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- [00:02]
A
Hi, I'm Jarrett Murphy from City Limits,
- [00:04]
B
and this is Ben Max from Gotham Gazette. Today is part of our video series breaking down key issues in the 2021 New York City election cycle. We're talking about education, always a central issue in city politics and government and always a central issue in mayoral races and other races for office.
- [00:23]
A
Yeah, and obviously it is that in a very practical sense, Ben. The biggest chunk of the city's budget for any one department is Department of Education, 20 billion or so a year, which is something like a third to a fourth of what the city spends. And that's true of every city, everywhere. Traditionally, in America, the primary focus of local governments is schools, even more than policing. And I think perhaps because of that and because of how central education is to everything in life returns in terms of income, your participation, democracy, everything flows from that. It's been a really vexing issue for a lot of mayors, and especially the past two. Mayor Bloomberg cast himself as education mayor, won mayoral control of schools, engaged in a lot of controversies about closing schools and forming charter schools, co locating charter schools, how many stakes to attach to tests and what to do where the test scores weren't very good. And Mayor de Blasio is less associated, I think, with the issue because it's not the thing that has dominated his political identity. But certainly it's been a big concern over his maritalty, and there have been a lot of different elements to how he has addressed the issue and how the issue has presented itself to him.
- [01:42]
B
Right. I mean, de Blasio got elected in part on his promise for universal pre kindergarten. He's executed that. It's widely seen as his main legacy item and achievement his biggest accomplishment. He's clearly had a focus of sorts on schools. A lot of what he's done is tried to kind of reverse the Bloomberg legacy. De Blasio, a very different approach, some very different relationships, like a much friendlier relationship with the teachers union. And he's had this equity and excellence agenda, trying to improve all schools. While he's been very hesitant to take more dramatic steps, like a strong desegregation push that many have called for. He even had his own advisory panel that he, you know, was very slow to adopt their recommendations. And, you know, Covid has sort of forced his hand on some key issues. De Blasio also had, like many other mayors and the old Board of Education, had a real challenge with trying to improve the city's most struggling schools. And that's where some say the call for desegregating comes back. Into play. He put a lot of resources into community school program. He's had this equity and excellence agenda that included things like more AP classes, more computer science classes, algebra classes. He sort of made a push to change the specialized high school admission process with an eye towards integration, but that fell flat. And so he struggled with that. And he got a couple of mayoral control of school extensions in Albany through a very tough process, in part because of his troubled relationships with the powers that be. And he's been pretty anti charter school, again, in a reversal of Bloomberg, and also very hesitant to close down schools, although he's done that to some degree.
- [03:29]
A
And one of the interesting wrinkles of this issue is how the kind of power to control it breaks down. And that goes across a couple different levels. One thing that's unique about schools, I think, compared to many other public issues, is that, you know, there are people who can escape the system. You know, not obviously, there's only one police force for New York City. There's only one set of roads. There's really only one park system. But if, and we're both parents, if we decide we want to exit the system for one of a number of reasons, for religious reasons, for concerns about safety, quality, even staying within New York City, you can go to private schools, you can go to parochial schools. And of course, that's part of the reason why there's choice within public schools now is to compete with that. And that's a very interesting factor that also leads to some of the vexing issues. But.
- [04:20]
B
Right. And that relates to, obviously, the question about desegregating the city schools and what types of effects that might have. And of course, a lot of times those choices come down to families with resources, and the families with minimal resources don't have the same choices. And that's also where the charter school discussion has come into play. Right.
- [04:39]
A
And I think in all of this, you have the fact that while the mayor has control of the schools, thanks to the legislative victory that Mayor Bloomberg won, and that was renewed on several occasions, including a couple times in the Mayor de Blasio, it is not total control. He first and foremost shares power with the panel for education policy, but the mayor has a controlling share of votes there. Obviously, the City Council has some oversight powers and technically approves the budget, but a lot of that money comes from the state and frankly from the federal government through Title 1 funds and other means. And the governor and state are big players too, in this, as well as, of course, the unions. This is an area of city government where Unions have traditionally been very powerful. Some of the biggest controversies in New York City come from when the union was unhappy with the conduct of schools and there were big strikes. So a lot of other kind of cooks in the kitchen when it comes to education policy.
- [05:33]
B
Yeah, there's the governor and legislature, as you mentioned. Then there's also the state Education Department and the Board of Regents, which are quasi independent entities in some ways. A lot of appointments through the legislature. There's. So the power that rests in sort of state level entities on education is immense. Like a lot of other powers in New York, that New York City needs to ask for permission, ask for funding, ask for policy changes. A lot of it does go back to the state level. And that's where we've seen debates over these last couple mayoralties around mayoral control of city schools. But also, you know, the cap on charter schools is at the state level, and the state controls the education funding purse strings in big ways that come down to the city. And some of that has related to funding for charter schools, colocations, rent, things like that. So big battles all the time. And of course, the specialized high schools I mentioned earlier, the three big ones, the admissions process is enshrined in state law, and that has been a topic of contention under de Blasio and has certainly been part of the mayoral race discussion that we're having in 2021 here. And as we get to that 2021 race for mayor and of course the other races that are happening around the city for city council, comptroller, public advocate, borough presidents, you know, the issue we haven't mentioned yet that of course is dominating the discussion now is how Mayor de Blasio is managing Covid and schools. And he has taken a lot of hits, had some false starts, but also is getting a lot of praise from many parents and other quarters around being pretty forceful about reopening schools. And this might be part of his defining legacy as well. Although as we're speaking, we really don't know where this is all going to land. Vaccination is happening. Things seem fairly safe in schools, but we really don't know exactly where things are headed on that front.
- [07:33]
A
And that's a huge issue, obviously, for the candidates running in 2021, is, you know, de Blasio will finish this school year, will begin the 2122 school year, presumably with widespread, if not total in person learning. But obviously the successor is going to have to deal with the longer term impacts of this education experiment that has not necessarily gone particularly well over the past year. What's the impact of academically, of students having had remote learning for this long, of them having very uneven learning experiences even within the same classrooms, and the emotional impact that it's had, the damage we hear about to children emotionally and socially dealing with that is going to be the kind of portfolio of the next mayor as well as, as you said, we don't, we don't really know. We hope that, and we think that we are seeing the light at the end of the tunnel in terms of COVID But there obviously are variables out there with these new variants, questions about how effective the vaccines will be. We assume things will be normal by this time next year, but this may not be the last time we have to think about handling schools during a pandemic and learning lessons from this one. I think a big thing we need candidates in 21 to talk about.
- [08:46]
B
Well, like on so many other issues, Covid has exposed or further exposed major crises related to education, related to just society. That includes the number of homeless students, well over 100,000 is the estimate that are in the school system, either in shelters or doubled up with family members or friends. There's obviously the digital divide that has become such an enormous focus during COVID because of remote learning. Then going back to what you were saying, there's all the questions about the quality of remote learning and how much further many students are falling behind during COVID How far some students have started to fall behind during COVID The mayor has promised to have sort of a learning loss recuperation plan in place before next school year. But unquestionably the next mayor is really going to have to deal with the mess that's been left by Covid, that's been left by some of de Blasio's failures on this issue. To have a more robust remote education plan in place, to have bridged the digital divide better and other issues. And so the next mayor is facing that challenge, the challenges of just before COVID Again, so many under resourced, underperforming schools, many thousands of kids who can't read at grade level who are struggling in school, kids with undiagnosed learning disabilities, kids with learning disabilities who need more resources and more attention, and these huge resultant gaps in college and career readiness that still exist in the city even as we've seen graduation rates and test scores creep up. There are still these major problems in city schools that were here before COVID and have only been exacerbated.
- [10:33]
A
And the resource issues and the questions about readiness obviously overlap with the deep racial segregation of the school system, which is quite striking when you look at different schools. And obviously that is something that de Blasio has been pressed to deal with. And there was a task force that produced a report on that and some recommendations. And the mayor, you know, did move to implement a kind of lukewarm version of those this year by removing middle school screens and changing a kind of particularly egregious geographic screen for high schools in one particular district. But there's a lot of pressure to do more when it comes to the test for the selective high schools, the gifted and talented program, the non sh sat high schools, of which there are many and frankly don't have the single test standard, which for all its flaws at least, is a quasi objective standard, have a much more complicated and subjective mix of ways to screen who comes to those schools. Fixing that is something that there's a lot of pressure on the mayor to do, but it's very, very complex and a lot of different allies and enemies and kind of fractures in that issue. When you try to talk about dealing with the SHSAT test, there are people in the black and Latino communities who are concerned about racial disparities and how the test enforces them, reinforces them. And then you have parents in the Asian community who tend to be very well represented in those schools who believe that changing the test would harm their children's ability to access those schools. I think two other issues that come to mind too are school safety, a lot of pressure to remove police from schools, but the concerns about how you then handle the fact that there is sometimes violence in school schools, and, you know, violence and discipline are a key problem or a key obstacle to learning. And the one thing that maybe is for another time, but connects to this is we're talking here about K through 12. But for a lot of students in New York City, public schools connect directly to the CUNY system, which is incredibly important system that's under a lot of pressure, dealing with its own kinds of segregation and resource issues. And frankly, as where some of the preparedness issues you've talked about really come to bear. When students are in college being asked to do college level work and finding that their writing skills or their reasoning skills are not up to snuff.
- [12:57]
B
Right. And I think it's important that you mention, you know, the wide range of things here that the mayoral candidates, as they're appearing at these endless number of forums are being asked about, include a lot of the hot button issues like SHSAT and the specialized high school admission, gifted and talented school screens School safety and those issues that you just mentioned. There's been limited discussion about cuny and there probably needs to be a mayoral forum just focused on cuny. But it's notable that in the mayor's race, only one candidate, so far as we're talking, at least here in mid February, Shaun Donovan, has put out a detailed education plan. A number of other candidates have put out bits and pieces of their education agenda, and many of them have been answering education related questions to give a sense of their stances at these forums. And there's a wide range within the Democratic primary of viewpoints on a number of these topics that are, you know, voters need to sort out, we in the media need to sort out and help show voters. And some of that's happening and much more will be. There seems to be a good bit of consensus in the field that mayoral control of city schools needs to stay, although there's a couple different viewpoints on that. But there's a lot of talk about some of these hot button issues that often without a really detailed education plan being put out by the candidates, sort of obscures a lot of what the mayor and their school's chancellor really does with the school system. And so much of that is sort of about a broader vision for management, for how principals, you know, how much control over their schools, principals have, the roles of superintendents, the resources that schools have. You know, we talk about school safety. A lot of times that discussion is focused on police and school safety agents and whether there's NYPD officers that are armed in some schools, metal detectors. But then often that leaves out, you know, the role of guidance counselors and social workers and nurses at schools. And those are, you know, important topics for the mayoral candidates to talk about as well, especially if they're talking about removing school safety agents or NYPD officers from school. What's their plan for bringing in those other resources?
- [15:11]
A
Yeah, I mean, it's really a soup to nuts issue. Right? I mean, we're talking about, you know, vision. What, what is the role of schools? What should we be preparing students for? How, again, as you said, how do you manage this massive system? Write down questions about pedagogy. I mean, you were a teacher. My mom was an elementary school teacher. And, you know, I know there is ongoing debate about whether to teach kids who are younger whole language or phonics in terms of how they acquire language. And obviously there are questions about how you deal with something that New York City uniquely has to deal with, which is students coming in who do not have an English language background, sometimes coming here in high school and, you know, facing the pressure of deciding how to prepare for a career or college on a much tighter timeline timetable than others. I think this all kind of boils down to the fact that in these debates we're probably not going to get into a lot of these more granular issues, but we have to think about big questions for candidates. And I think one of them for me is this question about integration and how do you preserve some of the good aspects of having different kinds of high schools and different kinds of other schools, middle schools, without having this stark disparity of resources and these unfair racial skews? I think that is a very thorny question and it's not something that slogans will answer, and that's certainly one I want to have answered. What's one or two of yours?
- [16:40]
B
Well, I think, you know, along with what we mentioned earlier about a plan for making up for, let's just call it Covid, learning loss, you know, is essential. And what does that plan look like? But then broader than that, as I said before, what's your plan for underperforming schools? How do you do school turnaround? And does that tie into a more sweeping vision of school desegregation, which in itself is a school improvement plan across the board. One of the other things I'd point to is this combination of what qualities are you looking for in a school's chancellor? What type of school's chancellor would you appoint? Do you have any names? Of course. Would be nice to hear from candidates, although they're often hesitant to say those. And how would you and that chancellor manage this massive bureaucracy? What kind of changes would you make to DOE central headquarters and to the roles of superintendents, principals and others? And I'll just throw one more in there. Overcrowded schools and large class sizes are huge issues. Again, this is the nuts and bolts of sort of managing the system. And there is there are ways that have been pointed to to both reduce class sizes and reduce school overcrowding that the next mayor really needs to take a look at or develop new strategies to do those things. But that's something I want to hear from these mayoral candidates is how would they address school crowding and class size challenges?
- [18:09]
A
Well, audience, lucky for you, there will be no test on this material. This is just a review session, but hope you found it helpful. Hope you'll stay tuned to citylimits.org and gothwingdeset.com for coverage of the race and a Maxim Murphy on WBAI 99.5 FM every Wednesday at 5. And of course, as we say every time we do one of these, go to Vote NYC for information about who's running and whether or not you're registered.