A parent from Queens with a child attending a New York City public school shares her frustration with the Department of Education and the teachers union for not taking parental concerns seriously. She wants to protect herself and her child from potential retaliation, so she is remaining anonymous.
As a parent of a public school student in New York City, I was recently bombarded by automated messages from the city’s education department urging me to “run for a position on an Education Council.”
If they weren’t so dramatic, it could be enticing.
New York’s Community Education Councils serve as the state’s version of school boards, albeit with little power or authority. Zoning boundary changes are the sole issue on which a CEC can cast a binding vote. Any resolutions they pass are merely “advisory” to the DOE.
When it comes to the meaning of “considered as advisory,” we parents know what that means. The DOE is notorious for hosting “engagement” sessions to keep parents under their thumb while enforcing laws unilaterally.
We city dwellers are still reeling from the trauma inflicted upon us by former Chancellor Richard Carranza, who held town hall after town hall to solicit parent feedback on middle-school admissions, and then ignored them when it became clear that the majority of parents opposed his pseudo-righteous equity agenda, which included abolishing all testing and high-performing schools.
Union officials have called the bill a “once in a generation opportunity” to reduce class sizes, while the Education Department has called it “incredibly disruptive to the school system.” Nonetheless, the bill has the support of a veto-proof 41-member majority of the City Council, and Council Speaker Corey Johnson is a co-sponsor.
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Ex-School Chancellor Richard Carranza’s Affair
Investigators from City, who have been tasked with looking into multiple corruption complaints lodged against ex-Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza, have stated that they will not be looking into allegations that Carranza had an affair with a subordinate that he had hired and have refused to comment on whether or not they are continuing to look into those complaints.
Carranza, who moved to New York in 2018, was accused of employing multiple friends from across the country for high-paying posts at the DOE that were never advertised publicly.
Carranza has moved in with one of these friends, Raquel Sosa, in San Antonio, Texas. Several years ago, when Carranza was the superintendent in Houston and she was an elementary school principal, the two crossed paths.
Sosa moved into Carranza’s Texas house months before she quit her DOE job in late August, suggesting that their relationship had progressed beyond the professional level. On March 20, barely five days after Carranza resigned in New York City, she registered to vote from the Lone Star love nest.
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Decisions Of Parents Are Being Ignored In NYC Schools
CEC parent volunteers who make decisions after extensive research and discussion are disregarded. However, a new policy is being implemented in full secrecy under the sole authority of the Department of Energy.
In most cases, parents will willingly play the role of a stooge for the school administration so long as the purpose is not to undermine academic merit and quality. However, the parents are exhausted of the abuse after three terrible years of constant attacks.
The DOE is not the only perpetrator of abuse. Michael Mulgrew’s United Federation of Teachers has been trying to organise school boards with activists who echo union talking lines at the expense of students. They talk about “fairness” but never take responsibility. Questions like, “How does this enhance academic results?” are quite direct. They didn’t respond to my question.
Despite the fact that most fathers don’t refer to themselves in military fashion, trustee and radical equity activist Shino Tanikawa has advertised a federation-sponsored event to recruit fathers for the CEC election as a “boot camp.” groupthink.
This misconception benefits campaigners since it shows that most people trust our schools to provide a quality education for their children. Contrary to popular belief, we are not “comrades” who will be fighting over who runs the DOE.
You can tell FLW supporters at any citywide CEC meeting because they are the ones who show up in large numbers during contentious votes while pretending to be outraged (“It’s unreasonable,” “It’s unfair,” etc.) and chanting mundane UFT issues, which are essentially anything to undermine the mayor these days. Limiting and discouraging charter school growth.
Conclusion
Neither management nor the union is interested in hearing from you. They are looking for people who will just agree with them.
But nowadays, parents won’t settle for a supporting role. Parents need to have a seat at the table and a voice in policymaking if they are to be treated as equals in their children’s schools.
Despite the hypocrisy, props go to the honest parents who have served on CECs and the handful who have run for these council seats. They tirelessly fight for public school parents in New York City’s broken school system, and they deserve all the credit they can get.
The stakes of a political choice, which the federal government, many states, and many cities and towns must evaluate, are on full display at two public schools in Manhattan. In 2019, Success Academy Harlem 2 ranked 37th out of 2,413 elementary schools in New York State. In comparison, PS 30, which had about a third as many students as Harlem 2, spent twice as much per student and placed 1,694th. Both PS 30 and Harlem 2 are housed in the same structure.
