NYC Parents to DC Parents

NYC parents to DC Parents:
"Buyer Beware!"
December 2006

On December 13, 2006, Leonie Haimson of Class Size Matters, along with Eugenia Simmons-Taylor and Monica Ayuso, parent leaders in District 4 East Harlem and District 28 Queens, traveled to Washington DC to speak about Mayoral control, at the request of Parent Watch, a DC parent advocacy group. The Class Size Matters presentation is posted here.

Before we left, we solicited comments from NYC parents about the effects of Mayoral control on our schools. Here they are below:

There has been a complete refusal to listen to parents during the decision making process. Regardless of the issue, the DOE and Mayor decide on a policy, try to implement it, and only then are parents allowed to express an opinion. This procedure has demoralized many parents, including those active in various organizations, to the point that a sense of not wanting to bother pervades. More and more parents are simply concentrating on the needs of their own children and maybe, their schools. The loss of parental input has led to disastrous policies-cell phone ban, redundant test taking, etc- that lead to confrontations with parents. We hear collaboration from the DOE and we know that means only one thing, follow us, trust us, we know best.

-- Rob Caloras, President, Community Education Council District 26, Queens

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We must begin now to develop an alternative to the current system of mayoral control. We need to focus on the cornerstone of good government: a system of checks and balances. We’ve seen what unchecked power produces. We see parental rights and worker rights being violated every day in our schools.

We hear that Tweed is putting more money back into our classrooms. But we see more privatization, and more outside consultants feeding at the public trough, courtesy of no-bid contracts. Mayor Bloomberg: our school system is not for sale! We read that real change is occurring, but all we see is change for the sake of change. We need to challenge the conventional wisdom and the party line of this administration.

Now, our Mayor is worried about his legacy. Mayor Bloomberg has been traveling the country. He’s on tour selling the benefits of mayoral control from coast to coast. But, he won’t talk to us. This Mayor will travel to California, but he won’t walk across the street to Tweed Courthouse to address New York City parents. He won’t answer our questions. He won’t talk. And, he won’t listen.

When the history of this administration is written, historians will note that the stakeholders of the school system – parents and teachers – were left out of the critical policy decision-making. True parental empowerment is a precondition to our support for any future system of mayoral control. Parents deserve and demand a seat at every table when decisions affecting our children are made. We need to return democracy to the administration of our school system.

…..There’s a serious problem down at Tweed Courthouse. Most of the educators have left the building. The lawyers, and the management consultants, and the privateers have moved in. And, parents are locked out.

-- Tim Johnson, Chairman, Chancellor’s Parent Advisory Council (CPAC)

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In theory I thought it was a good idea to break up the community school boards and give parents more of a say in terms of the CEC councils under the Mayoral and Chancellor's control. However, I find that as "parental representatives" our advice falls upon deaf ears. I think that the Mayor parades the premise and practice of Community Education councils to give the public the misguided notion that "we" have a say and that "we" are heard. This is not the case. I have yet to see any of the suggestions that we as a council been taken into consideration or put into practice. Also having the school under mayoral control only feeds his political agenda and does not address the real issues. Bloomberg claims to be a Mayor for the children and constantly uses education as his political platform yet again parents are seen but not heard. Just my two cents...

---- Kathleen Bullock-McCoy, Citywide Council on High Schools, Bronx

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Greetings from NYC! It has been a rough few years under mayoral control! We all welcomed it because we believed that change, any change had to be better than what we were dealing with. How wrong were we? We were very wrong! In what seemed to be a small amount of time parents found themselves unable to get in touch with personnel at the DOE. We found that nobody knew what they were responsible for and nobody answered telephone calls or return messages and emails. Special education is basically running with no accountability. School do not do what they are supposed to do for special needs children unless a parent request due process hearings and then the games begin.

The worst part about the whole mayoral control issue is the fact that everyday the mayor and the chancellor roll out another form of "The Dog and Pony Show!" What that means is that they constantly roll out a new initiative and never follow through on the impact it is having. 4 years later and we are still not getting our calls returned or emails responded to and nobody is held accountable... If you know of anyone being held accountable please let us know because I have not seen it yet in spite of all the mayoral talk of accountability. BUYER BEWARE!

It is a scary world with the mayor in control because how do you hold the mayor accountable when no one will listen because he is the boss wielding so much power that no one dare go against him. I have nothing to lose. I am leaving the city because of the schools. They have gotten progressively worse since Mayoral control. Teachers have lost their gusto for teaching because of the nonsense. Parents are worn out because they have been racked over the coals and are exhausted because they have to follow chancellor's regulations to the T but school officials can do what ever they want and get away with it. Finally, the mayor and the chancellor do not like bad press, so when you try to uncover corruption in the DOE, they try to shut you down. Also, the mayor seems to think that hiring businesspeople to educate our children is a great idea. Our children have been guinea pigs the last 4 years. Different programs, more tests, no accountability and no education. I could tell you horror stories about special education but I would need to kill many trees to tell the very real stories of children's academic careers ruined because of the chancellor’s lack of accountability. Buyer beware of mayoral control! Mayoral control is not a good thing when it comes to education; leave that to the educators. Good luck! -

-- JoAnne Scichilone, VP, Special Education Parent Panel

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I have been a parent advocate for over 20 years, since my first child entered the school system up to my last child who is currently a junior in High School. We as parent leaders worked diligently to bring about real parent involvement. Yet with the change in governance to total mayoral control with no system of checks in place, we have never seen parents so disenfranchised as they are now. We have not only lost the gains we made, but we have moved back to the Dark Ages of Parent Involvement, where parents were expected to run bake sales and do homework and that was the limit to what their involvement was expected to be. Under previous Chancellors and especially under Chancellor Crew parents achieved a real voice in the system that educated their children. We were consulted on curriculum, zoning, special programs, etc. and we had meaningful input on the budgets of our schools and our districts.

Now with the changes of the last 4 years, we have lost those gains. We receive little or no information from the Department of Ed and when we do receive any information, it is only to be told about decisions that have already been made. The concept of real consultation does not exist. There is much talk about parent involvement, but actually it has been done away with it in it highest forms. Vast amounts of money are being spent with no input from parents nor for that matter from anyone else. The Region and District have their budgets in place and we have never been consulted on them, while in the past we would have sat at the table to spend every dollar. Our Special Ed and Gifted Programs are being decimated even though we were told this was not to be the case. Even as recent news stories have indicated, in the very real issue of safety and carrying cell phones, the Mayor has made his decision and has no interest in the very real concerns of the parents. I will not say that Mayoral accountability is all bad, and some change was needed however, any system must have in place a form of checks and balances. It is the very foundation of our Federal system of government and has historically proven itself to be the best system.

As recent statistics have actually shown, the supposed gains of this administration under total Mayoral control appear to not even be real but rather a reworking of the numbers. High School graduation rates are not up, and the children in the 8th grade are not showing great advances. If you look closely at the governance structure, the current administration is actually admitting the failures of most of their restructuring since they are now looking for new ways to restructure once again, using the empowerment school model to in effect return to a form of decentralization. As a parent, I warn, be very careful before you turn over total control over to anyone.

– Dorothy Giglio, Region 6 HS CPAC representative, Presidents Council District 22, Brooklyn

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My daughter is a public school student in New York City. Despite what Bloomberg and Klein say, mayoral control is not a success in New York. The top down style does not take into consideration the different learning styles of students nor does it appreciate the knowledge and experience of teachers. Refusing to respect education specialist and filling the ranks with rubber stamp teachers and principals with little experience has led to demoralization of staff and negatively impacted on students. Hiring central staff with no educational policy experience led to gaffs like the imposition of a city-wide curriculum in math that did not meet the needs of students. Their policy also added responsibilities to principals without giving them the authority to carry the new directives out. …

Mayoral control limits parental involvement. Parental input is a critical asset in the public schools. Klein and Bloomberg refuse to listen. One issue is cell phones in school. It is obvious that cell phones cannot be used during school time, but many children come to school alone, some as young as 11. Parents work and the only way they know their kids are safe is by receiving a phone call.

The biggest issue confronting NYC schools is class size. Bloomberg and Klein ignore the problem. Studies have proven that smaller classes allow for greater learning. Teachers have time to work with children who are slower to absorb the lesson. They were 37 and 38 kids in a class in my daughter's middle school. That she was able to learn was a tribute to the well trained staff at that school. It was a unique situation. Parents send kids to private school because of class size. Public school students should receive the same treatment. Test score increases are not an indication of achievement. This mayor gooses the important tests by holding back students who would not do well. This practice is disingenuous…Mayoral control in NYC has not been a success. Washington, DC should not do it.

– Lee Levin, parent

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Do you know the expression, "All is not gold that glitters"? That is what is going on in the New York City Public School system. Instead of making class sizes that teachers can teach, there are still many schools that are running over capacity.

This is true for many schools in poorer neighborhoods, and schools in the most wealthy communities. In school district 3 where we live, on the upper west side, one of the most affluent neighborhoods in Manhattan, we have to send my two children, age 13 and 18, to a completely different district, where one school happens to function under completely different rules due to a "fluke" in the system which allows for this. We're thankful we have this—it’s a commute of 30 minutes on the trains and a brisk 10 minute walk to the train, but worth it, because there are only 25 children in the classroom, as opposed to over 35 in the classrooms in the district where we live... The other high schools in the district are just unacceptable to attend in terms of quality of student body and academic programs, and overcrowding--(one year we were assigned a high school where at the orientation, the parents and kids were forced to wait out in the rain for 30 minutes while they opened the building, then we proceeded to go to an auditorium where they used a bullhorn to control the crowds--at that point, our daughter ran crying from the building, and staunchly refused to attend that school).

Don't listen to the rhetoric of the politicians! Putting two kids thru the public school system in NYC is more difficult and stressful than applying for colleges, (which is what we are doing now). We had a period of years where we sent our child to private school just to avoid her being overlooked in a classroom of 36 kids, where her skills as a writer were completely overlooked due to the damaging effects of overpopulation. It forced us to spend thousands of dollars that we should have saved for college. When we ran out of money for private school, and tried to get back into public school, we were assigned a high school where at the orientation, the parents and kids were forced to wait out in the rain for 30 minutes while they opened the building, then we proceeded to go to an auditorium where they used a bullhorn to control the crowds--at that point, our daughter ran crying from the building, and staunchly refused to attend that school. The public school system in New York City is still a vast myriad of red tape that could be simply erradicated by implementing some foundational reforms, like cutting the class size to a human level!

-- R. and C. Sadoff, parents

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It's been almost five years since the mayor got control of the schools -- what, exactly, has been the nature of this "success"? Not even their precious test scores have gone up, let alone graduation rates. School climate is deteriorating. The emperor has no clothes!
I think we need to tell the folks in DC that "this model of accelerated school reform" is hot air. This is why ICOPE is calling for a new system altogether -- the age of "school reform" is over. We need to orient the system around human rights -- not just the right to education -- but the rights to democracy, dignity, development of the whole child and his/her community, etc -- all of which are interdependent.

The people in DC need to learn from the errors of NYC -- not duplicate them.

- Cecilia Blewer, Independent Commission on Public Education

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My daughter is in a class of about 25, with one teacher, who has not been able to secure help in the classroom. In her previous grades, the teachers have always had at least student teachers every day for most of the weeks. It’s a shame to put the workload on our teachers and to compromise children who learn better in smaller groups. My daughter’s best experiences in school, she has told me, was working in small groups and getting more individual attention.

– Faith Schwartz, parent

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I am the parent of a student in kindergarten in Brooklyn. I highly discourage you from modeling your schools on the NYC model. There is no room for parental involvement in the school system here. And there are no checks and balances in this system, which is dangerous and very undemocratic. What if our next mayor totally disagrees with the educational philosophy adopted by our current mayor? A horror story, that's what. And with such a large, overcrowded system the centralized running of our schools is not what our children need. Not all students work in the same way, teachers and principles deserve to determine their best teaching methods -- not a centralized authority -- and one that is not even necessarily run by an educational expert.
Please for the students in DC, their families and the future students and families that will come after them I implore you to work within your system to find out what works and focus on that. Focus on teachers and their good ideas, focus on principles, and focus on parents. Do not focus on standardized testing, or a centralized authority to supersede the best teaching practices possible in your city. The federal focus on no child left behind was a centralized one, and it has failed our nation's children miserably. No centralized accountability system can hope to aim higher than NCLB because it will not take in to account all the important variables that educators and administrators are adept at managing. So focus on giving them the resources they need and the rest will follow. – Lee Solomon, parent

Honestly, I'd have to say it's been a mixed bag. On the plus side, we finally got an administration committed to making changes and empowered to do so. I support a number of the major initiatives. For example, I am conceptually behind the city-wide curriculum, and completely behind the matching system for high school admissions. The negatives have been largely due to the Mayor's contempt for teachers and parents, which was not anticipated. So the ultimate question is how do you create change within a system of checks and balances, which by their nature slow down process? -

-- Elizabeth Rose, parent

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To the Washington DC parents,

Mayoral control of the public school system results in less access and accountability and more arrogance on the part of the mayor and his chancellor. If you want a less democratic process in the say of your children's education and more of a dictatorial disregard of you and your children, then choose mayoral control of the public schools. Unfortunately, the old adage is true, "Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely." I urge you to reconsider and NOT accept mayoral control of your schools. It makes a bad situation worse. If fact, I would advise total decentralization of the public school system and have each school stand on its own, answerable to the parents and children of that individual school.

My best in your pursuit of justice and freedom to decide the fate of your children's future. Good luck. ]

-- Annette Evans, concerned parent/former educator
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As someone who originally supported both Mayor Bloomberg and mayoral control, I feel it's important to reach out to you before a decision is made in your city.
Like many, I thought mayoral control meant that politics would be removed from the schools. What I've found is that mayoral control simply meant the schools were subject solely and completely to the Mayor's politics. Here are some examples to illustrate our current situation:

Marginalization of Parents

With our Mayor enamored of corporate management approaches and autocratic decision making, mayoral control has meant the complete evisceration of parental involvement. Many local "community education councils", the new local school boards, have simply given up meeting as they have no role and their input is simply ignored. My school board, in an affluent part of the city, struggles to find members and a quorum to meet.

Our Public Advocate, a city-wide office responsible for representing the interests of the people collected input on how the Mayor's ban on bringing cell phones into schools put students in jeopardy on their long commutes. The Mayor dismissed the exercise as a "publicity stunt". Now we have a lawsuit against the Mayor to overturn this policy.

School Crowding and Class Size

The Mayor follows the cynics who don't believe public schools can be improved, that a new parallel system of charter schools must be built as an alternative. But instead of providing facilities for these new schools, he insists on forcing them into existing schools, causing further overcrowding. Currently, the Mayor is trying to force a new middle/high school into a Harlem school serving grades K-2. The opposition there is lead by a 24-year old PTA president who is fighting not only the Mayor, whose Department of Education is headed by one of the country's most accomplished litigators, but also Columbia University who will manage the school.

We have little transparency or accountability with regard to the very large class sizes we suffer. Classes of 28 are common for even the earliest grades. Despite a law passed by our city council, the Mayor refuses to provide average class size data for high schools. He repelled a referendum on class size by claiming he didn't really have authority required, that it was really the State who runs the schools.

School Construction

The Mayor is very close to the real estate interests who are busy transforming the city with their gargantuan development projects. But rather than task them to include schools in their plans, a measure he fears would hinder growth, he allows them to build housing that will overwhelm our schools. When he is willing to build schools, he finds the least desirable options. The NY Times reported a major thrust of the Mayor's long term planning will be to clean up toxic waste sites to provide land for schools and other facilities. Despite denials from his staff on this policy, the Mayor put forward a plan to build four schools on toxic waste site in the South Bronx.

Your Mayor will undoubtedly have his own agenda which may or may not follow ours. But the important point is that once we ceded control to the Mayor, we were left with few or no checks on his authority to do as he pleases. Our City Council can hold hearings but has no real authority. That State Legislature has authority but is too far removed and disinterested to police the Mayor's actions.
I urge you to consider the failings of our approach before embarking on this path.

-- Patrick Sullivan, parent

New Report Shows City Misusing $153 Million in class size funds

See the new report, produced by an independent consultant for the UFT, showing that based on DOE’s own data, the city has utterly failed to reduce class size with the $153 million in state funds targeted for this purpose -- and that in one third of schools receiving class size reduction funds, class sizes actually increased. Comptroller Thompson said he would audit the use of these funds to see how they were actually spent.
The city’s misuse of these funds is a direct result of a lack of leadership, commitment and accountability on the part of the DOE.
At the current glacial rate of decline, it will be 10 to 30 years before the city reaches its state-mandated targets of 20 on average in grades K-3 and 23 in other grades. More of the report’s other findings:
At 43 percent of all K-8 schools citywide, class sizes increased.
In large high schools with 1,500-plus students, there were four more students per class on average than in small schools with fewer than 1,500 students.
Little progress was made even in the city’s low-performing city elementary and middle schools (SINI/SRAP), which need smaller classes most desperately; 51 percent saw some decreases in class size but 42 percent saw larger classes.

In the city’s failing middle schools, class sizes remain larger than the citywide averages.
Among the 309 K-8 schools that were allocated the class size reduction funding, the more money that was allocated for this purpose, the more likely it was that class sizes increased rather than decreased.
Districts 10, 20, 24 and 25 had among the largest classes yet all were in the bottom half for reducing class size this year. Conversely, the top five districts for reducing class size (18, 6, 19, 5 and 17) all had smaller than average class sizes to begin with.
See the media coverage in the Daily News: NY Post ; NY Sun; and NY1;
In the NY Times, the findings were buried in a longer piece about the fact that another $80 million has been wasted in the ATR system devised by Joel Klein – in which teachers who were “excessed” through no fault of their own because of school closings and the like would no longer be automatically reassigned to other schools but would be held in an “absent reserve” at full pay until they could find new jobs. Of course in the new “open market” system, principals have to pay out of their school budget for every new teacher they hire, and the more experienced the teacher, the more he or she costs -- so there’s a built-in disincentive against doing so. In the past, principals were given budgets that automatically covered the cost of their staff, no matter what their experience level, but this is no longer the case.
We filed a Freedom of Information request for the data on the ATRs and as of October, there were 800 of these teachers. Many of them are highly skilled, and should instead have been assigned to classes at no cost to principals to reduce class size. The city, of course, would rather have them sit around doing nothing so they can eventually lay them off.
The ATR teachers, along with the approximately 800 teachers sitting idle for years in the rubber rooms, many of them without even being formally charged with misconduct, as well as an explosion of out of classroom positions such as “data coaches” and “senior achievement facilitators” have led to huge inefficiencies in the system, that Klein et al should be held accountable for.
The city’s response to the new findings? The DOE doesn’t deny that class sizes may have gone up in one third of schools receiving class size reduction funding -- but insist that “schoolwide averages mask targeted class size reductions in key courses like math.”
So a school could lower class size in math, but raise class sizes in English, Social Studies and Science? What do you think: is this what our kids need? Is this what the State intended when they ordered NYC to reduce class size?

Public Hearing on the Contracts for Excellence

http://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=1&attid=0.1&disp=attd&view=att&th=11a4b8b01a76ef31

Copy of FY08 Budget FSF Data Final Sorted per capita funding

http://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=1&attid=0.1&disp=attd&view=att&th=11a4b81c5e1c3a6b

Schools Chancellor Clashes With City Council

NY1 News
Jun 3, 2008 Weather: Warm and Sunny. High 84
Top News • NY1 Living

Schools Chancellor Clashes With City CouncilMay 27, 2008Schools Chancellor Joel Klein appeared before the City Council Tuesday to discuss his wish to shift school funding around, in lieu of a $99 million budget gap projected for the next school year. Klein previously proposed using $63 million in state aide to help close the gap in the $22 billion budget. But Governor David Paterson and Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver have already rejected the plan, saying that the money is earmarked for struggling schools. Klein said without that money, hundreds of schools could see their budgets slashed by as much as 6 percent. "Throughout this process I have always told the mayor to give us as much money as is possible," said Klein. "If I could have done it, I would have done it. My endgame, the proposal I'm making is to have an across-the-board cut of 1.4 percent." Protesters marched out of City Hall after repeatedly interrupting Klein. Some bore signs and chanted, "Chancellor Klein, don't cut a dime!" Some members of the city council asked Klein why more is not being done to seek additional funds from the mayor. "To some degree you're pitting the parents of the more successful students against the parents of the less successful students," said Democratic Bronx Councilman Oliver Koppell. "I say that to you because you have to live with that every single day, that that's the perception that you're not standing up and fighting,” said Democratic Manhattan Councilman Robert Jackson. Klein defended that the Department of Education has helped increase school funding overall. "Under this administration, there's $4.6 billion dollars -- significantly more money -- added to the schools. We've also taken $350 million-plus from the bureaucracy to the schools. So I think the facts can speak for themselves," said Klein. Other city lawmakers said that money for schools could be restored. "Revenues's been up at least for this fiscal year which is going to be rolled over into the next fiscal year. We can find the money if we want to find the money," said Democratic Queens Councilman David Weprin. "If we were to make cuts to the DOE's contracts, budget and cuts to their central staff, and look for cuts and savings in other agencies, we could find the money we need to preserve services to our classrooms," said City Council Speaker Christine Quinn. Quinn said she will work with Klein to cut more fat from the bureaucracy instead of the classroom. While Klein said he has chopped all the fat from the budget, he said Quinn is welcome to look again.
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Right Way to Grade Teachers

Right Way To Grade Teachers
By RANDI WEINGARTENApril 7, 2008http://www.nysun.com/opinion/right-way-to-grade-teachers/74223/
Chancellor Joel Klein of New York City's Department of Education and superintendents from other parts of the state are opposing language in the budget bill clarifying last year's agreement that teachers shouldn't be evaluated on student test scores; they should be assessed on how they use test scores and other data to adjust their teaching to help students improve.
This enlightened approach to tenure decisions is something that the Legislature and the governor agreed last year was eminently reasonable. The approach is akin to judging doctors on how they use the results of blood tests, X-rays, and the like to prescribe a course of treatment.
The plan, agreed upon last year, represents recognition of a real problem. Using student test scores for evaluating teachers is just as flawed a premise as using them as the sole criteria to judge children. After all, there are many factors that affect student learning that are beyond a teacher's control, such as the school's resources, class size, availability of special education, the performance of other teachers, student mobility and attendance, and parent support.
And then there are the technical limitations of the available data and the quality of the standardized tests that make it impossible to isolate the "effects" of an individual teacher. Take, for example, the fact that the state English Language Arts tests are given in January of each year. Which teacher is responsible, the 4th-grade teacher who taught the student between February and June or the 5th-grade teacher who had the child between September and January?
Perhaps the greatest myth that opponents perpetuate is the notion that student test scores can be used to make decisions for which they were never intended. Even education advocates who regularly disagree with each other conclude that, as co-director of a Washington think tank called Education Sector, Thomas Toch, wrote recently in Education Week, "standardized test scores aren't the simple solution they seem to be."
To ensure quality, the criteria for judging a teacher's performance should be rigorous and multifaceted. It should include multiple measures of student learning and instructional practices associated with exemplary teaching, such as knowledge of subject matter, the ability to tailor instruction to the needs of their students, and engagement with parents and the greater school community.
If we are serious about ensuring high teacher quality for our kids, we need to develop evaluation systems that fairly and accurately measure a student's total intellectual growth. We also must ensure that school leadership fosters a collaborative working environment and provides the resources and conditions that support high-performance teaching and learning.
Second, the tenure process is just that — a process. When the chancellor concludes that an overwhelming majority of teachers are granted tenure, he discounts the fact that about a third of new teachers leave the classroom in their first three years, most because they recognize that they are not suited for the job.
Opponents are arguing that the legislation takes away local control from school districts. In fact, it does nothing of the kind. Nothing precludes districts from making tenure decisions based on myriad criteria —just not student test scores.
At a time when schools all over the state are facing daunting budget cuts, including nearly $800 million in state and city reductions to our city's schools, it is both disappointing and perplexing that the chancellor and the superintendents don't like this legislation. Instead of fighting tooth and nail to hold onto every dollar for education, they have chosen to create a bogey man. As teachers are used to telling their young students: There is no bogey man.

Ms. Weingarten is president of the United Federation of Teachers.

How To Evaluate Teachers

How To Evaluate Teachers
Editorial of The New York SunApril 11, 2008http://www.nysun.com/editorials/how-to-evaluate-teachers/74567/
The schools chancellor, Joel Klein, and the president of the teachers' union, Randi Weingarten, are locked in a bitter debate over whether test scores should be used to evaluate teachers. Mr. Klein thinks they should and Ms. Weingarten thinks they shouldn't. The legislature and the governor have sided with Ms. Weingarten, and it looks like New York is going to be the only state in the union that will forbid using test scores to evaluate teachers. As it happens, we're not terribly excited about this fight one way or another, because we don't think test scores should be the device for evaluating teachers. We have another contraption we favor for evaluating teachers. It's called parents.
We've been watching this schools debate for six years now, and we don't mind saying that it's become mindnumbing. We don't think anybody is going to get a better schools chancellor in the city than Mr. Klein, who's brilliant and passionate and committed. We don't think anybody is going to get a better union president than Ms. Weingarten, who's also brilliant, passionate, and committed. But by our lights neither is in the best position to decide whether our schools, let alone our teachers, are doing a good job. We don't think the Regents board is in a better position, either, not that it's a bad Regents board. By our lights, the authority best qualified to discern whether a school is working is its customers, the parents.
Ordinarily, we'd be in the camp that says that Mayor Bloomberg and Mr. Klein ought to be able to use whatever method they want in evaluating teachers. They're management, after all, and it ought to be up to them. But, aside from backing charter schools, they have been on the sidelines in the fight to empower parents in the quest for better education. From the perspective of the lowly parents, mere customers, the fight over who gets to judge who's a good teacher is a bit of a sideshow if the customer can't decide whether to take the tax money he or she is paying to Messrs. Bloomberg, Klein, and Weingarten and spend it on another school that the customer thinks is doing a better job.
What would allow that, of course, is a system of school vouchers. It's the same system that would empower parents to sort out the curriculum issue that City Journal's Sol Stern and our own Andrew Wolf have been pressing. Instead, the mayor has spent his long quest to improve the schools belittling any attempts, with the exception of charter schools, to empower the customers of the schools to make their own decisions. If we sound, at this point, a bit dismissive of the particulars of the teacher-evaluation debate, it's how a lot of parents feel. What's the point of worrying about it? Even if a parent concludes that a particular school or teacher is not the right one for his child, the parent still has no choice in the matter, unless he's rich or wins a charter school lottery. So now Mr. Klein can't even use test scores to evaluate his employees. He'll have to pay them anyhow. It'll give him a taste of how the parents feel.