Testimony of Randi Weingarten before the NYC Commission on School Governance: November 29, 2007
Nov 29, 2007 11:00 AM
You’ve asked me to testify on the UFT’s thinking about school governance. Now that’s something I hesitate to do, because we are still thinking through our position. After six years of watching the Bloomberg administration go through three reorganizations, we’ve seen a lot and learned a lot. We are engaging in a union-wide discussion, and are including other school stakeholders, most particularly parents and community leaders in our deliberations. .
Inside the union, we’ve established a nonpartisan taskforce on school governance. It’s a broad-based committee representative of all the union’s political parties, and the school system’s different levels, types of schools and geographic areas. We want it to be inclusive, because school governance is too important an issue to be treated as the provenance of one caucus. Everybody has to be heard, and a position crafted based on what system will most help support the mission of the school system, which is how to educate our city’s children. .
The taskforce also has parent representatives on it, and seeks to be a conduit for a long-needed citywide conversation. We are planning to hold hearings in each of the union’s five borough offices in January, where we will hear testimony from the public, including parents, educators, concerned community activists and our own members. It’ll be a series of sounding boards; we’re not interested in a gripe fest or in finger pointing. We want to pinpoint what works, what can work better and what we need to do to get school governance right to produce the best education for our kids.
And we need to do all that well in advance of 2009, when mayoral control automatically sunsets. We need a serious, citywide discussion about what type of school governance fosters effective teaching, learning and parent involvement.
So if you are looking for specific recommendations, I won’t pre-empt our own UFT process and make those recommendations here. Not just yet.
But I can offer a framework for posing some questions about what’s at stake in school governance and how—if I’m not ready to say how we can get it right—I sure know how to avoid getting it wrong.
The first question is: what is the governance and accountability system that will best support teaching and learning? What we have learned is that school reform is tough. Getting results requires a number of key components. Most important, it takes qualified teachers. But it also takes working conditions that foster real progress, an accountability system that’s fair and accurate, engaged parents and collaboration among teachers and principals.
The next question flows from that: should the legislation passed in 2002 be kept in total, be amended (and if so, how?) or should it be ended, as the automatic sunset in 2009 allows.
I don’t want this commission to conclude from my remarks that “mayoral control” in itself is a nonstarter. It’s not. Nor should you conclude that I advocate a return to the system of an appointed central board and the community school boards model.
Ironically, the issue has never been primarily one of mayoral control. Mayors have run the schools for much of the last century, and it’s a political fiction to think they did not. Mayor Giuliani and his predecessors pretended they were not in control in order to dodge blame, but the buck stopped at City Hall then, as now. In fact, as Diane Ravitch reminds us, for most of the history of the city’s school system, the mayor appointed each and every member of the central school board, and when he didn’t, he virtually appointed the Schools Chancellor.
For example, John Lindsay, in the days of the greatest strife of the system, controlled the school board, and since the Fiscal Crisis of the mid-1970s, mayors have had absolute control over collective bargaining and every other school fiscal decision.
What did change, and what we applauded, was Mayor’s Bloomberg’s agreement in 2001 to unambiguously say he would be accountable. We predicted – and we were right – that the mayor’s taking responsibility would move education to a higher priority in our city. We also thought, again rightly, that under mayoral control the schools would attract more city funding. So mayoral control has achieved some important gains for our school system.
At the same time, the last few years have shown limitations, too; namely, the lack of checks and balances, transparency and public deliberation, despite the 2002 legislation’s being chock full of them.
As Ravitch and I wrote in our New York Times op ed (3/18/04), headlined Public Schools, Minus the Public, “We certainly commend Mayor Bloomberg for his willingness to take responsibility for improving the public schools. In recent days, however, many of us have realized that the legislation went too far by consolidating all power in the hands of one elected official.”
We agreed that the mayor should have a larger role in running the school system than in the recent past, but we also said, “He should not have unchecked power to hire personnel, make contracts and set policy,” and we called for “a mid-course correction by the Legislature to restore transparency, public engagement and accountability to the school system.” We stand by that statement.
For any governance system to work, it needs checks and balances and a continuing voice by parents and teachers. Neither the military nor the corporate model is appropriate for schools. A mayor has to do more than say he is accountable; he or she has to preside over a system that operates rationally, transparently and consultatively. This system does not do that reliably and consistently. And if a mayor falls down on the job, there has to be better redress than waiting until the next election to boot the mayor out of office—particularly since mayors are elected based on multiple issues and not simply on education policy. Accountability can’t happen just once every four years; worse, with mayoral term limits, that means, if a Mayor runs for re-election, accountability happens just one day – Election Day – in eight years.
In short, a lack of checks and balances means that decisions—major and minor—are done without consultation, much less any real public discussion and debate. That means no real accountability.
It also means that there is no one on a daily basis who serves as the champion of children, of all children who attend our public schools.
It means that those who have been the traditional advocates for children—parents, community figures and, indeed, the union—
are frozen out of any meaningful, institutionalized involvement.
Incidentally, it’s because parents and teachers and many civic officials care so passionately about education that the city sees so many protests over not only the lack of voice but over policy issues, too. Thankfully the U.S. Constitution still enables us to use the town square.
Take the three top-down reorganizations that the chancellor has undertaken in the last seven years. Where was the analysis of what worked and didn’t work in the regions? Where was the analysis of what worked and didn’t work with the empowerment zone? Where is the analysis of whether a fully decentralized structure of 1,500 schools, essentially standing alone, and reporting to a computer system will work to help all kids achieve. To date we’ve had no systematic public accounting, other than, “We ended it because it was so successful.”
What is success anyway? (Is it student preparedness for college, for life, etc?) There is no universally agreed-to definition of progress or success in schools, and so the administration has fallen back on default measures like scores on standardized tests. But polls show that parents and indeed most informed people yearn for a broader vision for our youngsters, one that includes literacy and numeracy, but also the ability to think critically, to appreciate the arts, to cultivate sound values and to be good citizens. .
What’s been lacking in each reorganization is a citywide discussion on just what constitutes success. The mayor famously said “Judge me on the results.” Which results?
We’re even handicapped by not having an independent source of data, and a nonpartisan public body analyzing that data, to use as mile markers. The last City Charter revision mandated an Independent Budget Office to oversee the city’s exchequer and require that the budgeting process be transparent. There’s no comparable Independent School Oversight Office to act as a check and balance against Education Department claims or gauge its successes or even guarantee that we’re all talking the same language.
The City Council last year went some way in establishing checks on the Education Department when it passed, over the mayor’s veto, the city Whistleblower Law. That law protects workers reporting abuses by individual managers, but it can’t begin to ameliorate systemic problems—
abuses not the fault of individual supervisors but of a system that does not critically evaluate itself all the time.
Most disconcerting is that when criticisms are raised to the mayor and the chancellor, they’re treated as acts of defiance. Look at the public advocate’s experience, for one. Councilman Lew Fidler commented at a recent Education Committee hearing that, sadly, the DOE is expert at managing dissent, but not listening to it or learning from it.
So, as presently constituted, the current system allows almost no opportunities for democratic participation by stakeholders. That’s not just an affront to democratic procedure, it impoverishes our ability to educate the city’s children.
Similarly, no government official had arms-length oversight or the motivation to implement the 2002 law as intended. That is part of the dilemma over whether or not to keep it, mend it, or end it.
For me, personally, the question is: how do we maintain a mayoral responsibility while also institutionalizing the checks and balances so that other stakeholders have voice and responsibility. It’s all about how we foster collaboration and a sense of common cause, all in the quest of increasing opportunity for students
Education is the community’s investment in its own future, and school governance needs to derive from the community’s commonly set policies and goals. The politicians and administrators who run the schools are elected or appointed to implement that agenda, and they must see themselves as the PARTNERS of those who have a stake in the schools, not as their better-informed saviors.
Why collaboration? In my judgment, it is as important as voice, and as important as using evidence of what works. Research shows that schools with a collaborative environment work better for kids. In too many schools, teachers are colleagues in name only – some schools, however, do foster substantial collegial relationships among teachers and administrators. And when schools are organized to support that collaboration, the benefits are substantial. According to a summary from the Federal government’s education research clearinghouse, teachers who work together have significant improvements in student achievement, behavior and attitudes. Schools, after all, are communities, and we build on the work of each other.
Teachers and other educators, parents and community-based organizations have valuable contributions to make, and that has to be respected. Most of all, we need the voices of those who are most concerned with helping children learn and graduate and fulfill their dreams, not those who are distracted by organizational charts and hierarchical structures.
Finally, we need to return our attention to what the evidence tells us matters most: smaller classes, an orderly and safe environment, highly qualified teachers with the professional latitude to tailor their instruction to the needs of their students; expanded pre-K and career and technical opportunities. Attention to structure without an idea of how it aids or harms instruction is a fool’s errand.
That point was also made by the American Enterprise Institute’s Frederick Hess, who concluded in his study of mayoral control earlier this year that “mayoral control can do no more than offer a heightened opportunity for effective leadership.” Part of that leadership, I want to add, is knowing how to listen.
When the state revised the education laws, it maintained the American tradition of allowing for public input through a school board of public representatives, in this case the Panel on Education Policy, but the way the law was implemented—including the mayor’s summary firing of members who disagreed with him, including the commission’s Joan McKeever Thomas— quickly lay to rest any hope for a true public voice. The PEP can and must be the voice of the community that it was meant to be.
We can take advantage of the 2009 reassessment to get governance right. But it won’t come out right unless we do it together, parents and taxpayers, educators and elected officials, as equal partners in our city’s most important enterprise – our next generation of New Yorkers.
