Parents have a “human right” to be involved in the city Department of Education’s (DOE) decision-making process, education advocates assert.
The Independent Commission on Public Education (iCOPE), a Brooklyn-based organization of parents, educators and community activists, says the department’s policy of reorganizing the school system without prior consultation with parents is a human rights violation that must end now.
“The community has been shut out,” charged Warren Miner, a member of iCOPE’s planning committee. “Everything is controlled through the chancellor’s office or the mayor. There’s no community input.”
This has been a constant complaint as of late, especially as parents learn that their children’s schools, including South Shore, Canarsie and Lafayette high schools, will be restructured after the decisions to do so are made by DOE officials.
“This is a public education system,” says Ellen Raider, a member of iCOPE’s coordinating committee. “We don’t want three men in a room making the decisions…We want a dialogue in the city about what education should be like in the 21st century.”
“One of the biggest problems that we have today is that under the current mayoral system, the parents have been eliminated from the process,” said Assemblyman Alan Maisel. “And I think that is a big mistake because it basically returns us to the bad old days prior to the reorganization where all the decisions were top-down.”
But, he noted, during the structure under then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani, parents had a voice through the school boards, which Mayor Michael Bloomberg replaced with community education councils (CEC).
Although the school boards were labeled by many as corrupt – hence the reason they were abolished – CECs are often criticized for not really providing a voice for parents and having no power or influence with Bloomberg and schools Chancellor Joel Klein.
The councils “have no role to play,” Maisel said.
Members of iCOPE say it’s the mayoral control of the school system that’s led to a decline in educrats’ interest in parental input.
“Mayoral control is not working because the community has been shut out,” Miner said.
Klein recently took action to better involve parents in DOE endeavors by attending various CEC meetings throughout the city to discuss new school reforms and the latest restructuring of the department.
Keeping with its human rights campaign, iCOPE says DOE’s strong focus on test prep must go.
Teachers spend too much time teaching for the test, and as a result, subjects like art and music suffer, Miner said.
“That’s not a satisfactory method of education,” he said. “You have a school that will spend five days before the state tests come in concentrating on math only to the exclusion of everything else. School after school is doing this.”
According to Raider, “This insistence on test prep doesn’t even touch the full development of the human personality. It decides if a student can fill out bubble forms.
“We want alternative ways of measuring the whole child. There’s a place for standardized tests but the way it’s being done now is silly.”
For more about iCOPE, log onto www.icope.org.
6 years ago
