Per Michael Duffy, when it comes to pre-charter and pre-Mayoral Control parents:
“I think that some parents were empowered by the way things were in the past.”
Also per Michael Duffy, when it comes to pro-charter parents, same interview even:
“We’re trying to empower parents, teachers and activists in a number of ways.”
Irony, Tweed, etc., etc.
And who, prey (sic) tell, DISEMPOWERED said parents?
Spin, rinse, repeat.
Michael M.
Re Michael Duffy’s, “We’re looking for people who want to create something better than what exists.”
That would be true of a great many of 1.1 million kids’ parents — not just the ones Mr. Duffy is willing to empower (conditional on their wanting charters), but also the great majority of the parents in the system, the ones looking to Mr. Duffy’s BOSS to improve the system he is responsible for rather than undercut it in the areas most vulnerable to charter infusion, invasion, and encroachment.
“The faster this here non-charter goes down, the better the lifeboats will look.”
– If Joel Klein were Captain of the Titanic
http://www.nycsa.org/blog/ Peter Murphy
The teacher unions and letterhead allies want grocery stores to sell wine. As a former stockboy for the now defunct Grand Union, I heartily agree! Seriously, though, the additional revenue from higher sales of wine and the franchise fees is a fraction of what could be awarded NYS from Race to the Top. But, the unions don’t want the reform measures to compete for RttT. Wine trumps reform. http://www.nycsa.org/blog/2010/03/more-wine-for-children-ed-reform-nah.html
http://InterviewwithMichaelDuffyinLo-Down Susan Crawford
More From Michael Duffy in Lo-Down– “I think that some parents were empowered by the way things were in the past. Very vocal parents had the ability to raise enough heat to challenge and quash proposals that would alter the status quo, and I think one of the reasons the status quo 10 years ago was so deeply dysfunctional was exactly because of that. “
This is incredible. First the DOE blamed the old school boards for the alleged “dysfunction” of the pre-Bloomberg/Klein era. Then it turned to UFT- and teacher-bashing. Now the DOE is blaming parents? Mr. Duffy, who came to the DOE from Boston, is clearly unaware that some of the city’s most popular and/or high-performing schools today — and for the past 10-20 years, were formed by groups of administrators, teachers and parents who coalesced around the given school’s vision and did the ground-work and due diligence that formed the basis of what those schools are today. Where can he find them? Start with the list of the 209 schools that the DOE exempted from the mandated curriculum when Bloomberg and Klein first took over. That’s right, lots of parental involvement helped foster schools that were high-achieving, and/or that could take all comers and educate them without assuming test scores are the be-all/end-all of a student’s life. And they were not, by a long shot, just found in middle-income neighborhoods.
Meanwhile, charter schools certainly have no use for parent involvement, beyond the contracts parents have to sign when their children are accepted. No PAs, no SLTs. Token parent representation at most can be found on the governing boards.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.