My statement to Cathie Black last night

See video below of last night at the Panel for Educational Policy, my statement to the new Chancellor Cathie Black.

To address the need to reduce overcrowding and class size, she should immediately call a halt to all co-locations and school closings, which only lead to conflict, bitterness and more overcrowding. Each new school sharing space with an existing school sacrifices about 10% of precious classroom space to create administrative and cluster rooms.

And she should immediately re-allocate the $1 billion to be spent on new technology next year in the capital plan to building and leasing more schools. These are not "Sophie's choices" -- these are choices that would benefit all our kids.



For more on the $1 billion extra the DOE wants to spend on new technology, see today's NY Post. Typically, the city wants to blame this on the state and the feds mandating online assessments. This doesn't fly; nowhere else in the country are they spending these kind of dollars for this purpose. Instead, the real reason is they want to expand online learning and further degrade the opportunity for our children to receive instruction from a real live teacher.

Another excuse by the DOE and another way in which they are evading their own accountability for the massive waste that will result.

Cathie Black meets a real life public school parent and gets an earful....

Educators go and apply for Cathie Black's old job

No Busing for Overflow Kindergarteners in Queens

See email exchange between Marge Kolb, head of the Presidents council in D24 in Queens, and Kathleen Grimm of DOE below.

To this day, DOE has refused to put the placement of G and T classes through any public process for community input, leading to flawed decision-making and the awful outcome described below, with parents having to spend hours transporting their Kindergarten children to schools miles away from their zoned schools – with no busing provided.

As Marge says, "DOE cannot pretend to be 'well-managed' and continue to perpetrate these kind of harms upon parents and children."

___

From: MKolbcorr@aol.com [mailto:MKolbcorr@aol.com]
Sent: Monday, October 18, 2010 10:48 AM
To: Klein Joel I.
Cc: Fighetti Gabriela; Sternberg Marc; dmytrocec24@yahoo.com ; Roseann Darche; nickcec24@aol.com ; Chan Madelene
Subject: No Busing for Overflow Kindergarteners?

Dear Chancellor Klein:

I recently called the District 24 office to inquire about the schools in our district with capped kindergartens (which I believe, currently number 6 or 7 schools). I was shocked to learn that busing has still NOT been arranged for 10-12 Kindergarten students from PS 12 in northern Woodside who were offered seats LAST MAY at PS 128 in Middle Village. I was told that one parent may be walking the 4.5 mile round trip to get her child to school each day (twice! in the morning and afternoon) and another parent may be close to losing her job because of the time involved in delivering and picking up her child from school . Parents were initially (and kindly) given metrocards by the PS 128 principal so they could make their way by public bus with their children, but he has since had to stop providing these due to the expense, so now parents are expected to pay their own way (and take two buses) to get their children to school each day. Please note that PS 12 has a free lunch rate of 74% and Limited English Proficiency of 34% - this is primarily an immigrant population being served.

At the September 28 D24 CEC meeting, Gabby Fighetti from the Portfolio division stated that she had just learned of this situation and would immediately take action. Now, weeks later I am told by the D24 office that these students will not be able to be offered busing. This is unacceptable!

I find it absolutely appalling that instead of offering PS 12 students seats at PS 229, which is the next school zone to the south, the DOE instead placed a brand-new 1^st grade G&T class at PS 229 which could have instead been placed at the new PS 330 (at IS 73) which opened this year with a Kindergarten G&T. The class at PS 229 draws most of its students from outside the school zone, and thus, had it not been opened, PS 229 might very well have been able to take the overflow from PS 12 (as it took overflow from PS 143 last year).

This is just another example of why the centralization of decisions such as this is detrimental to districts. The right hand at Central does not know what the left hand is doing. You have CEC and Presidents’ Council leadership who have years of experience in the district and a perfectly competent District Superintendent on the ground, yet were any of us consulted in advance about these issues? No!

I would like an immediate report as to what is being done to get transportation for the affected students. In the meantime I will alert the local elected officials to this situation.

Marge Kolb

President, D24 Presidents’ Council

___

From: Grimm Kathleen [mailto:KGrimm@schools.nyc.gov]
Sent: Monday, October 18, 2010 4:11 PM
To: MKolbcorr@aol.com
Cc: Fighetti Gabriela; Sternberg Marc; Chan Madelene; Shear Jeffrey; Goldstein Eric
Subject: FW: No Busing for Overflow Kindergarteners?

Marge,

I am sorry for any frustration here, but PS 12 is a school that does not have busing. Children who are eligible can continue to receive MetroCards, but we cannot provide them to parents. I wish that I could be more help here.

Kathleen

___

From: MKolbcorr@aol.com [mailto:MKolbcorr@aol.com]
Sent: Monday, October 18, 2010 5:01 PM
To: KGrimm@schools.nyc.gov
Cc: GFighetti@schools.nyc.gov; MSternberg@schools.nyc.gov; MChan2@schools.nyc.gov; JShear@schools.nyc.gov; EGoldstein@schools.nyc.gov; dmytrocec24@yahoo.com; rdarche@queensbp.org
Subject: Re: FW: No Busing for Overflow Kindergarteners?

Dear Ms. Grimm:

Your information is incorrect. PS 12 HAS busing, it is PS 128 that does not, and inasmuch as DOE has offered seats to overflow students from PS 12 to attend PS 128 (AS LONG AGO AS LAST MAY!!!) it is incumbent upon the DOE to provide transportation to those students.

How come your reply to me does not address the fact that PS 12 parents were led to believe that they would receive busing or that seats at PS 229 (much closer to PS 12 than PS 128 is) were not offered but were instead slotted for a NEW G&T 1st grade class which could just as easily have been located at the new PS 330 which was already getting a NEW G&T kindergarten class?

DOE cannot pretend to be "well-managed" and continue to perpetrate these kinds of harms upon parents and children.

I already have The Daily News interested in this story and the local City Councilmember, Jimmy Van Bramer has been apprised, so I expect a better answer from you.

Marge Kolb

President, D24 Presidents' Council

How the DOE missed the boat on enrollment growth, leading to inequitable budget cuts

See this article in today’s Daily News – showing that the DOE now is going to impose even bigger mid-year budget cuts than the maximum of 1 percent promised, to the 740 schools where enrollment increased – despite their supposed “fair student funding” formula. I have posted the memo here.

Here is an excerpt:

“For schools experiencing growth in enrollment, given the mandates related to special education, we will fund 100% of the increase in dollars related to an increase in special education enrollment. However, given the decline in the overall DOE discretionary budget and the decrease in the percentage of dollars returned by the schools with enrollment declines, we can only fund 55.5% of the increase in FSF attributed to the increase in general education enrollment.”

In other words, schools that have growing enrollments are getting screwed.

The even more critical issue is DOE’s explanation for this situation: that citywide, enrollment is growing this year for the first time since 2002 – not even counting charter school growth, which has been rapidly expanding.

“For the first time since 2002, enrollment has increased. During the current school year, NYC public schools saw an increase in total pupil enrollment of about 1%. This means that in addition to the annual redistribution of dollars from schools with register losses to those with register gains, we will need to add dollars to the FSF budgets.”

Overall, according to sources, there are about 10,000 more students than last year. Yet the DOE hadn’t budgeted for this, even though we’ve been warning them to expect this for years.

Actually, elementary and middle school enrollments started growing last year, according to our calculations -- if charter schools in DOE buildings are included.

Indeed, many public officials, parents and advocates, including the City Comptroller and the Manhattan Borough President, warned them of imminent enrollment growth, based on higher birth rates, more development, and families wanting to stay in the city, because of the lower crime rate. This, we warned, would likely lead to even worse overcrowding, given the inadequate capital plan, rather than the mere “pocket overcrowding” that DOE educrats love to describe.

We also told them that the enrollment projections provided by their consulting firms – Grier Partnership and Statistical Forecasting – should not be trusted. FYI, the latest Grier report predicts that enrollment would not increase in NYC schools until 2017, and SF until 2016 – at least seven years away.

Here is what we wrote in our report, A Better Capital Plan, in October 2008:

"Although a detailed demographic analysis is beyond the capability of this report, there are signs that especially in the early grades, increased enrollment and overcrowding may already be upon us, and this trend may worsen over the coming years."

And yet as usual, the DOE ignored what we were saying. The mismanagement, incompetence and unfairness of all this cannot be understated. And it prefigures even worse conditions in our schools for years to come.

The fantasy world of Michael Bloomberg

Bloomberg’s campaign speech today at NYU, in full here, reveal how he must be living in a complete fantasy world – insulated from reality, even more than most politicians:

By 2013, we will have created – far and away – the best public school system of any big city in the country. Not only will more middle class families be staying in the City and sending their kids to school here, I believe we will start to see an entirely new phenomenon: Families from around the nation and the region will be moving into the City for the schools. That was unthinkable just a few years ago! Families will come because more and more neighborhoods will be offering top-quality schools that are as good as – or better than – some of the suburban schools. They'll come because our schools will be performing at higher levels than schools in Boston… or San Francisco… or Phoenix… or any other big city in the country. And they'll come because they want more quality school choices – and they'll have more choices here than just about anywhere else in the country.

I won't even mention the delusional aspect to his concept of how good our schools will be; indeed, there is no evidence of improved results if you look at the most reliable measures, the national assessments known as the NAEPs.

No, what is astonishing is how this speech ignores the obvious reality: that these families, if they could indeed afford to move to NYC, would soon find that there is no room for their children to attend school.

Already, nearly half of NYC kids attend overcrowded schools, class sizes increased last year by the largest amount in ten years, thousands of students are sitting in rotting trailers; and last spring, hundreds of kids were put on waiting lists for Kindergarten.

Special education students are being given services in hallways and in closets, many schools have lost their art and music rooms, and 86% of principals say they are unable to provide a quality education because of excessive class sizes. Today, school nurses complained to the Daily News that there's no room to isolate children who have come down with the swine flu because of the extreme overcrowding at their schools.

Bloomberg has cut school construction way back, and the new five year capital plan has only 25,000 seats, which will provide less than one third of the space necessary to eliminate existing overcrowding – not to mention a rapidly increasing school population expected in the near future, caused by overdevelopment and a rising birth rate.

Where will all these additional kids flocking to the city in the future attend classes? Bloomberg doesn’t say. He recently told Downtown Express that parents should stay out of siting new schools, since any such schools would not be finished until their children were in graduate school.

And NYC public schools will never be as good as schools in the suburbs or even in Boston or San Francisco until and unless class sizes are reduced.

In either case, it’s a lousy deal for our kids.

Bloomberg to parents: butt out!

See the recent Bloomberg interview in The Villager:

Bloomberg said parents need only be involved in the micro issues of their child’s education, like the child’s attendance, behavior and grades. It does not make sense for parents to be involved in larger issues like overcrowding, because those issues take years to resolve, Bloomberg said.

“When you’re talking about siting schools, you’re not talking about parental involvement,” he said, “because the process from deciding you want to build a school, siting it and building it and moving your kid in, your kid’s going to be through graduate school by that time.

Surely they would be in graduate school if we left it up to the Department of Education.

"These things don’t happen overnight. You’re talking about a different group of people who want to have some input: community activists. Nothing wrong with that, but it’s not parents.”

No, actually it has been parents who have been forced to work and to work hard, finding sites, pushing the DOE, and lobbying their elected officials over and over again to ensure that there is enough space so that their kids can have decent class sizes, art and music, and can attend neighborhood public schools.

Parents have been forced to site every new school in Manhattan over the past eight years, and many schools throughout the city, because of the incompetence and disinterest of the Mayor and his appointees at the DOE. We’ve had to do our own enrollment projections as well, since the high priced consultants hired by the DOE seem unable to figure out that the rising birth rate and the development boom throughout the city, unleashed by the Mayor's policies, might actually lead to more children needing a seat in a public school.

He continued, “Parent involvement should not be parent control. We have professional principals, administrators and teachers — experts. They should design the classroom.”

That’s why there are few if any educators in control at DOE?

Bloomberg then described the improvements he has made in sharing information with parents about their children’s performance and their children’s schools, including parent coordinators, school report cards and surveys.

But what’s the point of those surveys, if they have no effect on what goes on in the classroom? Every single year, parents say in the DOE surveys that their top priority is smaller classes, yet every year the Mayor and the Chancellor violate state law by refusing to reduce class size.

This is not new. The Mayor has repeatedly expressed his disdain for the views of parents and their right to have a voice in how their children's schools are run. See this story from the NY Post in May : “Bloomie to school parents: back off!”

“Mayor Bloomberg said yesterday that parents should butt out of trying to dictate educational policy as the debate over mayoral control of the schools intensifies. "You do not want parents setting educational policy. You do not want parents telling teachers how to teach. Teachers would not be happy about that," Bloomberg said on his WOR radio program. "That's what you have professionals for," he added. …”

Why? Perhaps because he knows that despite all his billions, he cannot buy our silence, or our support.

See also letters in response to Bloomberg's comments from parent activists Tina Schiller and Tricia Joyce in the Downtown Express.

An Open Letter to President Obama: Please help us save our school!

Dear President Obama:

The Early College model, which you recently cited in your speech to the NAACP as a promising example that should be emulated nationwide, provides students with small classes, advanced instruction, extra learning time, and the opportunity to take college courses and graduate from high school with two years of college credit.

Here in New York City, the Bronx Early College Academy (BECA) was founded three years ago as a 6-12 school with help from funding from the Gates Foundation. Ninety nine percent of our students are African-American or Hispanic.

Though BECA was rated the most improved school in the city in parent surveys this year, its success has been put at risk by irresponsible conduct of the NYC Department of Education. Our school is one of more than ninety schools being moved into a new building this year, in a disruptive and chaotic process of musical chairs, with decisions made by unaccountable officials at the Office of Portfolio Development who have been completely unavailable and inaccessible to parents and other stakeholders.

Our students work hard: they have to complete about two hours of homework each day, attend mandatory classes after school three days a week, as well as classes on Saturday. The school was initially placed in an annex of PS 24 in Riverdale. Because of cramped space, the school could not provide our students with the smaller class sizes that the early college model requires. Instead, our class sizes averaged 27 students, but we hoped for improvements once the school was moved to a building of our own. We also had no auditorium, no gymnasium, no science labs, no media rooms, no library, no specialty rooms - just a few classrooms and a lunchroom.

Parents believed in the academic program and the mission of BECA enough to look beyond what we did not have. We held on to the promises made by DOE officials that they would find us a suitable site near to Lehman or on the college campus itself, with all of the amenities that a high-tech, early college program should provide – as well as a site that would allow our children to easily attend college classes during the school day when they reached 9^th grade.

Yet now, the school is being moved six miles away to the South Bronx --even further away from Lehman. The building (the former JHS166, which is being closed) will house six different schools, including a district suspension site. Rather than respond to parental complaints and requests for meetings, our school is being placed in a rat-infested facility that looks more like a prison than a school building.

While the school has a site-selection committee that includes parents as members, our committee was never consulted before the move was announced.

Again, there will be no room for smaller classes, once the school grows to its full 6-12 size. And though DOE officials had originally promised that shuttle-bus service would be available for the 3½-mile trip to the Lehman campus starting next fall when our students reached 9^th grade, they later revised this to say that there would only be buses once our students were 10th graders. Most recently we were told buses would not be provided until the 11th grade.

The lack of concern and disrespect for the BECA community has been exhibited by the Chancellor himself.

When BECA parents spoke up in June to protest the move during a meeting of the Panel for Educational Policy, Chancellor Klein claimed he was “unaware” of these issues, although there had been direct and frequent communication with him since March, via letters, petitions, rallies, calls to 311, and even speakers at earlier PEP meetings.

Editorials, opeds from elected representatives, as well as numerous news articles had been published about this issue. We have used whatever means available to us to express our concerns, yet we feel utterly ignored –emblematic of the manner in which the Bloomberg/Klein administration has shown complete disregard for the parent voice in the NYC educational system.

President Obama: you have spoken widely and well about the importance of parents being involved in our children’s educations. Why should parents have to go through such lengths just to have our views ignored, by an administration that does not value our contributions? Why allow time for public comments during meetings of the Panel for Educational Policy, if those comments are not heard or followed up on?

As Assemblymember Jeffrey Dinowitz wrote in April in the Riverdale Press, “the real problem [is] a Department of Education with no real plan, just a mandate to create more and more small schools with no intelligent planning as to where to put many of them….. [in a] mad rush to create so many so quickly …”

As a school, BECA has had its problems. We have had three principals in as many years. Now, just when we have hit our stride, the DOE pulls the rug under our feet with this disruptive move. With the great progress that our school has made, it is imperative that our progress should continue. If our school falters once more, it will be due to an administration that has shown a lack of commitment to make good on its promises to our children – and a lack of concern for their future success.

President Obama, listen to our pleas. Please help us convince the Department of Education that a more suitable site must be found for our school.

Sincerely, Annabelle Wright, PA President, Bronx Early College Academy

Ms. Wright can be reached at 917-496-3757 or at annabellewright1@aol.com. See also these letters from parents at BECA and from the Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr. to Chancellor Klein, detailing the poor planning process by the Office of Portfolio Development. For more on BECA, see The Riverdale Press from December 18, 2008– “Turning things around” and Insideschools.org . For more on the Early College model, see this Huffington Post column by a student who graduated from Bard Early College HS. For an analysis of the problems of the NYC small school initiative, including high staff turnover, inadequate facilities, and frequent moves, as well as the “collateral damage” suffered by students at the large schools as a result, see the recent report from the New School, “The New Marketplace: How Small-School Reforms and School Choice Have Reshaped NYC’s High Schools.”