New York State Commissioner MaryEllen Elia–only two weeks on the job–took a hard line with Buffalo public schools. She warned that the district had a year to “fix” their schools or she would take them over and put them in receivership.
“If there was any question how serious the state is about taking control of Buffalo’s schools, new Education Commissioner MaryEllen Elia made clear her intentions to Buffalo School Board members late last week.
“Rest assured,” she told them in a meeting in Buffalo,“that if the schools do not show demonstrable improvement, someone will come in under my authority and fix those schools.”
“The state Education Department already is taking steps to do just that.
“A year from now, five Buffalo schools are headed for a takeover by someone outside the district.
“Twenty more city schools are on the same path for the following year.
“At that point, the state has within its power to place any city school it deems failing in the hands of someone outside the district. And as it stands now, just 15 of the district’s 56 schools are in good standing with the state.
“That means, unless significant improvement is made in student performance, someone other than the Buffalo superintendent or School Board will be in charge of nearly half of Buffalo’s public schools in just a couple of years.
“When Elia demanded that the School Board fix the city schools or she would act, she was referring to a new state law that allows for the appointment of receivers who would have unprecedented powers to make sweeping changes at failing schools.”
New York State has a bad record taking over schools. In 2002, the state took over the segregated Roosevelt School District. It failed to improve the schools or reduce their deficit.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
When we figure out that a holistic approach that eliminates economic segregation in housing and therefore schools as well, then we can fix those schools. everything else is a bandaid approach.
How about “fixing” segregation? It didn’t work in 1954 when Brown v Board of Ed was decided. It still doesn’t work today . . . except for the privileged who enjoy the benefits of exclusivity.
John Kucsera’s and Gary Orfield’s 2014 report on school segregation in NY includes a long passage about Buffalo’s attempt, and failure, at desegregation.
Click to access Kucsera-New-York-Extreme-Segregation-2014.pdf
Section attached here:
Buffalo
On the western side of the state is Buffalo – a city that experienced a historical
desegregation lawsuit beginning in the late 1960s. The city of Buffalo has encountered a
similar growth pattern to other large cities in the northeast during the twentieth century.
Between 1940 and 1970, the city underwent an increase of black migration due to the
economic growth occasioned by the war industry. Due to discriminatory housing,
lending, and real estate practices – typical in most northern cities at the time – a majority
of the black population was kept to specific neighborhoods within the older central city,
as whites began to move outward to surrounding suburbs, resulting in severely isolated
schools and districts across the city.
In 1964, several Buffalo parents appealed to New York State Commissioner Allen
regarding the racial imbalance, as well as other discriminatory acts like the districting of
new school buildings and teacher hiring and assignment practices, in the Buffalo Public
School System and the failure of the Board of Education to alleviate such issues. The
commissioner supported the plaintiffs and mandated a plan for mitigating racial
imbalance. In response, the Board of Education created a voluntary desegregated
program, consisting mainly of one-way busing of black students into majority white
schools. Both Commissioner Allen and Nyquist were never fully satisfied with the
Board’s program or progress. Over seven years, the Board ignored or rejected any other revised plans or programs. As such, the program only helped 2,600 inner-city youth attend peripheral schools, while allowing 2,000 to 4,000 white students to transfer from desegregated schools to predominately white schools.33 In addition, schools in 1972 were even more segregated than they had been in 1968. In 1972, only six out of 30 Erie County school districts had 1% nonwhite students. Of these six, the only district with a significant nonwhite population was Buffalo (47%). Within the Buffalo Public School System, 67 out of 96 schools enrolled 80 to 100% majority or minority student
populations, with 20 enrolling 90% black and 29 enrolling 90% white students.
As a result, in 1972, black and white parents, the NAACP, and the Citizen
Council on Human Relations filed a lawsuit alleging both de facto and de jure
segregation in the Buffalo Public School System. Besides the Buffalo Board of
Education, defendants also included those entities or individuals with power and
responsibility of the Board, including the Superintendent of Schools, the Buffalo
Common Council, the New York State Commissioner of Education, and the New York
State Board of Regents. In Arthur v. Nyquist (1976), the District Court ruled that the
defendants had intentionally created and maintained a persistent segregated public school system, and thus, was required to desegregate.
The Buffalo desegregation plan occurred in three phases over five years. Phase I
lasted from 1976 to 1977, and the plan submitted and approved by the court closed ten
schools, opened two magnet schools, changed feeder school programs, and bused over
3,000 students, resulting in greater racial balance in the city. Phase II covered 1977 to
1978 and consisted of transforming neighborhood black schools to specialized magnet
schools but the transfer was voluntary for white students. Due to the limited scope of
Phase I and voluntary nature of Phase II, few white students transferred to predominately
black schools.
The next phase began in 1980 and consisted of two parts. Phase III mandated
busing of pre-K to grade 2 white students to Early Childhood Centers in black
communities, and grade 3 to grade 8 black students to “Academies” in peripheral white
communities. Phase III-X (or three-expedited) occurred in 1981 and was an accelerated
version of the earlier plan, as well as a slight revision by adding a variety of programs to
enhance the desirability of desegregation. By 1981, over 14,000 students in Buffalo were being bused – close to 30% of total students in the city.
The results: in 1985, The New York Times ran a front-page article with the
headline: School Integration in Buffalo is Hailed as a Model for U.S. In 1993, 37 of the
58 elementary schools were within court-ordered guidelines establishing that schools
should comprise no more than 65% and no less than 30% minority students. Two years
later, the District Court – responding to recent decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court –
declared the Board of Education obtained unitary status, although more than one-third of the schools were out of compliance with court-ordered desegregation standards.
Following unitary status in 1995, the district experienced dramatic fiscal problems
and severe white flight. Some citywide magnet schools were retained but many special
features of the schools were cut. As a result, magnet schools were losing their attraction
to families, as neighborhood schools and other interdistrict school choice policies were
gaining traction. In addition, since 1990, the metropolitan area has remained in the top
10 most segregated metropolitan areas in the nation in terms of white-black residential
dissimilarity. Whether school segregation patterns from 1990 to 2010 are reflecting
these residential findings remains to be investigated.
I wish these state takeover laws came with a “results or else” provision. If the state (or private charter, or whatever) takes over a school or a district, they have two years (the most they ever allow the school itself) to “fix” the school. If they can’t do it, they have to publicly eat a steaming plate of crow, hand back the school, adequately fund it and promise never to interfere with that or any other school ever again.
But I guess “results” only matter when schools are democratically controlled.
The fixer’s first step is to hire expensive public relations folk.
Um, meant “Mmm, steamed crow.” Thx autocorrect!
Jesus, now I’m replying to the wrong person. What a disastrous sequence.
Someone’s a little rusty!
Mom, steamed crow . . .
If she tried this in Scarsdale, parents would be up in arms. What makes these self serving sycophants think they can impose punitive measures on poor people and immigrants? This reeks of colonialism at it’s finest … Let’s take over poor people’s schools so our friends can profit. Time for Elia, Cuomo, and all of the other corrupt Albany profiteers to be shown the back door.
The point is that this would never happen in Scarsdale.
That’s the scheme. They are easy targets. Look at New Orleans, Detroit and Newark. There’s no accountability or deadlines for them similar to what they define for public schools.
Well I hope that she is there on Saturday with her sleeves rolled, helping those teachers with Saturday school.
This from the same article:
http://www.buffalonews.com/feed/education-commissioner-to-buffalo-fix-your-schools-or-i-will-20150719
————————————————
THE BUFFALO NEWS:
“ ‘That someone’s going to come in here and wave a magic wand, and all of these kids who have severe problems will start doing well, that’s just not going to happen,’ Buffalo Teachers Federation President Philip Rumore said.
“Elia disagrees.
“ ‘It’s important for you to understand there will be consequences if you can’t move those schools forward,’ she said. ‘It’s handing you a tool and giving you an option to use it. If you don’t use it, I will.’ ”
—————————————————–
Exactly what is this “tool” to which she refers?
Will this “tool” be able to reverse or correct the conditions described in the following post from “Perdido Street Schools” blog, beneath an article covering Elia’s appearance in Buffalo?
http://perdidostreetschool.blogspot.com/2015/07/nysed-commissioner-maryellen-elia-shows.html
—————————————————-
“AnonymousJuly 20, 2015 at 7:07 PM
“I taught for three years in the Hempstead UFSD, at Hempstead High School specifically, one of the schools that have been ‘identified’ as a persistently struggling school.
“The school had a student population of approximately 65% African-American and 35% Latin-American. As a teacher of Spanish-speaking students, a majority of them were recent arrivals from El Salvador and Honduras. When I refer to them as recent arrivals, the time period includes students in the US from as little to just arriving to less than one year in New York.
“Both the black and Latino populations suffered extensively fro severe economic hardships. As a teacher of Latino students, I recall many of them were wonderful children, but the experiences that they had endured, both before coming to the US and then magnified after living in New York, created barriers that children should never have to experience.
“One student would shamefully glance at the floor when homework would be collected. He confided in me that he worked in a restaurant after school and didn’t get home until midnight. He did this to help his family pay bills. This student told me he wanted to do the homework but couldn’t because he was too tired and could not keep his eyes open that late at night.
“Another student used to look into classrooms during holiday season. When I asked her what she was doing, she told me she wanted to see if there was food because she was hungry.
“The high levels of unemployment, divorce rates, and crime in the area were heartbreaking, and I experienced this for the short time I was there.
“Ms Elia…what you fail to understand…what the reformsters want from you, is a punishment to be inflicted on a school that cannot defend itself. This policy is akin to walking over to a person who is handicapped and demanding that they walk, and when they say they can’t, the person making the demand beats them, hoping to get the desired effect, while knowing in the back of their mind that it will not happen under current circumstances.
“Ms. Elia…many of the teachers at Hempstead, both of the black and Latino students, were wonderful educators, warm and caring, using their expertise to change lives for the better.
“If you truly want to deal with the ‘struggling school syndrome’, it is time to break from the Cuomo Party Line…visit the schools, walk through the neighborhoods, talk with the students.
“I am most certain you will not, because the truth is not what you are looking for. You are helping your masters to profit off the backs of our neediest…as the blame is shifted against professional educators. What is even worse, is that the group identified here as the neediest is made up of children.
“Ms Elia…will you be a voice for them, or the people who are banking their success off the ‘manufactured’ failures of children?”
——————-
Again the above post from “Anonymous” is in the COMMENTS section at:
http://perdidostreetschool.blogspot.com/2015/07/nysed-commissioner-maryellen-elia-shows.html
Apparently, the “tool” of “receivership”—and it’s only Commissioner Elia who can wield it—is to turn over “failing schools” to management by privately-controlled, Wall Street-connected charter organizations, the same ones that bankrolled Governor Cuomo’s slim election victory last November—and boy, is Mario’s kid and Meryl Tish hell-bent on pleasing their corporate masters, and also on taking revenge on those who opposed Cuomo in the election, including… yes… the teachers unions.
That means that hundreds of millions of New York state tax dollars and assets—i.e. school campuses built by the public sector, annual school budgets in perpetuity, etc. will then be put under the control of the private sector originating on Wall Street. In legal and practical terms, the citizen-taxpayers—whose money and assets these Wall Street-connected operators will now control—will have no mechanism for holding private management accountable for anything it does, or for demanding transparency to the public over how these private operators run its school…
— over how salaries are set, ($500,000-plus for Eva Moskowitz)
— over whom they hire, (uncredentialed, poorly trained non-teachers… non-union who can them be fired at will, and regularly replaced every two years or so)
and
— over which students in the public they deign to educate—as these private sector managers can refuse to serve and/or kick out any students it finds too expense or too troublesome to teach—i.e. Special Ed. kids, homeless, foster care, bad behavior kids, etc.
In short, some good things are coming to New York state schools!
The district should refuse to comply unless the state pays all the money owed to them from the underfunded lawsuit. Why should the state be permitted to employ discriminatory funding practices, then invade the schools when they fail to meet minimum standards?
This.
Local taxpayers and yes, increases in state aid, have more than made up for that shortfall. Buffalo spent $25,000 per student in the 2014-2015 school year, considerably above the NYS average ($20,000) and more (in some cases almost twice as much) than the surrounding suburbs, even the highest-performing ones.
“Why should the state be permitted to employ discriminatory funding practices, then invade the schools when they fail to meet minimum standards?”
They should not be permitted to do this, but how do we stop the corrupt Rheeformers short of an outright bloody rebellion.
Those minimum standards changed drastically with NCLB, RTTT and the Common Core high stakes rank and yank flawed and fraudulent tests that mandated every child had to be college ready by age 17/18.
Before NCLB and all the rest of the CC Crap, minimum standards for high school graduation were usually set between 5th to 9th grade reading level probably based on the fact that the average literacy level in the United States was 5th grade reading skills and that about 26% of jobs in the U.S. didn’t even require a high school degree.
For instance, I don’t think anyone is going to totally automate yard work and the average gardener in the U.S. earns about $25 an hour and, from what I’ve read, there are more than 250,000 of them. It also doesn’t take a high literacy level to operate an electric powered nail gun in the housing construction industry.
If a child grows up without a love of learning and there are options for jobs that do not require a high level of literacy, a high school or college degree, aren’t this young adults supposed to have the freedom of choice to find a job that fits the lifestyle they grew into.
I think it is arguable that NCLB, RTTT and the Common Core Crap agenda of Bill Gates and David Coleman are stripping choice away from these young people by forcing them to comply with a so-called college ready agenda in a country that already has about 3 college graduates for ever job that requires a college education?
Tim, you need to dig deeper into the per pupil spending figures. If the system operates anything like Chicago, it is questionable just how much goes into instruction as opposed to administration. You need to tell us what those funds are supposed to cover. You need to see how much the district is required to spend on ESL/ELL services as well as other special ed funding. Typically the amounts in impoverished, minority districts will be or should be substantially higher than in economically stable districts with smaller minority populations. Per pupil spending means nothing without a breakdown. Since I have been hearing that NY has not been meeting its funding obligations for years(?), are these real delivered dollars?
Just wondering…are NY schools top heavy on administration? It seems to me that over the years administration, not just in NY but all over, has grown. Perhaps it is related to all the mandates from federal and state governments that tend to require mountains of paperwork. I really don’t know. Just curious.
Here is Buffalo’s adopted budget for the school year that just ended: http://www.buffaloschools.org/files/filesystem/2014-15%20budget%205%2014%2014.pdf
New York’s school spending is driven by much higher than average fringe benefits costs (as much as 5x the national average) and high salaries in the New York City area.
OY!
But can she fix them? Sounds like boasting. It’s a difficult problem.
Dienne and TC,
Exactly.
She can spread a little sunshine around from the “Florida Miracle.”
Mary Ellen Elia will fail just like all the other Rheeformers before her who have boasted the same threat. She will fail at improving the public school she helped destroy but she won’t fail in sending lots of public money into private pockets—private hedge fund pockets.
I predict that Mary Ellen Elia will do the same thing many of the other lying, frauds who are known as Rheeformers do when they fail. They will lie. They will cherry pick the numbers, hide important facts, make data difficult to find and as opaque as possible and then claim that she succeeded when in fact, she will just make education worse for the children who need it most.
I think what we are witnessing—even as some of us fight back to save our republic—is the systemic greed based self-destruction of a culture and its civilization from the top down. What the U.S. ends up with in a few decades might be worse than 1984 by George Orwell and/or Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury and/or Brave New World by Aldous Huxley and/or Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick, etc.
It seems that our legal system is failing the republic just like the White House and Congress has in addition to one state legislature and governor after another as the states continue to fall to the oligarchs as they spend huge fortunes to elect the puppets who will do their bidding.
And what did many of our unelected and unwanted leaders scheme about during their so-called summer camp for billionaires in Sun Valley, Idaho this month?
http://www.businessinsider.com/the-biggest-sun-valley-deals-2015-7
Elia should begin with recommendations for those schools for this school year. If there is no improvement all along the way, people must be involved in figuring out why. The school should go into some form of receivership only if there is good reason to believe that the staffs are not cooperating. The state should get involved in those schools on the ground level and have some understanding of what’s going on, rather than issue an ‘or else’ followed by kicking the problem somewhere else where the likely ineffective solutions will be churn, data analysis, silly paperwork and/or whatever else somebody without a clue decides. There should be a genuine attempt at a partnership including supports before ever going the other direction, which will likely be a highly punitive blind dead end.
She couldn’t even fix a running toilet
MEE’s initials tell us what we need to know about her.
“Rest assured,” she told Rip Van Winkle,“that if the schools do not show demonstrable improvement, someone will come in under my authority and fix those schools.”