Your position on the Mayoral control

Yes

No

Would you support discontinuing Mayoral control of the public school system and replace it with a new system that is neither Mayoral control nor the old school board?

X

If you answered "no" to the above question, would you support working with education stakeholders to amend the existing Education Law to create more checks and balances?

Which of the following changes to the Panel for Education Policy (PEP) would you support? Please check as many as you like.

Yes

No

• A directly elected PEP, instead of the current appointed members?

X

• A reconstituted PEP with a majority not appointed by the Mayor?

X

• Allowing Community Education Councils (CECs) to select parent representatives to the PEP?

X

• Having PEP members serve with set terms, who cannot be fired at will by the Mayor or the other officials who appoint them ?

X

Which of the following measures to ensure that parents and community members have a say in their children's schools would you support? Please check as many as you like.

Yes

No

• Expand the authority of Community Education Councils, including the approval over school closings and co-locations?

X

• Authorize municipal control; i.e., the NYC Council with the power to pass laws regarding schools and educational policy, as they do in other areas?

X

• Provide authority to School Leadership Teams (SLTs) to develop school based budgets and select principals?

X

• Have CEC members elected by all district public school parents, rather than as currently solely by PTA officers?

X

• Support the hiring of a DOE Ombudsperson to investigate and settle parent complaints?

X

I support a citywide elected school board and elected Community School Boards in New York City.

I also support assistance for School Leadership Teams to develop good meeting processes and norms, including measures to help people of all backgrounds participate. The Department of Education should support school community priorities, not focus on enforcing central policy implementation from the top down.

I totally reject mayoral control as a way to improve schools. Majority-minority school districts have always been the victims of this disenfranchisement. Mayoral control has been a cover for facilitating public school privatization, charters, real estate deals, profiteering by for-profit vendors for "non-profit" charters, and investors doubling their money from loans to charters in seven years through the New Markets Tax Credit. The results of mayoral control (and state control) has been from bad to terrible in every city it has been tried: Detroit and eight other Michigan school districts, Chicago, Philadelphia, Newark, Patterson, Jersey City, Jackson, Boston, Baltimore, Cleveland, Providence, Washington DC, Memphis, New Orleans, Oakland, and New York City.

Would you support:

Yes

No

• Repeal APPR and de-link teacher evaluation to student test scores? (the current moratorium ends in 2019-2020)

X

• Expand the use of computerized state standardized exams?

X

• Create a Commission composed of public school parents, administrators and teachers to create a more fair and meaningful accountability system?

X

• Shorten the number of questions in the state exams while setting a time limit on these exams?

X

• Expand the number of schools that substitute performance assessments for Regents exams?

X

• Make the Regents exams fully optional and no longer required for high school graduation?

X

• Approve a law emphasizing parents' right to refuse the state exams and that the state and the districts must annually communicate this right to parents?

X

• Require that admissions to all high schools, including specialized NYC high schools, cannot be based upon a single standardized exam?

X

• Improve transparency in testing, by requiring the release of all test items after the state exams are given?

X

• Mandate an independent audit of the state exams, including their scoring methodology and alignment with grade-appropriate standards?

X

• Require that the state exams as well as the NYC specialized HS exam be analyzed for gender and racial bias?

X

School accountability based on standardized tests not accountability at all. We know from 50 years of data that the low-scoring schools are the segregated, high-poverty schools. The whole society is accountable for the segregation and poverty. The accountability for the schools needs to work the other way around, from the society and government to the schools. Are they providing what what good schools require:

- adequate funding

- desegregation between schools and within schools (i.e., no tracking)

- smaller class size

- teachers with decent wages, benefits, and job security so they can focus on teaching as a career

- democracy and collaboration in the school community, free of arbitrary and burdensome requirements imposed from outside

- support for parent participation in the school community

I don't support the current state standards. They look much like Common Core, just in a new wrapper. They are not grade appropriate, particularly in the early grades. They are not diagnostic. They are used to rank students, teachers, and schools, creating a milieu where teachers are compelled to teach to the tests rather than the students as they are. We should rely on professional educators to do their jobs in the context of democratic decision-making and collaboration by the whole school community.

More specifically would you:

Yes

No

• Support full funding of schools at originally agreed upon CFE levels?

X

• Strengthen the Contracts for Excellence law, to ensure that DOE follows through on its obligations to reduce class size in all grades?

X

• Require that the state and NYC reduce class size particularly in struggling schools?

X

I believe every child should have access to a well-round curriculum in every public school, including access to gifted-quality academic learning and vocational training, without tracking. School communities should be able determine their own needs and priorities for programs, including for art, music, science, physical education, and cultural relevance.

Good schools for all with this kind of programming should be funded by state income taxes, not local property taxes, through an equitable funding formula that takes account of needs in different districts. With the top 1% getting 30% of income in the state, up from 12% in 1980, schools should be fully funded by progressive taxation, particularly of unearned income through graduated tax brackets for millionaires, keeping instead of rebating the stock transfer tax, and a land value tax on the unearned rise in land site values due to social investments.

Support teachers unions and decent wages, benefits, and tenure. End high-stakes testing and requiring teachers to teach to the test. End teacher evaluations based on high-stakes tests. Maintain high certification standards. Increase frequency of educational sabbaticals for teachers.

Use Controlled Choice, which replaces student assignment based solely on the attendance zones with families ranking their choices of schools from across the district. Students are then assigned to schools based on their preferences and a formula that ensures a relatively even distribution of students by socioeconomic status across all schools.

All schools should be made schools where any child can progress as far as their interests and ambitions will take them. The whole premise of creating tiers of more and less selective middle and high schools is that we have to ration our eduction. The same rationing premise is behind tracking students into mutually exclusive academic and vocaional curricula. We should stop rationing education. Ignorance is more expensive than education to society. We should put the money into the schools needed to make them all good schools.

I view the so-called "education reform" agenda of testing, competition, and privatization adopted in large part by both major parties as a conscious substitution for desegregation. The rise of the former coincided with the retreat in the courts from desegregating schools in several key ruling from the 1970s through the 1990s.

What little desegregation was done in this country resulted in substantially improved outcomes on standardized tests for minority and working class students, while the white middle class students performed as well as they did in their segregated schools. But all the students did better on measures of intellectual self-confidence, creativity, problem-solving, critical thinking, and teamwork, which are attributes valued in middle class occupations. I believe we can overcome much of the resistance to desegregation by race and class by highlighting the better outcomes on these other measures for white middle class students.

Increase the funding so there is sufficient staff to address these students special needs.

The broad funding demand by progressives is to fully fund the Foundation Aid formula, which the Board of Regents says the state is $4.2 billion short of fully funding. That funding should be provided, but the formula itself needs amendment to be more equitable and responsive to the real needs of high-poverty districts, as John Yinger at the Maxwell School at Syracuse University has been pointing out in many writings since the formula was initiated, including this recent article: http://cpr.maxwell.syr.edu/efap/about_efap/ie/Nov_17.pdf

Do you support any of the following measures? Please check all that apply.

Yes

No

• Require the city annually release transparent needs assessment for new school capacity that takes into account current overcrowding, loss of seats through TCU removal, lapsed leases and other causes, and updated enrollment projections?

X

• Require that developers provide space for schools in overcrowded areas or pay "impact" fees into a fund for school construction?

X

Legislation and funds to reduce the student-teacher ratio to 15 to 1 in all public schools. Expand public school construction and reconstruction to meet the need.

Would you:

Yes

• Support the continued expansion of charter schools by raising the cap on charters?

X

• Support repealing the law requiring that NYC pay for charter school facilities or provide them with space inside DOE buildings?

X

• Strengthen the 2010 charter law to require that before charters are renewed or allowed to replicate, they must show they've actually enrolled comparable numbers of high needs students as in their districts, i.e. ELLs, SWDs and free lunch students, not merely that they've made an "effort" to do so?

X

• Require that the State Education Department and/or SUNY post data for every charter school's suspension, enrollment and attrition rates, including for students in each of the high-needs categories?

X

• Require that charter schools and Charter Management Organizations be fully subject to open meetings law and post their board meeting times and locations in advance, as well as board minutes, budgets etc.?

X

• Oppose the Education Investment Tax Credit bill, which would award tax credits to donors who give to private and parochial schools?

X

• Amend the charter law to include a citizen right of action to ensure charter schools are complying with all the provisions cited above?

X

• Enable the state and/or city comptroller to carry out performance audits on NYC charter schools?

X

The problems of transparency and corruption are statewide. Public campaign finance is needed to break the pay-to-play corruption where big campaign contributors get the big contracts, tax breaks, and regulatory favors, from housing to schools.

I would end the use of high-stakes tests to define high-poverty schools as failing in order to privatize them as charter schools.

With legislation enabling performance audits of charter schools by the state Comptroller, I would urge the comptroller to conduct them across the state.

I oppose charter school expansion and support the closure of existing charter schools that are not meeting the goals approved for their charters.

Which of the following measures to decrease the influence of private interests would you support?

Yes

No

• Close the LLC loophole, which allows large donors to circumvent contribution limits and disclosure requirements?

X

• Implement public financing for state elections, including matching funds for candidates and lower contribution limits, with even lower limits for corporations and individuals engaged in business with the state?

X*

• Limit legislators' outside income to 15% of total income while raising their salaries to more reasonable levels?

X

• Require more detailed financial disclosure on contributors from legislators?

X

Would you support:

Yes

No

• Require that any classroom app or computer program require parent consent before a child's personal data can be collected and shared with any organization or company, including data pertaining to behavioral conduct, disabilities or other sensitive information?

X

• Require that information be provided to parents before their children's personal data is collected and shared, including the types of personal data collected, the security provisions employed to protect against breaches, and citing which other companies, service providers, or other third parties will be given access to this data?

X

• Prevent the state, districts or schools from providing access to the personal data of public school families or students to charter schools for marketing or other purposes without the prior consent of parents?

X

I have twice sought out public school teachers as running mates on the gubernatorial ticket, Brian Jones in 2014 and Jia Lee in 2018 because public education is a top priority for me and Gov. Cuomo's public education policies have been so bad.

In Syracuse, I have long participated in lobbying, public hearings, and demonstrations in alliance with local groups advocating for students and parents, including Parents for Public Education, Alliance for Quality Education (when it had a chapter here), and the Central New York Civil Liberties Union over the high rate of suspensions of minority students in Syracuse.

Gifted-Quality and Vocational Education accessible by all students in all public schools without tracking.

Equitable and Adequate Funding

• Full funding in compliance with the Campaign for Fiscal Equity settlement.

• Reform the state school funding formula so it is equitable and adequate for high-needs districts.

• Shift school funding from local property taxes to progressive state income, stock transfer, and land value taxes.

End high-stakes testing.

Halt new charter schools.

Desegregate schools by race and class. New York's schools are the most segregated in the nation. Use controlled choice, which replaces student assignment based solely on the attendance zones with families ranking their choices of schools from across the district. Students are then assigned to schools based on their preferences and a formula that ensures a relatively even distribution of students by socioeconomic status across all schools. This will require redrawing school district boundaries that now divide students by race and class.

Home Rule for NYC on Education Policy: Upstate legislators have no business decided how the NYC schools shall be governed, how teachers and schools shall be evaluated, or the tests used for admission to selective high schools. These and other educational policies are best determined by the voters, parents, and educators in New York City.

Reduce class sizes.

Universal Pre-K and Kindergarten: Fully-funded, full-day, and developmentally-appropriate Pre-K and Kindergarten with certified and unionized educators available to all children.

Universal Tuition-Free Public University and Technical Education

Yes

No

Would you agree for a member of our group to interview you in person, if we have follow up questions?

X