Parents frustrated with lack of input in education

The evening did not get off to a good start for Robert Gordon who arrived flustered and unfashionably late to Community Education Council 27’s public forum held at J.H.S. 202 in Ozone Park.
Gordon, the Department of Education’s (DOE) managing director for resource allocation and featured speaker for the evening began his presentation by apologizing for his tardiness of at least 30 minutes, explaining that his entourage had been unable to find the school.
His task was to convince the roughly 80 skeptical parents and education watchdogs assembled there that the DOE’s latest restructuring plans for the public school system were not only the answer to the city’s education woes, but that the DOE wanted their input.
The audience wasn’t buying it.
“I think that the overall picture of what is happening in our schools is a positive picture,” Gordon began, citing academic gains including an increase in on-time graduation rates and higher standardized test scores since Mayor Bloomberg introduced his Children First education reform in 2003.
“That doesn’t mean we’ve got everything we need,” he continued.
Gordon reviewed the major changes outlined in the mayor’s January 17 State of the City address including the move to give more autonomy to school principals, a rethinking of teacher tenure and a new accountability system designed to communicate more specific data about students and their schools directly to parents that would also give schools a letter grade.
Next Gordon treaded into the delicate area of school funding.
“Right now we really don’t do a good job funding schools on an equal basis,” said Gordon, school funding will also be revamped to become a “fund the child” system in which dollars will be allocated to individual students and will follow them to the public school he or she attends.
Under the plan schools will receive a minimum allocation for each student and additional funding based upon needs such as poverty, learning English and low academic achievement.
Finishing his presentation with that, Gordon opened the floor to questions and comments and himself to scrutiny.
“So you’re saying that children from impoverished neighborhoods are going to get more money? Is that saying that poor children are dumb?” said CEC 27 president Andrew Baumann.
“Is this a completed plan? If this is a completed thing then where is the infrastructure for this plan,” asked David Hooks, Jr., Helen Marshall’s appointee to CEC 27.
“And then this premise that if you live in a poor neighborhood, you’re more expensive to educate. Where does that come from?” he added.
“I sit on a lot of [Parent’s Association] meetings. They have a hard enough time getting lunch forms filled out,” said one man who questioned the role parental surveys should play in determining a school’s overall grade.
“Parents, a lot of them work, a lot of them are single parents they don’t have the time to do it. How do you profess that this is now going to change the whole school system?”
And even if parents did have the time to be more involved, Baumann, in an emotional speech reflecting a general frustration with the DOE, made it clear that he didn’t believe they would.
“Parents don’t feel like they matter. If I don’t matter, why would I even bother? I’m the president of the CEC and I’m questioning whether or not to do this again because I don’t think I matter either. I’m not heard and I’m not listened to,” he said.
“The Department of Education has made us impotent. It doesn’t matter what we say or what we do. It doesn’t matter what we believe in. You’re just going to go do whatever you want, whenever you want,” he continued.
“You said it’s a proposal but when did you come to the CEC and say, “Well we’re thinking of doing this; can you give us your opinion? You didn’t”
“When did you go to the district council P.T.A. presidents?”
“When did you go into the schools and say you know what parents tell us, how can we make things better? You didn’t,” he exclaimed to a round of applause.
Despite the heightened tensions, Gordon said he learned a lot from the meeting. Specifically, “That we need to keep parents involved, that there’s an interesting difference of opinion about weighting kids based on poverty and that people want to feel like their voices are heard.”
As for Baumann, “They talk the good game but they really couldn’t care what we have to say. I speak my personal opinion and I do not believe that our opinion counts or matters,” he said.
“If it did they would have called us in ahead of time and said help us do this, help us develop this plan, help us be partners in this plan.”