Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum,
Education Hearing
Friday, September 12, 2003

Thank you for having me here today and allowing me to testify about the changes that are taking place in our schools.

You have already heard from our schools Chancellor, and you will hear later from representatives of teachers and supervisors unions, as well as other concerned advocates.

I, however, am here as a representative of the people of New York City , particularly the children and their parents.

I applaud the Legislature for approving massive and important reforms to our schools. I, like many New Yorkers, was encouraged by the Bloomberg administration's commitment to reforming our schools, a task that is critical to the futures of our 1.1 million school children and to the prosperity of our city. Like many, I was hopeful and excited that the fall of 2003 would mark a new beginning for public education in New York City .

In fact, although I'm concerned, I remain hopeful that as the school year progresses we will see the positive results we've been promised. We must keep in mind that it is far too early to judge the ultimate success or failure of the Department's plan. That judgment will depend on student learning and achievement, class sizes, parent satisfaction, teacher enthusiasm, and a host of other factors. So my purpose here today is not to pass judgment. Rather, it is to discuss some trends that I find worrisome, trends that may stand in the way of the progress the administration owes the children of New York .

If there has been one overriding flaw in the Chancellor's performance, it has been his failure to communicate. He has not made his plans clear to parents, teachers, advocates, or other government agencies, and he has not listened when these groups have offered criticism or help. This failure to engage in meaningful dialogue is clearly evident in the two trends I'd like to address: the Department's insistence on secrecy and its refusal to acknowledge problems and accept legitimate criticism.

I'd first like to discuss the Department's insistence on secrecy. Considering the magnitude of the reforms underway, one might reasonably expect the Department to do everything in its power to keep parents, teachers, school administrators, and other city agencies informed. Unfortunately, the exact opposite has been the case.

From the beginning, the Department has demonstrated a frustrating lack of transparency. It resisted a bill requiring that it submit quarterly School Construction Authority reports to the City Council. It has withheld from my office and from the press information on critical issues such as crime, building safety, and curriculum exemptions.

Last month, during a tour of learning support centers to determine whether or not they were ready to handle parent needs, I was denied entrance to two centers, both public buildings. This is the most shameless demonstration of the Department's lack of transparency.

The Department's unspoken policy of secrecy is not just some internal squabble among city officials. It has and will continue to have a real effect on the quality of education in our schools.

For example, Chancellor Klein contracted with Voyager Expanded Learning to develop a new supplemental reading curriculum. Voyager's methods have been heavily criticized elsewhere in the country and have undergone little in the way of testing and evaluation. So why is Chancellor Klein so eager to spend millions of dollars on an unproven curriculum? In response to pressure to publicly explain its choice, the Department offered a rationale based on test scores from 2001, before Voyager, or any phonics component for that matter, were ever introduced into the city's reading curriculum. There is no demonstrated rationale at all for introduction of this program on a City-wide basis.

When you make your plans in secret, you deny yourself the benefit of outside input. This leads me to the second worrisome trend: The Department has failed to acknowledge problems and accept recommendations from the people who know the New York City Public School System best, the teachers, administrators, and advocates who were involved before the present administration stepped in.

Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein are running the school system like a corporation. But the school system is not a corporation. It is a public entity, and shutting out the people who understand how it actually works in a show of “out-with-the-old-in-with-the-new” bravado couldn't be more short-sighted.

Allow me to offer some examples of the Department turning a deaf ear to legitimate criticism. For months, Chancellor Klein ignored the problem of “push-outs,” despite a report released by my office and Advocates for Children last November indicating that in some schools more students were being pushed out than were graduating. It took eight months for the Department to respond to our requests for data, and to this day, it has not developed a system for tracking “push-outs.”

In January, the Mayor promised that the Department would release details of an English Language Learner program within 60 days, but months later, advocates with a stake in the program had not been consulted and still had no idea what changes the Department had in mind.

And then there's the Voyager Program. Voyager provides that the six lowest-performing students in each classroom receive six-on-one instruction for thirty minutes each day. Teachers, however, were never consulted as to when in the day this instruction would take place and, to the best of my knowledge, no plan is yet in place for making the program work.

When the Department doesn't simply ignore constructive criticism, it goes on the attack. Recently, my office released a report on the deferred maintenance at 53 city schools. The Department's own School Construction Authority has classified conditions at some of these schools as “hazardous” or even “life safety issues.” Rather than acknowledge my recommendation that the work needed at these schools is too serious to postpone, the Department dismissed my report, claiming that it uses out-of-date information. The Department made this claim despite the fact that the information in my report is the most recent that it has published. This response illustrates the tendency of Chancellor Klein and his staff to hold back crucial information and respond to urgent criticism with defensive hostility.

One further example of the Department ignoring reasonable criticism: 1,200 parent coordinators have been hired by the Department and equipped with cell phones in order to address parent concerns. It distressed me to learn, however, that many parent coordinators have been calling my office asking for copies of my guide to the most commonly asked parent questions. This begs the question: Did the Department provide these parent coordinators with the sufficient materials and expertise for the job ahead of them?

Several veterans of the system have spent the past weeks working at my office, answering the questions and solving the problems of parents who have been confused or frustrated by the Department's new bureaucracy. These dedicated men and women are still eager to help New York City 's children get a better education and, in many cases, they have decades of know-how to offer.

There are real consequences to Chancellor Klein's refusal to make use of such experience. Since Monday, my office has received an average of 50 complaints a day from aggravated parents who have been unable to get the help they needed from the Department.

One mother says, “My son…still does not have a program card and has not had classes. It is day two of the school year. Who is responsible for the unorganized, chaotic scene I witnessed at [his] high school today?”

Another mother discovered on the first day that at her son's school 3 rd and 4 th grade are put in the same classroom. She asked my office to help her secure a transfer.

Another mother reported that her daughter applied to four high schools over the summer and never received a response from any of the schools or from the regional learning support center.

Many of the Department's reforms amount to a restructuring of an admittedly cumbersome bureaucracy. In addition, the Department has thrown a great deal of energy into its new curriculum. But consider the effects of some of their policies on teachers and students: those 1,200 parent coordinators have been hired at a cost of 43 million dollars, but 800 full-time classroom aides and thousands of full-time and part-time aides who monitor halls and take care of discipline have been laid off. The likely result: more stress and distraction for teachers already dealing with drastic curriculum changes.

These trends add up to a troubling forecast of the Department of Education's ability to improve education for New York City school children. If the Department does not begin a cooperative effort with stakeholders in order to carry out their reforms, they risk failure.

How can the Department do the job without teachers, without principals, without parents, without advocates? They can't.

This is the heart of the matter. Chancellor Klein must demonstrate good faith before we can have faith in him or his reforms.

Thank you.