Chelsea teachers join citywide rally against schools restructuring

Volume One, Issue 24, March 2 - March 8, 2007

By Barry Paddock
Chelsea Now photo by Elisabeth Robert

Wilma Velazquez, a teacher who lives and works in Chelsea, got to St. Vartan’s Cathedral early on Wednesday, managing to snag a seat near the front of the rally at the Murray Hill church. She was there to challenge Mayor Bloomberg and School Chancellor Joel Klein’s recently announced reorganization of the entire New York City public school system.

Soon, the room around her filled to its capacity of about a thousand people. Two overflow rooms filled as well, where the rally’s speakers could be heard on closed-circuit TV. Even in these overflow rooms, students, teachers and parents applauded wildly and chanted, “Make the right choice! Listen to our voice!”

“Parents and teachers learned about this restructuring from seeing it in the news,” Velazquez said. Any restructuring, she insists, should be “a discussion. You bring the parents and educators together to make a plan that works in the classroom.”

Ten years ago, Velazquez left a career in real estate to teach in Chelsea, where she grew up. “There’s no greater satisfaction,” she said, explaining her career change, “than seeing a light go on in a child’s face, when they say ‘I got it!’ about something they couldn’t understand before.”

She teaches ESL and Spanish at the Clinton School for Writers and Artists (M.S. 260), the first alternative middle school in District 2 when it opened 35 years ago. The small and selective school pairs students with local artist mentors during their final year before high school.

“It’s going to be chaos at the beginning of the school year,” Velazquez predicts of next September when the massive reorganization is due to take effect. “Parents and students need consistency and clarity, as do teachers.”

Her fellow teachers attending the rally were quick to agree.

Rosemary Cella, who has taught Math and Science at M.S. 260 for 13 years, worries that “our creativity as teachers is being taken away, replaced by micromanagement and high-stakes testing. Who in the D.O.E.’s upper echelon has gone through the ranks? It’s like running an accounting firm with people at the top who don’t know accounting,” she said, referring to Klein, who had a high-powered background in law, business and government but had no substantial education experience before being appointed schools chancellor by Bloomberg in 2002.

In his January 2007 State of the City address, Bloomberg announced he and the chancellor will abolish the City’s 10 school regions, each of which now consists of about 110 schools overseen by one superintendent. These 10 regions are themselves creations of the mayor and chancellor, the product of an earlier restructuring.

Under the newly announced plan, principals, rather than being overseen by a superintendent, will choose from one of three new kinds of oversight. High-performing schools can become “empowerment zones” where the principal has maximum control and minimal oversight. Other schools can get support from new D.O.E. support structures, not yet unveiled, involving former superintendents. Still other schools can choose to find an outside overseer such as a community organization, university or, controversially, a for-profit consulting firm.

Some at the rally worried this is a stealthy way for the mayor and chancellor to open the door to greater corporate oversight of City schools.

The influence of highly paid consulting firms on the D.O.E. was an especially sore point for the rally’s audience. It was a private consulting firm, hired by the chancellor to find ways to move millions out of school bureaucracy and into classrooms, that advised the D.O.E. last month to cut and consolidate school bus routes. The firm undercounted thousands of kids who rely on the busses, resulting in both the City giving stranded six-year-olds Metrocards to replace canceled buses and desperate parents hiring private car services or taking off work to drive their kids to and from school.

“They’re making decisions affecting us and our environment,” said Leidi Chavez, a junior at Brooklyn’s Franklin K. Lane High School who was at the rally with student members of an activist group she co-founded aimed at improving her school. “We’re the ones dealing with the effect of their decisions every day.”

From the rally stage, Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum, reflecting on the mayor and chancellor’s leadership, said, “They have created an echo chamber, a deafness that is absolutely unbelievable.” Eager to reverse this image, Klein has embarked on an ongoing “listening tour” to all five boroughs. He has been met by overflow crowds fiercely denouncing his plan, even as he argues that it will give each school some $170,000 extra and make funding more equitable between schools.

City Comptroller William C. Thompson Jr. opposes the plan for its lack of community input. “They say we’re against reform,” he thundered from the rally’s stage. “Nothing could be further from the truth. We just want them to get it right.”

Indeed, speaker after speaker called for their own brands of reform, especially smaller class size, a top priority for the United Federation of Teachers, one of the principal organizers of the rally, but a low priority for the Chancellor. Klein’s hand may be forced by a bill just introduced by the State Assembly, which would require him to use a quarter of the money recently won from the State for the City school budget exclusively on reducing class size.

Facing growing opposition to the restructuring and some talk of a movement to take back the mayoral control of the school system granted by the state Legislature in 2002, Mayor Bloomberg announced on the day of the rally the creation of the new D.O.E. position of chief family engagement officer, an appointee who will represent parents and report directly to the chancellor.

In a further effort to soothe critics, Chancellor Klein sought out and was granted a meeting with organizers of the Feb. 28 event. They met just hours before the rally began.

Weingarten reported to the rally audience that organizers had asked the chancellor, “Would you stop until you’ve really heard from people in the trenches?” She then told the crowd, “He said no,” provoking a mass eruption of boos and hisses.