A Queens mother of a New York City schoolchild explains how frustrated she is by the Department of Education and the teachers union because neither listens to parents. She’s keeping her anonymity to prevent retribution against her or her child.
Last week, I received multiple robo-texts from the New York City Department of Education encouraging me, a public-school parent, to “run for a seat on an Education Council.”
That might be tempting — if they weren’t so performative.
Community Education Councils are New York’s equivalent of school boards, except they have no real teeth nor influence. A CEC’s only actual power is to vote on zoning boundaries. Other than that, the DOE takes any resolutions they pass as “advisory.”
As parents, we understand how “taken as advisory” works. The DOE infamously keeps parents under their thumb by holding “engagement” sessions as they push through policies by fiat.
Those of us stuck in city public schools are still traumatized by former Chancellor Richard Carranza, who held town hall after town hall to solicit parent feedback on middle-school admissions — then ignored them when it turned out the majority of parents opposed his pseudo-righteous equity agenda that included getting rid of all testing and high-performing schools.
It hasn’t gotten much better under Chancellor David Banks — who hasn’t held any engagement sessions with parents at all.
CEC parent volunteers’ well-researched and earnestly deliberated resolutions are ignored. Instead, under absolutist DOE management, new policy is rolled out in a completely opaque manner.
Under normal circumstances — when undermining merit and academic quality weren’t the goal — parents have obligingly gone along with being the window dressing for the DOE. But after three especially bad years of relentless attacks, parents are fatigued and fed up with the abuse.
Unfortunately, the abuse isn’t just from the DOE. The United Federation of Teachers, led by Michael Mulgrew, has tried to stock Education Councils with activists who parrot verbatim talking points that prioritize union interests over those of students. They champion “equity” but dodge accountability. Obvious questions such as “How does this improve academic outcomes?” are never answered.
One UFT-sponsored event to recruit parents for the CEC election was shamelessly marketed as a “Boot Camp” and led by radical equity activist and Board of Regents member Shino Tanikawa, who has yet to grasp that most parents do not refer to themselves in military group-think fashion.
What activists like this misunderstand is that most families depend on our schools to actually educate our children. We are not “comrades” going to battle for control over the DOE.
Just attend any CEC meeting throughout the city; the UFT allies are the ones who turn out in numbers during contentious votes where they fake outrage (“It is unconscionable,” “It’s inequitable,” etc.) and echo the UFT’s issues du jour, which these days are basically anything to undermine mayoral control and oppose charter-school expansion.
Parents who dare to defy their mission promptly receive ad hominem responses (e.g., “You’re racist,” “You’re MAGA,” “You’re supporting white supremacy”). They are vicious. One went as far as calling a fellow parent’s employer and made a complaint that she was racist for wanting schools reopened during COVID.
It’s why I write this anonymously — the UFT has a long powerful arm, and I fear professional repercussions and for my child’s educational future.
Another dismal reality is how undemocratic CEC elections are. Unlike political representation, which is largely based on population size, the boundaries of each of the 32 education districts are archaic and disproportionate; District 16 in Brooklyn has just 3,700 students (smaller than some schools) while District 24 in Queens has 40,000 students.
A bystander might assume the elected CEC members received hundreds or thousands of votes, but in reality, some were elected with as few as 10 votes yet supposedly represent thousands.
To compound this undemocratic process, the DOE has crafted a “same-school rule” with the good intention of preventing overrepresentation from one school. Fair enough. However, the net effect is that in districts with large schools, it creates the potential for one parent representing a school of a few thousand families while another might represent a very small school with only a hundred families.
The council for high schools, which represents more than 300,000 students (one-third of the entire city student population), inexplicably has only one council.
Also short-sighted is when a winning parent has children at multiple schools. If he or she is the highest vote getter, all other candidates from these schools are eliminated no matter if they receive a similarly high number of votes because of the DOE’s “same-school rule.”
One parent could collectively be representing let’s say 3,000 or more families while another may only be representing 100 or fewer — all with equal voting power on resolutions and zoning boundaries. This isn’t how democracy by pluralism is supposed to work. Does it sound fair? It typically isn’t.
Candidates from the larger schools are overworked, have more demands put upon them, more voices to hear from, more voices to represent, but does anyone care to reform this?
So the next time you step into a taxi cab and see advertisements for the CEC elections or receive the daily emails and robo-texts from the DOE or UFT encouraging parents to step up and run for a seat, remember these are signs and a reminder of DOE’s desperation that its ruse of so-called engagement is falling apart at the seams.
Neither the department nor the union wants feedback. They want yes men and women.
But parents are no longer content with being window dressing. If policy-makers want parents to be true partners in our child’s education and run for seats, we need to be equal voices.
Kudos to the sincere parents who have been on CECs and to the few who step up to run for these council seats despite the hypocrisy. They are our unsung heroes who selflessly advocate for public-school families in this dysfunctional system we call New York City Public Schools.
