Jan. 31, 2021
I’ll be speaking tonight Sunday at 8 PM with other teachers, parents and advocates at a forum on how mayoral control or our schools should be changed– more here, including how to sign up and/or watch on Facebook live.
- An example of the problems with this governance system is how last week, the Mayor tried to push through the renewal of the unreliable and invalid Pearson test for giftedness, which luckily was defeated by an 8-7 vote of the Panel for Educational Policy – the first time in the history of the PEP that a DOE contract has been rejected.
Though even the Chancellor admitted that the admission process was “pedagogically unsound”, the main argument the administration made for the renewing the contract was it was too late to do anything else. This is despite the fact that numerous problems with the program and admissions process had been discussed for years, including at a PEP meeting last spring.
You can read a leaked DOE memo from July after the PEP discussion took place, which also suggests what the DOE may be planning to substitute for this test could be worse. The unconscionable delay in decision-making has been a repeated feature of our schools under de Blasio, who also postponed closing the schools last March when the Covid crisis was at its height, and delayed planning for their reopening till mid-July. Mayoral control has been touted as a more efficient form of governance, but it’s been any but efficient under this Mayor, as I point out in my (postponed) testimony to the NYS State Assembly.
Mayor de Blasio says he intends to go ahead with some sort of selection process for four-year-old kids this year to be admitted to the gifted program anyway; we will see if and how he maneuvers this. Already the Staten Island Borough President James Oddo has fired his appointee for voting against the Pearson contract, so it is possible that the Mayor could bring the contract back for another vote next month.
Any supposedly independent board where representatives can be fired at will is not an independent board at all.
- Finally, on my latest Talk out of School podcast, I spoke to Brian Jones about Black Lives Matter in School, to take place starting tomorrow Feb. 1-5, in schools throughout the country, including NYC. Brian is a former NYC public school teacher who now works at the Schomburg Center as the Associate Director of Education. On the show, he explains what BLM in School movement is all about, and places its demands and principles in historical context. It’s a fascinating discussion; there are also a link to some lesson plans in the resources section of the podcast site.
Talk to you soon, Leonie