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TESTIMONY OF BOROUGH PRESIDENT MARTY MARKOWITZ BEFORE THE NEW YORK STATE ASSEMBLY TASK FORCE ON COMMUNITY SCHOOL DISTRICT GOVERNANCE REFORM

Photograph by Sarah Liriano
	In photo: Borough President Markwoitz (at table), Deputy Mayor Dennis Walcott (seated - 2nd from right), & Schools Chancellor Joel Klein (seated - 3rd from right)

As the mayor moves quickly to restructure and refocus the schools system, and to make it perform at a much higher level, I am delighted that he has given top priority to increasing the roles and responsibilities of parents. The consumers of public education – the parents who speak for their children - need a voice – many voices – because no one person has all the answers. The Legislature obviously understood this, and chose to create this task force in preparation for the elimination of the 32 community school boards in June. While learning to do more with less, we are actively seeking to achieve parity among all city schools, so that every parent can send their children to a local school and have confidence that their children will be able to learn in a safe, challenging, and nurturing academic environment.

Time and again, wherever we see such an environment, and we see that students are succeeding, we see a school that is a cohesive community of parents, teachers, and administrators working together. Given that, I fully support Mayor Bloomberg in his commitment to place a parent coordinator in each school. Obviously, a new and nimble structure is needed to replicate a pattern of full and active parental involvement in all city schools. The structure developed to ensure parental involvement in the schools must serve three essential purposes. First, it must include a proactive communication and outreach component designed to involve all public school parents.
Second, it must create a meaningful pathway for capturing parental expertise and applying it in the schools. Third, the structure must allow parents to hold local school officials – superintendents, principals and teachers – accountable for school performance and the education of their children.

While establishing parent-service offices is a good start, it will not be sufficient to have only ten centers throughout the City. The new structure must include a direct and accessible avenue for recourse for parents who are facing problems with their children’s schools that are not resolvable through their school’s parental coordinator. The most direct way to accomplish these goals is to establish local parent groups as advisory bodies, which would also work actively to increase parental involvement in schools where it is lacking. Members could be appointed in a similar fashion as community planning boards: half by the borough presidents and half by the city council members representing each community. The boards should have small administrative staffs comprised of reassigned existing personnel, whose jobs would be to effectively communicate

with parents. Parental advisory boards would comprise a broad-based source of parental input,
and should also have the power to recommend educational policy, through direct and well-defined lines of communication that should be established with the superintendents and the chancellor.

When a regional superintendent post is vacant, the chancellor’s candidate to fill the vacancy should be required to appear before the chairs of the parental advisory boards for the region. The chairs would then present their findings to the chancellor who obviously has the final say.
The parental advisory board should also have the power to recommend three candidates to fill principal vacancies. The board also needs to be able to play a role in how money is spent in their local schools.

The chairs of the parental advisory boards for each borough should meet monthly with the borough president’s appointee to the Panel for Educational Policy. The chancellor or a representative should be required to attend these borough board meetings to discuss progress, educational policy and how resources are being allocated across the borough. These meetings could be held at the borough president’s offices and a nominal staff should be assigned to help ensure that the content of these meetings is effectively communicated to parents.

In schools with little parental involvement, those without an active PTA, or where we don’t see many parent volunteers, I believe that we have an obligation to analyze the barriers to parental involvement and actively work to overcome them. Since parents are in the best position to effectively recruit other parents as school volunteers, and to examine barriers to parental involvement in their local schools, each board would be charged with increasing parental participation in the schools within their purview. The boards would regularly review parental participation in each school, and establish their own plans for increasing involvement. The boards would also evaluate overall school performance and evaluate their superintendents each year. Board members would be term-limited and eligibility criteria would include being the parent of a child currently in a public school in the designated community school. Borough Presidents would be held accountable to the public for the quality of their advisory board appointments, as would local city council members. In addition, the chancellor should be directed to hold annual educational conferences for parents in each borough, to inform parents about educational trends and progress in the system.

Increased parental involvement and improved citizen access to educational decision-makers is a necessary component of the educational improvements and the heightened public accountability sought by the mayor. To reiterate, these are the three guiding principles for parental involvement that I believe will best accomplish the goals of making every school perform well for every student:

A proactive communication and outreach component designed to involve all public school parents;

A meaningful pathway for capturing parental expertise and applying it in the schools; and

A structure for parents to hold superintendents accountable for school performance

The State Legislature made a bold decision last year in entrusting the mayor with total control of our schools system. Mayor Bloomberg has staked his mayoralty on greatly improving how we educate our more than one million students, and I certainly hope he succeeds. But everybody needs help, especially when you are talking about running 1200 schools.

New Yorkers have opinions about everything, and when it comes to educating our kids, these opinions need to be heard, considered and sometimes acted upon. Our educational system needs to flow from the top down and from the bottom up in order to succeed. The only way you are going to encourage real parental involvement is by empowering them and giving parents real responsibilities. A parent’s only agenda is making sure that his or her child gets a quality education. Whatever you choose to replace community school boards must encourage the neighborhood activism that has made so many of our schools successful. Harnessing and replicating that activism in schools in Brooklyn and beyond is a crucial component for the future of the New York City schools system. There is no reason why this world-class city can’t provide a world-class education for every single one of our children. I think my proposals are a solid blueprint to help us reach this goal. I urge the co-chairs and the task force members to strongly consider my ideas for whatever structure the committee ultimately decides to recommend for implementation. Thank you.