School Participation Discussion

With the school budget 1/4 of the city total, it seems counterproductive to have it considered in a separate venue. Post your thoughts on school governance, particularly unifying local governance at the community board.

Background: See the following Daily News article for some insight into the state of school governance. New York Daily News, March 23, 2005

Some 1,100 New Yorkers have signed up to run in the elections for the city's school parent councils - a 27% drop from last year, officials revealed yesterday.

Critics have charged that the councils, which replaced the city's scandal-plagued school boards, have no power to change anything in the public school system.

Last year, when the councils were first introduced by City Hall, 1,500 parents applied for the posts.

Faced with the lack of interest this year, the city had extended the deadline by a week and launched an advertising campaign.

Yesterday, school officials said they have more than enough candidates to fill the 306 slots on the councils.

Kathleen Lucadamo

I believe that the PublicSchools need more competition. They don't need more people making top-down decisions about how to run them. They need to be part of a marketplace so parents have lots of choices about how/where to educate their kids. Those that don't respond to the needs of the parents will lose students and thus funding. I would wipe out lots of overhead costs (admin salaries), cut the average school size in half, and use the free space for other schools, whether public charters or private voucher-funded schools. --BillSeitz http://webseitz.fluxent.com/wiki/EducatingKidsInNyc

I took a look at Bill Seitz's webseitz cited above for inseitz into his thoughts. As a parent who had 2 sons go through the city's public schools, I understand his frustrations. After 11 years of involvement I can't point to one concrete positive impact from my efforts. As Bill says, perhaps competition is the answer.

As a start, I think we need to take a new look at public education. A friend with 25 years experience in city public school classrooms educated me to see two overarching problems of the system: the dominant factory model and school's babysitting or day care role.

Let's acknowledge that we want/need good day care to allow parents to work. Schools should provide it and offer educational opportunities with it. But we don't need to tightly link day care and classroom education. Some children for some periods might just need day care. Let's create a space in the schools for them.

The factory systems demands uniformity and simplicity. It commands such foolishness as: ALL FIVE YEAR OLDS ARE EQUAL WHEN THEY ENTER SCHOOL! IF THEY DO NOT SIT QUIETLY THEY ARE DEFECTIVE!

Let's acknowledge difference as being OK. How about education credits that one can use over a lifetime? And perhaps the baseline should not be "smarter is better" with the rewards going to those who test best. For some it might be better to learn to read at 30 and build sand castles until that time.

But a question on this wiki is when and how do we make those choices? Do we split school planning responsibilities between a school council and the local community board? Currently local school planning units request everything for our children and abdicate on tough decisions. Let's have the local planning unit (community boards) make the tough recommendations to allocate between fire, sanitation, police, housing, and education. Those reasoned decisions will guide their representatives.

Let's decide at the local level what we want and take responsibility to make it happen. That's my 2-cents. Tom Lowenhaupt