Steve Koss is a New Yorker, a math teacher, and an active contributor to the groups battling corporate reform for the past decade.
He has some ideas to add to those I suggested to the Mayor-elect:
Diane,
Agree with your first five recommendations/mandates. Here’s five more of mine.
Sixth, Mayor-elect deBlasio must oversee radical revision if not elimination of the school-grading system which has confused parents and badly skewed administrators’ behaviors regarding test results, parent surveys, graduation rates, etc. There is nothing inherently wrong with measuring, but the results should guide efforts at improvement, not serve as bonus-triggering carrots or job-threatening sticks.
Seventh, the new Mayor should work to radically overhaul the Panel for Education Policy so that it no longer acts as a pointless rubber stamp of a single official’s educational whims. With that overhaul must come either substantial upgrading of CEC’s or new vehicles for ensuring that parent/community input becomes part of the education policy-making and decision process, just as it is for every suburb in the NYC area. [Steve: Mayor Bloomberg made up the name Panel on Educational Policy to underscore its powerlessness. I believe the law still calls it the NYC Board of Education. Changing the law so that appointees serve for a set term, not at the pleasure of the appointing authority, would enhance its independence. The mayor now has a working majority of eight compliant individuals. This mayor needs a real board with the ability to ask questions and vote no.]
Eighth, the Mayor must select a schools chancellor who is (a) an educator, (b) a communicator, (c ) open-minded, (d) sympathetic to the needs of local parent communities, (e) genuinely concerned about the education of the whole child, not just the parts of the child measured by NYSED, and (f) more desirous of helping struggling school succeed than shutting them down.
Ninth, de Blasio should mandate a policy goal to provide adequate classroom space (including gyms, art/music rooms, libraries, etc.) for all students in all schools and reduce class sizes to more educationally beneficial levels.
Tenth, the Mayor and his new Chancellor must bring back into the school system educational commitment to physical education, the arts, and civics, thereby returning schools to the joyful, rounded, multi-cultured (and multi-cultural) learning environments they used to be before Bloomberg turned them into joyless test factories.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I would add an eleventh, which is that the new mayor should announce a policy, to be followed at every level, of reducing school-wide segregation. Currently, one of the real and rather heartbreaking effects of school choice is that schools have been encouraged to market themselves to various demographics, so that very often the hallway that contains one co-located school will look very different from the hallway above it, which houses another co-located school. Given that those co-located schools usually have very different fund-raising capabilities–no matter how much lip service is paid to working together on grant applications–the result is clear inequality in educational resources. The kids are aware of it. And, these results trickle up into middle school and high school admissions. There has been a lot of talk in New York City of racial divides at the top high schools, but in fact the divides start many years earlier, and it is nowhere more clear than at these co-located neighborhood schools.
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Number 12:
It would be in the best interest of students, teachers, and parents, for Mayor Elect DiBlasio to review the competency of many of the NYC principals. There are principals appointed and kept in place because of their connections. The networks have protected these principals because the networks are paid through school budgets by those principals.. One hand washes the other so to speak.
There has been abherent and fascistic treatment of targeted teachers by some of these principals. Rubber rooms, isolation, false allegations, upheld by the DOE minions, along with the vast sums of taxpayer money spent on attorneys.
All of this should be investigated under the new regime, if we intend to put democracy back in place.
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@Koss… I just recently read Robert Reich’s short piece in both the Berkeley Blog and Huffington Post (he writes a monthly article – some longer/some shorter and this month it is a short one). He addresses de Blasio’s win as no fluke (http://blogs.berkeley.edu/2013/11/06/what-tuesdays-election-results-really-mean/ ). I would very much like to see Reich and Ravitch sound off against Rhee in that upcoming debate as they would make a formidable team. Everything I read that Reich addresses from an economic and political standpoint makes it seem ever-so-apparent how public education has been the testing ground for corporate take-over of public policy via our government… it is ever-so-apparent in what we as educators realize day in and day out as non-educator corporate types create crisis which they then “solve” to suit their needs … i.e. they create untested education policy and curriculum at great expense to students and great profit to them. The result is an ever-growing increase of societal inequality as seen within the public schools. All-the-while, those creating and enforcing these policies send their kids to elite private schools (thinking Rhee, King, Obama etc…). I hope readers of Diane’s blog will follow along in reading Reich’s articles (Huffington Post, Berkeley Blog) and comment as is fitting. It would be nice to “catch his attention” at the growing movement of public school teachers/parents/administrators fed up! Here is how he concludes one of his articles in the Huffington Post:
“If you believe the fix is in and the game is rigged, and that a handful of billionaires and their Tea Party puppets are destroying our government, do something about it. Rather than give up, get more involved. Become more active. Make a ruckus. It’s our government, and the most important thing you can do for yourself, your family, your community, and the future, is to make it work for all of us…” (taken from: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-reich/republican-shutdown-goal_b_4063703.html )
I would say the same for all of us in public education who have suffered under a “rigged corporate ed reform game”… Become more active. Make a ruckus. It’s our PUBLIC EDUCATION, and the most important thing you can do for yourself, your family your community, and the future, is to make PUBLIC EDUCATION work for all of us…”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-reich/pragmatists-ideologues-an_b_4244209.html
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When ?? Joyful NYC schools? When ??
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Deb,
Maybe it’s just a question of relative degree, or perhaps I’ve chosen the wrong word. But I believe many children pre-Bloomberg viewed school as a place where they could explore and cultivate their interests in science, art, music, etc. without incessant, dreary test prep and the Damoclean sword of high stakes tests hanging over their heads and threatening their teachers and principals, and even their very schools. I’ve seen enough anecdotes about alternately bored and sleepless, nerve-racked children to know that schools now are often not the environments they used to be a dozen years ago.
Perhaps I should have said “less pressured” or “more unstructured and exploratory” instead of “joyful?”
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