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Opinion

editorial


NOW NO ONE TRULY REALLY RUNS NEW YORK CITY’S PUBLIC SCHOOL SYSTEM

By Post Editorial Board

Published May 4, 2024, 6:47 a.m. ET

The Legislature’s latest fiddles to the mayoral-control law leaves Mayor Adams’
power over the city Department of Education hanging by a thread — and that was
the intention.

Combined with similar changes the same lawmakers made two years ago, it makes it
certain that decisions by Adams’ schools chancellor, David Banks, will regularly
be blocked by the Panel for Education Policy, which must approve many key moves.

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CUNY Graduate Center Prof. David Bloomfield described the plan as a “putrid
kettle of fish cooked up by the Legislature.”

Back in 2022, lawmakers insisted on limiting Adams to choosing just 13 of the
PEP’s 23 members, and removing his power to replace his nominees at will.

In 2022, lawmakers insisted on limiting Adams to choosing just 13 of the PEP’s
23 members, and removing his power to replace his nominees at will. Getty Images

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This year, they brought it down to 13 of 24, just over half — by adding a new
independent voting member who will chair the panel.

The mayor gets to choose that chairman or -woman, but only from candidates
nominated by the state Senate, Assembly and Board of Regents (whose members are
themselves chosen by the Legislature, and in effect by the Assembly speaker).

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In practice, this means that no one will get nominated to chair the PEP without
an OK from the city United Federation of Teachers, which basically bosses the
Legislature on these issues.

And the chair runs the meetings, no matter what other PEP members think, which
is an enormous power when it comes to setting the agenda.

In the original mayoral-control law, the PEP (and especially its chair) was
supposed to support the mayor and chancellor; now they’ll struggle to get their
agenda voted on at all, let alone approved.

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Unless City Hall manages to ensure every one of the mayor’s picks for a PEP seat
will be a complete loyalist (rather than, say, a reasonable voice who might
disagree from time to time), the panel will regularly wind up going rogue: UFT
lobbying and intimidation is sure to be relentless (it always is).

Even without the lunatic new chair, the UFT last year was able to engineer PEP
rejection of DOE decisions to award (perfectly available) space to charter
schools looking to expand

This is pretty much the culmination of a decades-long UFT drive to eviscerate
mayoral control, which has picked up steam with progressives’ rise to dominance
in the Legislature.

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We’re nearly back to the days of the old Board of Education, when voters had no
one to hold accountable for failing schools — and so the city wound up with a
lot of them.

Except that now the Legislature is sporadically micromanaging the DOE, as with
the new PEP-chair gimmick as well as the “class size” law — which will wind up
downgrading the teacher corps for the city’s neediest students, among other ill
effects, while doing “good” only for the UFT.

And UFT pawns like Speaker Carl Heastie (D-Bx) and state Sen. John Liu
(D-Queens) will keep at it until someone holds them to account.

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Mayoral control was always about ensuring someone would have the power and the
motive to demand accountability from teachers, principals and the sclerotic
education bureaucracy.

What do you think? Post a comment.

The Legislature’s steadily made that back into a dream.

Parents and voters furious at the state of the schools are stuck driving up I-87
north to gripe to Albany.


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Filed under carl heastie ,  david banks ,  department of education ,  editorial
,  education ,  eric adams ,  john liu ,  legislature ,  mayoral control ,  nyc
,  public schools ,  united federation of teachers ,  5/4/24
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