I’ve been in an uncomfortable position the past few weeks—defending the Department of Education.
I know that sounds crazy, given the errors in the scoring of the Gifted & Talented tests, the negative reaction to the rolling out of the Common Core standards, and the long wait lists at many of the city’s elementary schools. Yet here I am, standing up for the people who work in such offices as Portfolio Management (in charge of opening new schools) and Student Enrollment (in charge of managing admissions and enrollment), who faced a barrage of criticism from parents, local officials, and even fellow DOE employees at last month’s overcrowding task force meeting led by Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver.
The message was clear: You are not doing your job.
Probably no one intended to attack the two women representing the DOE at the meeting, who said they would be making alternate offers to waitlisted kids at PS 234, 276 and 89 next month. (Update: PS 89’s waitlist was reduced to just three or four children after the school decided to open a fourth kindergarten class.)
They had no answer to the big question looming over the meeting: Where will the children on the wait lists be sent to school?
Although the women bore the brunt of everyone’s disappointment with grace, whoever in the DOE sent them to the meeting with their hands empty owes them an apology. In what is seen as a mismanagement of enrollment in our fast-growing community, they were the ones who had to take the heat.
People beat up on the DOE but who exactly in the DOE is to blame?
It’s certainly not the schools themselves.
On an early Saturday morning last month, I watched parents race around Greenwich and Duane Streets as they prepared for the annual Taste of Tribeca, a fundraiser for PS 234 and PS 150. Those tireless workers and the parents who participated in this pricey fundraiser love their schools, as do parents at the other Downtown schools who volunteer hours of their time at auctions and book fairs, attend PTA meetings, and help out in classrooms throughout the year.
No one blames the principals or teachers (who as employees of the DOE are the agency’s public face) for screw-ups on testing, enrollment, and curriculum changes.
They are seen as victims, as much as the families who, through a random lottery, end up on a wait list, a temporary limbo that can drive a person to hate their lucky next door neighbor whose child was accepted to their zoned school.
The School Construction Authority might seem a likely candidate for blame, but when its representatives show up at our monthly overcrowding meetings, they are armed with statistics that they assert are as accurate as the enrollment projections embraced by Community Board 1 and the task force. And they are so pleasant! As opposed to the task force members who have had it up to here with what they perceive as an inexcusable lack of planning.
There is definitely planning going on. Go on the SCA’s website and take a look. I am not a statistician, and maybe those projections are flawed, but it is sobering to realize that the DOE is charged with providing school seats for every single child in the city, not just for ours in this little end of Manhattan Island.
The 2008 Capital Plan, which laid out the SCA’s construction goals for a four-year period, cited “the economic realities of the time” as the reason for slashing the previous budget by $2 billion.
The need to prioritize the needs of each school district will become all the more difficult as the city faces a growing student population and aging infrastructure. And the DOE, in the coming capital plan, must also take into account the tremendous and unexpected costs of Hurricane Sandy, which damaged 70 schools.
So, who – or what – is to blame? The economy? The school chancellor? The mayor, who 12 years ago took on the responsibility of the public education system, with the mandate of improving instruction, teachers, and test scores?
The LMDC for encouraging families to move downtown after 9/11?
Let’s just blame the DOE, whoever that is.
Connie Schraft is PS 89’s parent coordinator. For questions about Downtown schools, email connie@tribecatrib.com.