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As today’s City Council hearing on parent engagement wore into its third hour, parents grew agitated that they had yet to deliver their testimony.

After listening to chancellor Dennis Walcott and executive director for family and community engagement, Jesse Mojica, discuss parent engagement with council members for hours, the parents were ready to contribute, but the meeting was scheduled to end at one.

“It’s really unfair that this wasn’t mostly parent voices,” Michelle Lipkin, P.S. 199′s PTA president, said when she took the mic. “There’s a real disconnect between the definition of parent engagement for parents and the definition of parent engagement for the department of education.”

That disconnect was made clear as parents and council members agreed that the Department of Education can engage parents all they want, but without power, the engagement is all for naught.

“There’s no big secret in what gets parents involved,” Councilman Charles Barron said. “It’s when parents actually have power.” He suggested giving parents a say over curriculum, principal hiring, and budget.

Others agreed and noted that the Panel for Education Policy, the Community Education Councils, and the school closure procedures give only the guise of engagement.

“The parents need power through legislation. Not engagement, not feedback, not any of those pretty words. We need a vote on the PEP,” Christine Annechino, president of CEC 3, testified. “We have no voice. We have no power.”

Concerns raised by council members and parents during the meeting included the cut of 57 parent coordinators earlier this year, the accountability and assessment of parent coordinators, the lack of communication about toxic school environments, and the relocation of last night’s PEP meeting. While the tone was civil throughout, the issues always came back to the fact that parents don’t just want to be kept abreast of issues in their child’s school, they want to have the power to effect change. (more…)

Margaret McAuley, principal at Chappie D. James Elementary School of Science, questions the extent of support provided by the Department of Education to her struggling school.

Just hours after learning that Chappie D. James Elementary School of Science would be phased out, Principal Margaret McAuley publicly registered her concerns about the process that had brought the school to the point of closure.

McAuley testified Thursday evening at a meeting of the Citywide Council on Special Education, an elected parent group, which had been set aside to discuss closures well before the city announced yesterday that it would shutter 12 schools.

After the Department of Education’s director of engagement strategy, Meg Barboza, narrated a PowerPoint presentation about the city’s closure strategy, fielding challenges from council members along the way, McAuley took the microphone.

As music from a principals union event wafted into the second-floor meeting room at Brooklyn Borough Hall, McAuley described her efforts to serve students at her Brownsville school, which she started in 2008 after a previous school in the building had been closed because of poor performance. She said she had chased down resources and partnerships, sought out extra training for teachers, brought in computers and programming for parents, and put new expectations in place for students.

McAuley said she wasn’t surprised by the school’s first progress report grade last year, a D — scores remained very low. But she said they were improving, slowly but surely and unfortunately not in a way that this year’s report card grade, an F, could capture.

Most of all, she said, she hadn’t been informed that her school’s performance wasn’t up to par until October, when the city added it to the shortlist of potential closures. (more…)

New rules for how students who don’t complete classes can earn make-up credit are open for public comment.

I wrote about the push to regulate so-called “credit recovery” programs, which critics say are less rigorous than regular high school classes, in April:

The proposed policy appears for the most part to codify practices that are already taking place in many city schools, said Stephen Phillips, a professor in Brooklyn College’s school of education who worked as a principal and superintendent in the city. The policy shows that [the State Education Department] is “trying to catch up some standards to what was going on” inside schools, he said.

SED is now asking teachers, administrators, parents, students and others to fill out a four-question “Make-up Course Credit Survey.“ 

Interim Deputy Chancellor for Teaching and Learning Santiago Taveras told the City Council’s education committee last month that the city does not track schools’ use of credit recovery programs. (more…)