From time to time PIE has tackled some difficult issues and expressed not very popular opinions. Here's a sampling.
June 8, 1994
A SECOND OPEN LETTER TO COMMISSIONER SOBOL
Dear Commissioner Sobo1:
What do I do now?
In my letter to you last summer. I was worried about my school district's plan for site-based management. As I read your New Compact For Learning, the point wasn't business as usual, but "dramatic change," to "re-conceive the system itself." But I cou1dn't figure out how we were going to get there given that our site-based teams were overloaded with district employees. The few parents didn't represent our minority and/or lower-income populations - and there was no meaningful community outreach.
In your kind reply, you (and, in separate calls, Mr. John Quinn and Mr. Carlo Cuprill of the Lower Hudson Field Services Team) assured me that the point WAS to turn around the way we teach our children. You urged me to work with the District on their plan, which I have done. But it has now been a year and a half, and I am convinced that Nyack's site-based teams are set up to fail. That is, to make as little change and as slowly as possible.
*0ne building team resigned in frustration at getting nothing done .
*Another has yet to make a single decision - of any kind! - in the year and a half it's been together.
*Much of the teams' time has been spent on surveys which, by their very nature, are slanted towards the more literate, better educated segments of our population.
*Parents and community members have been forbidden to speak at the meetings of one site-based team - which has asked to decide in private whether their meetings should be open to the public.
*There has been no on-going effort to communicate with or involve the larger community.
*More than three-quarters of all the team's members have ended up being employees of the district.
*And of the 14 parent reps, I know of only two parents of color. This in a district whose high school is 40% minority.
What do I do, Commissioner Sobol, when your idea to bring innovative ideas and equality into the system is being used to maintain the status quo? By the un-democratic nature of their composition, Nyack's site-based teams are slowing down the decision-making process to the point of paralysis.
What do I do when the district refuses to include a sub-committee's recommendation that teams ask how well our teachers are teaching? Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems impossible to follow the spirit of the New Compact without at least considering this question.
What do I do when the teams don't discuss minority hiring, anti-bias curriculum, or what the Compact calls "lower standards and expectations" for parts of the student body?
Nyack's site-based teams are fu11 of well-meaning, dedicated people, but IF the point was to change education, I don/t see how it can be done when the teams are largely composed of people with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo.
You wrote that one of our schools' major problems is that
parents often feel excluded, unable to influence the education of their own children." I know you didn't mean for site-based teams to deepen that feeling. And I know that you didn't intend shared decision making to become another ring of bureaucracy, another- set of hoops for new ideas to have to Jump through.So, what do I do now?
How do I begin an appeal process so that the district can re-^ think this new bureaucracy before it becomes permanent?
How do I get someone from your office to come in and look over what we have -- and don't have -- here in Nyack?
I hope you can help, and I look forward to your reply.
Sincerely,
Daniel Wolff
Luis Rodriguez
Alan Denker
Brett De Palma
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