An Imagined Interview With the New New York State Education Commissioner
The New York State Board of Regents, the governing body for the state's schools, voted unanimously to appoint MaryEllen Elia as state education commissioner. This has to be an imagined interview. There were no open meetings with candidates where they were required to lay out their views about educational issues to the public. The winning candidate and her sponsors did not explain what they hoped she would achieve before she was anointed. New Yorkers can only assume Elia was selected because she will implement the Cuomo (Governor) and Tisch (Regent Chancellor) agenda which includes the incessant testing of students, evaluating teachers based on student test scores, a tax cap that prevents school districts from raising needed funds, and an all-out legislative push for tax credits for "donations" to private and religious schools.
Elia is the former superintendent of schools in Hillsborough County, Florida, a district that includes the city of Tampa. Hillsborough County is the eighth largest district in the United States. She started her career as a social studies teacher in western New York near Buffalo, helped her district receive a multi-million dollar Gates Foundation grant to overhaul the district's teacher evaluation system, and was named the Florida district superintendent of the year for 2015, just before she was fired by the Hillsborough school district.
Elia has a reputation for working well with different constituencies in Florida including the teachers' union and Florida Republicans. But she has also beendescribed as a fiscal conservative, promoter of magnet theme schools, an advocate of merit pay for teachers, and insensitive to the needs of minority youth and special education students. In 2008, a coalition of advocacy groups including the NAACPfiled a class action suit against the Hillsborough school district, then under Elia's leadership, charging disciplinary discrimination against African Americans and discrimination against special needs students. In 2012, Hillsborough School Board President April Griffin claimed that Elia "demonstrated a complete lack of professionalism with staff members and board members by cursing, yelling and bullying." Given that Elia was fired at Hillsborough and the current battles going on in New York State over high-stakes testing, the opt-out movement, teacher evaluations, and the governor's support for tax credits for parochial schools, it is amazing that Elia was appointed unanimously by the New York State Board of Regents and without any public discussion.
In 2013, Elia teamed with Florida's education commissioner, an avid advocate for charters schools and vouchers, and supporters of home-schooling, virtual education, and tax-credits for parents who send children to private and religious schools on a panel sponsored by the Florida Alliance for Choices in Education. Elia pioneered magnet schools in Hillsborough and the district under her leadership was one of the earliest to welcome charter schools with 50 in 2013-2014. According to a 2010editorial in the Tampa Bay Times, Elia also endorsed private school vouchers.
In an effort to find out who Elia is and more about what she thinks about educational issues, I have been plumbing the Internet for quotes by and about Elia and anything she wrote or said. Based on my findings I created this imagined interview with the new Education Commissioner as a way of welcoming her to Battleground New York.
Why were you fired in Hillsborough?
Commissioner Elia - "When you run a business that has a $2.7 billion budget which has 27,000 employees and 206,000 students and their families and all of the departments that support more than 300 schools, I think that you are bound to have people that disagree with decisions that have to be made to function. What you have is a level of concern about what has been a very decisive style. When you are running an An Imagined Interview With the New New York State Education Commissioner | Alan Singer:
Big Education Ape: MaryEllen Elia Approved as Néw York Commissioner of Education | Diane Ravitch's blog http://bit.ly/1GDyu1T
Big Education Ape: Hillsborough School Board member: Firing Superintendent MaryEllen Elia is a good deal http://bit.ly/1J3eGoS
Big Education Ape: Elia inherits controversy as new education chief - City & Region - The Buffalo News http://bit.ly/1Au1h83
Big Education Ape: Perspective: Gauging impact of Gates' $100 million Hillsborough schools grant (w/video) | Tampa ... http://bit.ly/1Q9uC9n
Big Education Ape: 8-2-14 Scathing Purple Musings | Color me purple in Florida http://bit.ly/1GiYuRE
