MS 158 PROBLEM ILLUSTRATES HOW INTEGRITY IS NOT VALUED UNDER MAYORAL CONTROL

In this day and age, trying to sweep school safety incidents under the carpet is bound to fail because cameras are ubiquitous. The video of the student beat-down of another pupil at MS 158 in Queens should shock everyone but won't surprise people who work in NYC schools.

Here is part of how the NY Post describes what happened:

Newly released video of an all-out punching, kicking, hair-pulling, girl-on-girl assault in the cafeteria of a Queens middle school is just the latest sign New York’s schools are out of control — and it has parents fuming, teachers wringing their hands and the schools chancellor literally walking the other way.

“I really don’t think he cares,” the mom of the victim in the caught-on-video cafeteria fight told The Post Friday, a day after Chancellor Richard Carranza walked out on her when she tried to confront him about the brawl at a town hall meeting for parents and teachers at the school.

“He didn’t say a word — he just sat there,” as she pleaded for action, said the mom, Katty Sterling, whose daughter was attacked at MS 158 in Bayside last week.

Later in the Post piece, a parent sort of feels for the teachers who witnessed the mayhem:

The kids are running the school, complained Jenny Suarez, the parent of a sixth-grader at the school.

“I see the teachers are just standing around not doing much. I guess they’re afraid of getting involved and losing their jobs,” she said.

QNS also has a story on last week's District 26 Town Hall.

Hundreds of concerned parents attended the standing-room-only event at M.S. 74 in Bayside, which began with prewritten questions read by members of Community Education Council (CEC) 26. But things took a turn after the father called out from the crowd requesting “just one minute” of time to speak.

The crowd yelled “answer this man,” and “let him speak,” urging the CEC and chancellor to give the parent time to express his concerns. QNS spoke to the father after the meeting, but we are withholding his name to protect the identity of his daughter.

“The school basically just covered it up and all I wanted to do was just talk. But I know they wouldn’t let me talk,” he said. “It’s just disconcerting.”

Further down:

Outraged mother Katty Sterling, whose daughter was involved in a physical altercation at M.S. 158 approached the stage and said that “nobody is doing anything” to reprimand the student who instigated the fight.

“The other student is sitting in school getting all the privileges and what is my daughter doing? Sitting at home, sick, getting traumatized,” yelled Sterling.

The chancellor and CEC members were seen conferring on stage before Aviles announced that the meeting would have to cut the meeting short. Aviles told QNS that the decision to end the town hall was the Department of Education’s decision and not the decision of the CEC.

Elected officials are involved too as they have written a letter to the Chancellor demanding answers. This is part of a QNS article on that letter:

The letter was authored by northeast Queens representatives Congresswoman Grace Meng, Councilmail Paul Vallone, Senator John Liu, Councilmen Barry Grodenchik and Peter Koo and Assemblymembers Nily Rozic and Ed Braunstein.

“These reported incidents are horrifying, and the apparent lack of action is deeply troubling and absolutely unacceptable,” said Meng. “No student should be subjected to harassment and violence at school. Our schools must be safe and welcoming environments for each and every student. When students are in school, they should be focused on learning, not worrying about their safety. Chancellor Carranza must immediately address the issues we’ve raised, and I await his reply to our letter. As the mother of two young boys who attend local public schools, I firmly believe that nothing is more important than ensuring the safety of our children.”

Having Senator John Liu as a signatory is rather ironic as Liu chairs the Senate's New York City Education Committee so he could have helped use the powers of the Senate in 2019 to end mayoral dictatorship over NYC schools. Instead, he and the rest of the Legislature renewed it through 2022.

The inevitable result of mayoral control is fraud. Teachers and administrators worry about losing our jobs. Therefore, we have to produce constantly improving statistics to make the mayor look good. In the end, we wind up with this kind of system where safety incidents are swept under the carpets while student grades and the graduation rates are artificially inflated so almost everyone passes.

The NY Post Editorial Board covered this topic and actually got it right:

 For the record, the [graduation] rate is up nearly 9 percentage points since de Blasio took office — but city students’ showing on the national “gold standard” test for educational achievement, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, is basically flat.

Their Conclusion:

For the city, and probably other school districts across the state, another factor [for rising graduation rates] is cheating by school administrators. De Blasio’s system can’t seem to go a year without some new grade-fixing or bogus “credit recovery” scandal surfacing in The Post, thanks mostly to outraged teachers.

What New York needs isn’t simply rising graduation rates, but rising numbers of seniors actually ready to go to college or start a career. Any “success” short of that is just a marketing ploy.

The arrogance from the Department of Education along with the phony numbers are only going to end when teachers and parents are again empowered, as we once were before mayoral control, to be a check on the system. Could you imagine a superintendent who was accountable to an elected school board walking out on parents like Carranza did last week? We could go a step in the right direction if the UFT would do its job and show members that their union is truly supportive but in the end as long as teacher and principal ratings are tied to student assessment results and schools are judged in part based on how few incidents they have, the cover-ups, grade as well as diploma inflation will just continue.

Ending mayoral control would bring some needed integrity back to the schools. It expires in 2022 and it will only take either the State Senate or Assembly to kill it forever. Why can't we have an elected school board or borough elected boards like just about every other community  has?

1. P.S. To see how some teachers feel, please go to Chaz's School Daze and read his account on the lack of discipline and the comments.