UFT: Parents ‘marginalized’ by Tweed

“As major stakeholders in our schools, parents need to be engaged and respected,” Anthony Harmon, the UFT director of parent and community outreach, told the City Council Education Committee on Dec. 15 as he detailed the UFT’s varied efforts to help parents voice their concerns about their children’s education. “Unfortunately, however, many parents feel they have been marginalized by the Department of Education,” Harmon said, even as cash-starved schools need parent participation more than ever.

Speaking following testimony by Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott and Jesse Mojica, the DOE’s new executive director for family and community engagement, Harmon listed longstanding grievances that he hoped the department would recognize and tackle. These included the near-zero turnout for Community Education Council elections, the absence of any meaningful School Leadership Team training and “the complex and confusing student enrollment and high school admissions process” that stymies parents and their children.

The lack of parent or community input on the Bloomberg-controlled Panel for Educational Policy is another sore point. Many parents, said Harmon, “will rightly complain about having no voice at Panel for Educational Policy community meetings on important issues such as proposed school closings and staff layoffs, because the mayor’s proposals receive rubber-stamp approval no matter how fierce the community opposition they face.”

Harmon said the Division of Family and Community Engagement, which now has cabinet-level authority following a recent restructuring, “has a real opportunity to re-engage parents and community members,” but only “if it chooses to go that route.”

In discussion, Brooklyn Councilman Lewis Fidler observed that the DOE’s interaction with parents and community members continues to be “didactic, rather than dynamic, and more concerned with managing dissent” than with empowering stakeholders.

Read Harmon’s full remarks.