Late last week, just hours ahead of a state-mandated deadline, Mayor de Blasio submitted his proposal for dealing with struggling public schools.
In a stunning rebuke to the students and parents who’ve been demanding real action, the mayor chose to side with his political allies rather than push for real reform.
The plan was largely written by the United Federation of Teachers, the city teachers union, and will do nothing to improve the educational outcomes for the students trapped in these schools.
This proposal tries to address the state requirement to turn around consistently under-performing schools or face consequences.
Such schools are exclusively in low-income, traditionally underserved neighborhoods. Parents in these communities have been demanding that the mayor follow through on the promises he made during last year’s campaign and deliver real results for their children.
You don’t have to look far for evidence of why the UFT is the absolute last organization that should be developing a plan to turn around struggling schools.
Just this week, we learned that, a decade after the UFT launched a charter school to prove the merits of the city’s union contract, its school continues to lag behind almost every other charter school in the city.
The UFT Charter School in Brooklyn is one of only two schools that got the lowest possible score in every School Quality Review category: student progress, student achievement, school environment and closing the achievement gap.
The UFT school has only 11 percent of its K-8 students passing in English and 18 percent passing in math on state tests.
Now take a close look at the city’s Memorandum of Agreement with the UFT on the rules for how it will “turn around” failing schools, and you’ll see why the mayor’s plan is doomed to fail.
Despite the rhetoric, the actual proposal contains none of the flexibility or eased restrictions that would be necessary to bring about real change in these schools.
- The principal will have no ability to select teachers — that authority goes to a 12-person committee appointed by the unions.
- The school will remain open until at least 2018 even though zero academic performance targets have been set.
- The staffing committee doesn’t have to consider any aspect of a teacher’s rating when hiring — which means that ineffective teachers can remain as long as they’re OK’d by this absurd panel of largely union appointees.
- The teachers who aren’t selected — who presumably are the lowest-performing — will be forced onto other schools. So, even if the city is reconstituting the staff at one failing school, we’ll just see a new round of “pass the lemons” that risks creating more failing schools.
The state has given the city until Dec. 19 to add more detail to this flawed proposal.
As the mayor and his schools chancellor go back to the drawing board, let’s hope they don’t again defer to the UFT, the very organization that has worked against reform and helped create the broken system we are trying to fix.
It’s time for the mayor to show some courage and do what’s right for students instead of special interests.
Tenicka Boyd is director of organizing for StudentsFirstNY and a New York City public-school parent.