City Council to DOE: Speed up compliance with governance law

Changes in the way public schools are run that were ordered by a law this summer could take until the end of the school year to implement, school officials said today.

At a meeting of the City Council Education Committee this afternoon, council members, along with teachers union president Michael Mulgrew, accused the Department of Education of dragging its heels in putting key provisions of the new school governance law into place.

At issue is how soon the DOE will make three key changes: returning superintendents to work exclusively in their districts, including parents of special education and English-language learner students on Community Education Councils and beginning work to open a new parent training center.

Testifying before the Council, Micah Lasher, the education department’s executive director of public affairs, said that he expected all of the new changes to be implemented fully by the end of this school year.

But Council Education Committee Chair Robert Jackson complained that time frame is too long. “The law doesn’t give you a year,” he said. “We need this implemented now.”

Lasher, alongside supervising superintendent Dorita Gibson and department general counsel Michael Best, argued that the department needs a full year to properly and smoothly introduce the changes.

Before the new governance law was passed, the education department assigned the city’s 32 community superintendents to work with principals and schools throughout the city rather than in specific school districts. The new law requires the superintendents to work “predominantly within their districts.”

Council member Dominic Recchia told the DOE officials that he had heard from superintendents who were still responsible for 20 to 30 schools outside of their district.

Lasher and Gibson responded that superintendents are now spending the vast majority of their time working within their assigned districts. But they acknowledged that superintendents are still devoting a small amount of effort to handing off their out-of-district duties to network leaders. Superintendents have developed relationships in schools over time, Lasher told council members, and their accumulated knowledge is needed to smooth schools’ transition to new leadership.

“I think it would be leaving schools in the lurch if we flipped a switch and said, you’re out of this and you’re in it,” Lasher said.

Lasher also emphasized that, under the letter of the law, superintendents are permitted to spend small portions of their time on out-of-district tasks so long as they are assigned “predominantly” to in-district duties. “We are in compliance with the law,” he said.

DOE spokeswoman Ann Forte said that three weeks into the school year, the department had received no reports of any superintendents so overwhelmed by out-of-district duties that they were prevented from devoting time to their in-district schools. And Lasher told council members that if there was ever a conflict between a superintendent’s responsibilities to a school outside their district with ones in their district, the in-district school would take priority.

Jackson also expressed frustration at the sluggish pace of efforts to fulfill another new requirement.  Each Community Education Council now must include a parent of an English-language learner and a parent of a special education student.

Lasher explained that the Office of Family Engagement and Advocacy is now conducting preliminary research into how many CECs currently fill the requirement and which councils may soon have vacancies before the chancellor proposes any new regulations to fulfill the new mandate; a proposal would then need to pass through a month-long comment period go before the city-wide school board for approval. Lasher estimated that it would be January before any firm plan to reserve spots for parents on the CECs would be put in place.

“This in particular is a complicated decision and we want to get it right,” Lasher said.

“Why is it so complicated?” Jackson asked. “Can’t you just expand the CECs by two slots?”

Again, the question comes down to the letter of the law, said Michael Best. The statute provides for nine CEC members, including the two parents.

Council members also wondered about the parent training center. Very little is currently known about what form the center will take, and council member Albert Vann asked about the delay.

Lasher responded that the city was waiting for the state to allocate funds for the center before initiating work to build the center, prompting Jackson to wonder why the city needed to wait to take the initiative.

The parent training center is part of four chapter amendments to the school governance law that have not yet been passed by the state Senate but which Mayor Bloomberg and the DOE have agreed to implement as part of the legislative deal. The amendment calls for the city to match state contributions of funding for the center, with each side contributing up to $800,000.

A source inside the education department said that while there are ways the Senate could allocate funds for the center before the amendments are passed, the city money cannot be set aside for the project until the state has set the ball in motion.

Critics noted that the city has had ample time since the law was passed to plan for changes. And they criticized the education department for failing to embrace the true intent of the legislation.

“There’s the letter of the law, and there’s the spirit of the law,” said principals union spokeswoman Chiara Coletti. “We had hoped the transition would happen more rapidly, because the law was very clear.”

Teachers union president Michael Mulgrew said that there was no reason the process should have taken so long.

“The DOE has received nothing but cooperation from all of the interested parties in instituting this law as quickly as possible,” he told Jackson. “It is now incumbent upon them.”

UPDATE: This post has been updated to correct an error that implied the 2002 school governance law specified that community superintendents work with schools outside their districts; the law did not substantially change the legal role of the superintendents, though in practice a DOE reorganization assigned superintendents duties outside their districts as well.