Wilfredo Pagan has been appointed to represent the Bronx on the Panel for Educational Policy

Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz, Jr.’s office announced today that it has appointed Wilfredo Pagan to the Panel for Education Policy, just in time to represent the borough at tomorrow’s meeting.

Pagan, a lifelong Bronx resident, went to city schools himself and has sent six children to them. The parent association president at P.S. 50, he has belonged to the Chancellor’s Parent Advisory Council and the Citywide Council on High Schools. He said he has also attended past PEP meetings in his capacity as an involved public school parent.

“It’s a new experience as far as the role, but as far as how the Department of Education operates in certain areas, I have good experience with it,” Pagan said.

He is replacing Monica Major, who has served on the panel since October 2010 and has recently been tapped as Diaz’s director of education and youth services.

Major was part of a bloc of borough presidents’ appointees who regularly voted against city proposals. Pagan said he was not ready to commit to that stance and would not say how he planned vote tomorrow when controversial issues, such as charter school co-locations and school expansions, are on the table. But he told me the three most pressing issues he sees in education right now are communication, organization, and school closures.

“What I represent is the Bronx Borough President’s office and what I represent is a vision: A vision of not wanting to have any more school closings, of being able to educate every child, of every child having a voice and every community having a voice,” Pagan said.

BOROUGH PRESIDENT DIAZ NAMES WILFREDO PAGAN

TO PANEL FOR EDUCATIONAL POLICY

Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr. today announced that Wilfredo Pagan has been appointed as the borough’s representative to the Panel for Educational Policy (PEP), which holds approval power over the actions of the New York City Department of Education.

“Wilfredo Pagan is a strong advocate for the children of the Bronx, and he will make us proud in his new role on the PEP. I look forward to working with Mr. Pagan to advance a strong agenda on education for the parents, children and families of the Bronx and the entire City,” said Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr.

“Every child has a voice, and I am deeply honored to be able to represent that voice on behalf of parents, families and the Bronx community. I am thankful to Borough President Diaz for this opportunity, and I look forward to working with his office on the critical education issues that face our borough and our City,” said Wilfredo Pagan.

Pagan, a resident of West Farms, was born on September 14, 1971, in the Bronx, where he has resided his entire life.  He is the youngest of seven siblings, all of whom have graduated from the New York City public school system.  He is the father of six children—four girls and two boys—each of whom have also attended New York City public schools.  His three youngest are currently enrolled in the very school he has volunteered in for the last six years, P.S. 50/The Clara Barton Elementary School, also located in West Farms.

As the President of the parents’ association at P.S. 50 and president of the District 12 President’s Council, Mr. Pagan has represented the parent community in different educational forums that range from Chancellor’s Parent Advisory Councils, public educational hearings, the Citywide Council on High Schools, educational space planning meetings and other activities.

Pagan replaces Monica Major, who currently serves as Borough President Diaz’s director of education and youth policy.

 

Building more oversight over contracts was one of the goals of the reauthorized mayoral control law passed by state lawmakers in 2009. The law handed review power of contracts to the Panel for Educational Policy, the citywide school board controlled by the mayor. But since 2009, several panel members have complained that they lack the information necessary to review contracts before approving them, making their oversight authority meaningless.

In the case of the contract with Future Technology Associates, the firm accused of fraud yesterday by the city schools investigator, panel members had less than a day to review detailed information about the contract before voting on it in September 2009, according to email messages obtained by GothamSchools. Officials shared the information in response to a request by the Manhattan representative on the panel, Patrick Sullivan.

The contract came up for a renewal vote at the first meeting of the PEP after the mayoral control reauthorization. In an email to Sullivan the day of the meeting, department General Counsel Michael Best cited reauthorization as motivating school officials to prepare more thorough background materials.

Sullivan, an opponent of the Bloomberg administration’s education policies, responded that those materials — which included a draft agreement between the city and Future Technology Associates — were not sufficient. He said that a day to review them was not enough time.

A spokeswoman for the Department of Education did not respond to a request for comment today. School officials have previously said that it would be impossible to provide detailed information to panel members because in most cases the contracts are still under negotiation when they come up for PEP approval.

In his 2009 email, Best said that his “understanding” was that the city’s practice was in line with those of boards of educations around New York, which he said do not review draft contracts before approving them. He said the more powerful Board of Education that existed before Mayor Bloomberg won control of the schools in 2002 operated the same way.

A spokeswoman for the New York State School Boards Association, Barbara Bradley, disputed that characterization, saying that New York school boards have access to full contracts before they approve of them. “They do their homework, they don’t rubber-stamp the contracts,” Bradley said. “If they want to go through it line-by-line, they could. But they’re also relying on the superintendent at the board meeting to lead them through this kind of thing, or their school attorney.”

In an interview today, Sullivan called on the chairman of the PEP, Tino Hernandez, who is a mayoral appointee, to step down. “Someone needs to take accountability for the failure of the PEP here,” Sullivan said. “The PEP didn’t carry out its oversight role as mandated in the state education law, so I think we need to have a chairman who is willing to make that happen.”

Hernandez, the former chair of the City Housing Authority who was appointed to the PEP in 2004, did not respond to emails from GothamSchools today.

Gbubemi Okotieuro, the PEP’s Brooklyn representative, seconded Sullivan’s request for more information about contracts. He suggested that the Department of Education share the information it has on each contract one to two months before it comes up for a vote. “Don’t just give me two weeks notice. Give me good information well before a major contract is about to come up,” he said.

The 2009 reauthorization also handed more oversight power of contracts to the city comptroller, who reviews contracts after they are approved by the PEP. In July 2010 the DOE proposed that the PEP vote to give blanket approval of all contracts, but it withdrew this proposal after John Liu, the comptroller, spoke out against it and brought it to the attention of state legislators.

New chancellor Cathie Black made her debut at the Panel for Educational Policy tonight to a packed crowd that drowned out her remarks with boos and jeers — especially when Black mentioned the name of her new boss, Mayor Bloomberg.

“Let’s try to do this with some civility and decorum,” the panel’s chairman said as he introduced Black. Yet the crowd continued to shout and jeer, forcing Black to raise her voice as she delivered prepared remarks.

The remarks described what Black has learned on her tour of schools — “I’m seeing what makes an effective school leader and how a strong school culture can contribute to learning,” she said — and also named her priorities, including building a strong teacher evaluation system and empowering principals.

She also summarized the education agenda Bloomberg laid out in his State of the City address this morning. The mayor laid out a trio of changes tied to coming budget woes and projected teacher layoffs: legal changes to transform the way teachers are laid off; contractual changes to deflate the Absent Teacher Reserve pool of teachers on the payroll who don’t have formal positions; and reforms to the teacher pension plan to cut costs.

Hundreds of people packed Brooklyn Technical High School in Fort Greene tonight for the panel meeting, including 80 who signed up to speak. The largest group includes teachers and students at the John Jay high school building in Park Slope who are protesting a plan to add an additional high school to the building.

(UPDATE: That plan passed the panel, with 11 members voting in favor. The panel members appointed by the Manhattan and Bronx borough presidents both abstained.)

When she began her remarks, Black praised the school board itself, offering a rare praise to the Panel for Education Policy, which has been belittled as a rubber stamp to the mayor by some and as an opportunity for political theater by others. ”This panel,” Black said, “has played a vital role in the major policy changes that have dramatically improved student outcomes in our city.”

Outgoing chancellor Joel Klein at his last Panel for Educational Policy meeting.

Schools Chancellor Joel Klein vowed tonight that he will absolutely leave his position in January — even if efforts to block Mayor Bloomberg’s chosen successor succeed. Klein spoke at a meeting of the Panel for Educational Policy that held few distinctions except for the fact that it will be his last.

“I know it’s been controversial, but controversy is a necessary part of education,” Klein said, reflecting on his eight-plus years as chancellor. “I respect that, and I understand that when you do make changes and look at things differently that it’s going to upset people.”

He added, “I don’t know of any other way to change a system.”

The Panel for Educational Policy is the current incarnation of the city school board, formed in 2002 just as Mayor Bloomberg won control of the city schools and named Klein chancellor. Despite the historic circumstances, tonight’s meeting plugged along unremarkably, as many others have. Some protesting members of the public did attend, but they had a narrow issue in mind: opposition to the planned expansion of a small middle school in Brooklyn.

Brooklyn Technical High School held tonight’s meeting.

Other panel meetings this year have included loud protests by busloads of parents who target Klein personally for everything from closing schools to overseeing falling test scores. Tonight’s tone harkened more to the first-ever meeting of the panel, which the New York Times described this way in a headline the next day:

That’s because, like the budget itself, the department’s Power Point presentation of the cuts it has identified would give even the most seasoned analyst a headache. The image above is just one page of the dizzying document.

The cuts are divided into five “buckets,” ranging from the central administration to District 75, the city’s district for severely disabled students. How deeply schools and students are actually going to feel the mid-year cuts isn’t at all clear, nor is it clear exactly how the proposed cuts add up to the $185 million the mayor asked the DOE to cut from its budget by Nov. 21.

Some questions, among many, that education committee members might ask:

• How many of the planned cuts are a result of the mayor’s budget announcement? At least a few of the programs targeted for elimination come as no surprise. The DOE quietly canceled its midyear class of Teaching Fellows earlier this fall, for example, and the citywide science test was already delayed once last year; science teachers we’ve spoken to never heard that the tests had been rescheduled.
• What are schools cutting from their budgets? A DOE spokeswoman told me earlier this month that many schools had already allocated most of their funds for this year, and that the DOE would have to work closely with principals to help them find fat to trim.
• How many of the cuts affect initiatives put in place since Joel Klein became chancellor? When I looked at the preliminary cuts distributed at the mayor’s budget briefing, I could only find one: the elimination of extra funds for schools that received high progress report grades.
• At the Panel for Educational Policy meeting on Monday, where the presentation was given, Manhattan PEP member Patrick Sullivan suggested eliminating funds for interim assessments and standardized testing for the city’s youngest students. Has the DOE considered those options?
• How much does each line item free up in the DOE’s budget? How much money has the city been spending to hold trainings about ARIS, its data system, in private locations? How much have consultants been paid to help with ECLAS, an early childhood assessment that is supposed to be easy for teachers to administer and analyze? This could be an opportunity for council members to find out budget details that the DOE hasn’t always made available.
• What is the DOE’s plan for dealing with the state budget cuts proposed by Governor Paterson, if those in fact go through? He proposed withholding $255 million from the city this year, significantly more than the mayor has asked for. The DOE would be unlikely to be able to protect its core Children First programs should a cut of that magnitude become reality.