Good afternoon. I want to thank Speaker Silver, Assemblyman Sanders and all members of the task force for the opportunity to address you today.
Sometimes it seems that everyone has a voice in how our schools run--except parents.
But who knows better than parents if schools are serving our children well? Today we are here to talk about how we should replace the community school boards. The Mayor asked to do away with community school boards because he felt they were not serving the schools, parents or children. There is a lot to be said for his view. I applaud the work that Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein are doing to restructure the Department of Education. I support the important initiatives the Mayor announced yesterday, such as the principal leadership academy and the streamlined chain of command. I also like his ideas about parental involvement--but I think we can go even further.
At the moment, our schools have an effective voice on behalf of the teachers, an effective voice on behalf of the system--and no structure in place for parents to make themselves heard. The most important aspect of any replacement for the community school boards must be responsiveness to parental concerns. We also want the new system to be transparent at all levels so that parents can always understand decisions that are being made about how their children learn.
I have been a teacher and I am a parent, and I am convinced that the best advocate a child can have is an informed and active parent. I want the schools to be responsive to the concerns of their communities. Children with parents involved in schools are more likely to get good grades, attend school regularly, behave well in school, earn a high school diploma and go to college. That means parental involvement should be the number one priority.
My friend, Fernando Ferrer, the former borough president of the Bronx and now president of the Drum Major Institute, testified before your task force that until now many schools have lacked a support structure to encourage parental involvement. I agree.
Yesterday, the Mayor proposed a parent coordinator and a parent engagement board in each school. I find his plan interesting. The City Council proposal is also intriguing--with local advisory panels made up mostly of parents who are selected by council members and borough presidents. But I believe that the legislature needs to explore even more options.
We must make sure that district officials, principals and teachers are trained in how to form meaningful working relationships with parents—and that they are held accountable for efforts to reach out to parents. Along with classroom size, test scores and attendance—success at parental involvement should be an indicator taken into account when judging how well a school is doing.
The city also needs a structure outside the sphere of the Department of Education to act as watchdog over schools on behalf of parents. Both my office and the Independent Budget Office are examples of how such a watchdog organization could work. The Mayor’s proposal so far keeps the parental role under the control of the Department of Education. We need a system of checks and balances—a parent advocate independent of the Department of Education—in the same way the public advocate is independent of the mayor and members of the state legislature are independent of the governor. Parents must have a place to go when the red tape of the system fails them.
Every day my office hears about problems parents face as a result of the bureaucracy of the school system. We often hear that the Department of Education or individual schools do not try very hard to explain their decisions to parents. Recently a mother from Manhattan called us. Her 6-year-old son was sent home a few weeks before the end of the semester with a note saying he was in the wrong school, and should immediately start attending a different school he was zoned for. No one explained to her how they made this decision or why it couldn’t wait till the end of the term. The problem solver in my office called the district and persuaded the superintendent to let the child stay in the school until the end of the semester—and also that the mother deserved an explanation of why the child had to change schools.
Parents like the mother of that six year old often feel helpless in the bureaucracy of the system. For the last several months, my office has collected hundreds of surveys asking parents their number one concerns--from the availability of nutritious meals to the safety of kids in school. I have raised private support through the Fund for Public Advocacy so that we can publish a guide for parents based on the problems we are hearing about.
Our guide will not be about what the Department of Education thinks parents need to know—but about solutions to problems that parents are actually struggling with.
An independent parental advocate organization could do more than just look at individual complaints. Sometimes parent complaints lead to uncovering systemic problems.
Recently I heard from some parents that their children were being forced into GED programs instead of being allowed to earn high school degrees. So we conducted an investigation that showed schools are “pushing out” struggling students to improve the overall test scores. Rather than be judged as “failing”, schools sometimes try to get rid of students who score poorly on tests. We said to the Department of Education—by all means improve schools, but make sure struggling students aren’t dropped from the system. Last week when the Department of Education announced it was closing the High School for Redirection in Brooklyn. We said, okay, but let’s make sure there’s a plan to keep those students in the system, not let them drop out or be pressured into GEDs. Someone has to look out for parents’ rights in the system.
Many offices of elected officials help parents with such issues but at the moment there is no single clearing house with the authority to keep watch over issues of importance to parents. Some parent groups have proposed a parent advocate organization with a board of trustees and public/private funding. Perhaps the individual parent representatives in schools could report to the citywide parents organization. Now is our opportunity to make sure that the new structure brings parental involvement in schools to a higher level than ever in the past. I am grateful to the task force for giving me the opportunity to express my concerns and ideas. I look forward to further discussions about how to create such a citywide parental advocacy structure. Thank you.
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