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Governance Task Force’s recommendations approved

by Michael Hirsch

Feb 19, 2009 3:41 PM

A soup-to-nuts discussion of the UFT Governance Task Force’s recommendations in its report, “Ensuring an Effective School Governance Framework,” took center stage at the Feb. 4 Delegate Assembly, which overwhelmingly approved the report after the long debate.

UFT President Randi Weingarten also gave an impassioned plea for the maximum mobilization of UFT members and friends of public education at the March 5 City Hall rally to stop budget cuts and layoffs that threaten core school programs and other vital city services.

The comprehensive governance report was prepared by a working committee of some 90 UFT members who, UFT President Randi Weingarten said, “spent thousands of people hours” on it during the 18 months of the project. The recommendations were created to advise the state Legislature on ways to replace the state’s present mayoral control legislation, which expires in June.

Among a host of reforms, the report [excerpts of which were published in the Feb. 5 issue of the New York Teacher] called for strengthening school leadership teams and restructuring the mayoral-dominated central board, to be called the Central Education Policy Committee. It would comprise 13 voting members, plus the chancellor as ex-official, and would act as an independent policy-maker and monitor of the Department of Education.

While the five mayoral appointees would be in the minority on the proposed body — the remaining eight to be appointed by the city comptroller, public advocate, City Council speaker and the five borough presidents — school governance would still retain its mayoral-control character because the mayor would continue to hire and fire the schools chancellor. The chancellor in turn would maintain the considerable power the position now holds, and have the budget authority the mayor now holds. In addition, to win any vote, the mayor would need merely to win two of the eight non-mayoral appointee votes.

As Staten Island Borough Representative Emil Pietromonaco, co-chair of the task force, said, “Somebody’s got to be held responsible.”

Executive Board member Jackie Bennett spoke in support of the report.

“The issue is not simply mayoral control — good or bad — but how to get accountability, transparency and checks and balances in school government,” she said. “I don’t want to play [Mayor Michael] Bloomberg’s game and rip the system apart again. You change the Panel [on Educational Policy] by taking three votes away from him and shooing Klein off the panel, and now there are real checks and balances.” 

Michael Fiorillo, chapter leader at Newcomers HS and one of three task force members opposing the recommendations, argued that the committee made accommodations early in its work that guaranteed its conclusions wouldn’t go far enough.

“Rather than acting on a vision of schools as modeling democracy,” Fiorillo said, “the concern was instead how our recommendations would be received politically by editorial boards and conservative think tanks.”

He excoriated mayoral control as “union busting and a road to privatization, brought about by the same people who caused the financial crisis.”

He also opposed allowing waivers to chancellor candidates who are not educators, and he supported a completely independent education board.

Vice President for Career and Technical Education High Schools Michael Mulgrew countered that “we are already getting raked over the coals by the editorial boards” for going too far, citing Daily News and New York Post editorialists slamming of the union for allegedly trying to destroy mayoral control.

Mulgrew also argued that “taking away mayoral control changes how schools are funded. Now the mayor wants dollars to go to the system because he’s accountable. With an independent board, the mayor could starve the schools, just as [former Mayor Rudolph] Giuliani did. Remember: this union’s job is to protect members and the children in the schools.”

Executive Board member Michael Shulman said he agreed with all but one part of the report: a blanket statement that mayoral control should be maintained, albeit with modifications. “We shouldn’t support mayoral control. It could still leave us with a mayor and a chancellor who have no respect for our teachers,” he said.

PS 79, Queens, Chapter Leader John Bartley congratulated the task force “for accomplishing something the mayor never did. It reached out to all stakeholders.”

He also reminded delegates that “this isn’t a union contract. It’s a framework for empowering communities. It’s not meant to express anger at the present chancellor and mayor. March 5 [the giant rally against city cuts] is for that.”

Retiree Peter Goodman remembered how, as a new teacher during the fiscal crisis of the 1970s, “we then had a chancellor and a mayor we liked, and nobody took responsibility for the schools. The potential layoffs and disasters that face us now mean that the mayor who provides funding to the schools must take responsibility for the schools’ successes or failures.”

A motion to delay approving the report was rejected overwhelmingly, and the task force report was approved by the Delegate Assembly with scant opposition.

In other business, delegates voted to support the candidacy of Kenny Mitchell to replace former Staten Island Councilman Michael McMahon, now the 13th congressional district representative, to the open 49th district council seat vacated by McMahon.

Debating the report...