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Candidate: Doug Biviano

Race: City Council, District 33, Brooklyn

Political Party: Democratic

Current job: Building superintendent in Brooklyn Heights

Web site: BivforBrooklyn.com

1. Have you been endorsed by the United Federation of Teachers? No

2. Have you received campaign contributions from the following education-related political action committees?

No Democrats for Education Reform
No United Federation of Teachers
No Council of School Supervisors and Administrators
No New York Education Voters
No Educational Justice PAC

3. Do you have children in the public school system? Yes If so, how would you describe their experience? 5 (out of 5) 

4. Do you support programs like Teaching Fellows and Teach for America? Yes

 5. Do you support efforts to stop the growth of charter schools? Yes. Charter schools dilute the pool and siphon off quality educators from our public school system

6. Would you preserve school report cards as they are now? No. The report card system is a tremendous waste of money and weighs standardized testing far too heavily over critical thinking and creativity skills

7. Do you believe test scores should be a factor in determining whether teachers receive tenure? No. As with academia, I believe tenure should be approved on merit and through a process of peer review.

8. Do you support the 2009 law giving the mayor control of the public schools? No, it gives mayor too much power. I approve of efforts to streamline education and make the bureaucracy behind it more efficient, but mayoral control creates an autocratic over-centralization, with far too much power taken out of the hands of teachers and parents (where the majority of it belongs) and put into the hands of the mayor.

9. What letter grade would you give your district’s public schools right now? Again, I oppose the grading system. There are some tremendous success stories in my district, like at P.S. 8 where my children attend, and there are some areas where we need to make a serious effort to get parents more involved. Schools and their needs have to be addressed on a case-by-case basis, as each one contains a unique population of students and has different needs. That is why the standardization trend under Bloomberg has been so counterproductive.

10. In the last eight years, have your district’s schools improved, stayed the same, or worsened? How? As with anything else, when the money’s there we have greater flexibility and a better opportunity to make our schools flourish. Families have the luxury of participating in their children’s education when they aren’t struggling to pay the bills, and we that much more opportunity to hire teachers, reduce class sizes, invest in technology, and undertake capital improvement projects. A great example of a missed opportunity can be found in our current testing and school grading system, which has siphoned off millions of dollars and teaching hours, both of which could have been much better utilized to address the priorities I outline above.

11. Do you support Joel Klein remaining chancellor of the city’s schools? No If not, who would you suggest to replace him?
We need an actual educator, not a lawyer, leading our public schools. I would support someone like Dorothy Siegel, or a similar advocate of performance-driven budgeting and greater local flexibility for public schools

12. What’s an appropriate cap for charter schools, or should they exist at all (the current cap is 200 statewide)?
I would approve of lowering that cap, incrementally if need be. With greater local controls for public schools it should alleviate the arguments of charter schools advocates and lessen the need for them.

13. What’s the best way to improve a struggling public school? Localization and flexible budgeting will lead to wise investment decisions made by actual educators, who best understand how children thrive and learn, and parents. Incentive programs to lure more quality teachers into the fold should be funded to the greatest possible budgetary extent, as well.

14. What’s the single greatest problem facing your district’s schools and what specific policy would you propose to combat it?
I hate to be repetitive, but standardization. We waste money on a grading and standardized testing program that warps our educational priorities. A study recently revealed that teachers currently spend as much time each day teaching to the test as the kids spend in unstructured playtime. We need to be fostering creativity and critical thinking in our students, and giving our educators the flexibility to teach to their students’ strengths.