Testimony of Randi Weingarten before the City Council Mayoral Control and School Governance Working Group On School Governance: January 11, 2008
Jan 11, 2008 10:15 AM
I want to commend your wisdom in convening this working group on mayoral control and school governance well in advance of the sunset next year of the state statute. I’m also pleased that you’ve thrown your deliberations open to the public, and early in the process, too. All too often what government asks the public to do is react. Better that we’re brought in at a formative stage of policy development.
You’ve asked me to testify on the UFT’s thinking about school governance. I appreciate the opportunity, though I think there are substantial preliminary questions that need answering first.
You’re grappling with such practical options as whether or not to return to a citywide school board system and who will supervise the chancellor and determine his or her duties.
You’re asking about the advisability of community districts… about the best ways to operate individual schools… and about a host of the other questions. All good questions, but that level of detail is something I hesitate to comment on now.
Why?
First, because I’m not sure the public has come to a significant understanding of what’s worked or hasn’t worked under the present system that was devised seven years ago.
Second, the union itself is still thinking through its position on school governance. We’re now engaging in a union-wide discussion, and are including other school stakeholders, most particularly parents and community leaders in our deliberations. I don’t want to presume on their conclusions.
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 province of a few. Everyone has to be heard.
In addition to union members, our taskforce also includes parent representatives, and seeks to be a conduit for an overdue, citywide conversation. We are planning to hold hearings in each of the five boroughs starting later this month. The first of these will be held on January 17 on Staten Island, Manhattan on January 22, the Bronx on February 7, Brooklyn on February 12, and February 28 in Queens – we will make certain to get details of locations and time to you. We will hear testimony from parents, educators, concerned community activists and our own members. Council members helped us significantly when we held meetings on the effects of closing schools on overcrowding, and we hope for your participation now. We want to pinpoint what works… and what can work better.
And, just as you are doing, we need to do all of this well in advance of 2009, when mayoral control automatically sunsets. So the reason I refrain from making specific recommendations at this point is, I won’t pre-empt our own UFT process.
But today I can offer you a preliminary framework for evaluating what’s at stake in school governance.
The first question is: what’s the governance system that will best support teaching and learning? What we have learned these past seven years is that school reform is tough. Getting results requires a number of key components. It requires qualified teachers and working conditions that foster real progress. It requires engaged parents and collaboration among teachers and principals. It requires an accountability system that’s fair and accurate.
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 your Working Group 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. For example, since the Fiscal Crisis of the mid-1970s, mayors have had absolute control over collective bargaining and every other school fiscal decision. 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.
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 correctly predicted that mayoral control would draw more city funding to schools. It is clear that 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 transparency, checks and balances and public deliberation.
As Diane Ravitch and I wrote in a New York Times op ed back in March of 2004, 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.” I stand by that statement.
Any governance system needs 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 present 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, on Election Day.
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, certainly not more than existed under the old Board of Education.
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, though I must add that this City Council and its oversight hearings on schools, school safety and budgeting have done a lot to champion children’s needs.
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. Even the School Leadership Teams, which were meant to give equal voice to teachers, parents and administrators at the school level, have withered on the vine in many schools. Any improvements in school governance should start by reinvigorating these valuable tools for parent and community 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 school reorganizations that the city has undertaken in the last seven years. Where was the analysis of what worked and didn’t work with the empowerment zone? Where was the analysis of what worked and didn’t work in the regions? To date we’ve had no systematic public accounting, other than, “We ended it because it was so successful.” And where is the analysis of whether the current scheme, a fully decentralized system of 1,500 schools -- each essentially standing alone and reporting to a computer system -- will work to help all kids achieve?
What is success anyway? In the aftermath of NCLB, this administration and many others have fallen back on default measures like scores on standardized math and English 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.
Each school reorganization has provided an opportunity to spur a citywide discussion on just what constitutes success – instead there’s been silence.
That discussion, I hope you’ll agree, must be a part of your deliberation, too. The mayor famously said, “Judge me on the results.” Which results?
We don’t have an independent source of data, let alone a nonpartisan public body to analyze the data.
The City Charter mandates an Independent Budget Office to oversee the city’s budget and requires that the 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. Although I support the Research Partnership for NYC Schools -- established with the support of the Business Partnership – I do not believe it can serve that role.
Last year, the City Council took a noteworthy step to establish 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 doesn’t – and can’t -- ameliorate systemic problems, abuses not the fault of individual supervisors but of a system that does not critically evaluate itself all the time. In the absence of any direct oversight of principals, there has been a huge increase in the number of complaints to the Special Commissioner of Investigation – in fact, SCI last week reported the agency received 2818 complaints in 2007 -- the highest in the agency’s history.
So, as presently constituted, the current system allows almost no opportunities for democratic participation by stakeholders. That’s not just an affront to democratic process, it impoverishes our ability to educate the city’s children.
For me, personally, the question is: How do we create a law that institutionalizes checks and balances so that other stakeholders have voice and roles? And equally important: How do we create a law that fosters collaboration and a sense of common cause in the quest to increase 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? Research shows that schools with a collaborative environment work better for kids. While some of our schools do foster collegial relationships among teachers and administrators, in too many schools, teachers are colleagues in name only. That’s too bad because according to a summary from the Federal government’s education research clearinghouse, teachers who work together see significant improvements in student achievement, behavior and attitudes. Schools, after all, are communities, and we build on each other’s work.
Teachers and other educators, parents and community-based organizations have valuable contributions to make, and should be respected. We need to hear the voices of those who are most concerned with helping children learn and graduate and fulfill their dreams, not just 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 and assessment without an idea of how they aid or harm instruction is a fool’s errand.
This point was made earlier this year by the American Enterprise Institute’s Frederick Hess, who concluded in a study of mayoral control that “mayoral control can do no more than offer a heightened opportunity for effective leadership.” Part of that leadership, I want to add, involves 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 quickly dispelled 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 – the education of future generations of New Yorkers.
