators have a stakeholder like Patrick on board to ensure that education policies are questioned and children are not being exploited for some politician’s self-promoting agenda, then there are PEP members, such as Patrick, that will make sure to hold the mayor and chancellor “accountable” for the 1.2 million children. I look forward to Patrick’s comments and ideas with respect to education. I wish you the best, Patrick, and welcome back!

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  • Frank Thomas, DOE spokesman just told me no arrests have been made tonight at PEP despite confrontation between protesters & police earlier. 25 mins ago
  • RT @leoniehaimson: It's been shown repeatedly that as one schl closes another overwhelmed w/ high needs kids that small schls won't take 30 mins ago
  • Shael: the suggestion that kids are moved around (to large, struggling high schools) just isn't accurate. 33 mins ago
  • @SchoolBook: Manhattan rep @PSulliv and mayoral appointee Lisette Nieves get into an argument she tells him to get off his "soapbox” 34 mins ago
  • Mayoral appointee Lisette nieves chimes in on an increasingly irate @PSulliv she says he's being rude. 35 mins ago
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