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By Mona Davids | April 8, 2014 |

Thursday will be Mayor de Blasio’s 100th day in office, and he still hasn’t presented his education plan for our children. Where’s the plan, Mr. Bill?

The new Siena poll tells us that improving public education is the most important single issue to New Yorkers, just ahead of keeping the city safe from crime. And 57 percent said they’re generally not satisfied with the quality of the public schools, against 30 percent satisfied.

The mayor’s priority seems to be pre-Kindergarten, but his Department of Education has yet to provide data showing the benefits of pre-K and the mayor hasn’t explained how he’ll ensure high-quality teaching and facilities for all pre-K students.

Last week, in fact, we learned that he is creating a separate and unequal pre-K system — one where students enrolled in community-based organization pre-K programs will receive an education inferior to those taught by certified teachers.

CBOs — whose teachers aren’t members of the United Federation of Teachers and who will enroll the greatest number of pre-K students — will get thousands of dollars less in per-pupil funding than programs taught by UFT members.

Not that using UFT members guarantees results. Consider the pre-K data from state test results for schools that do have UFT teachers:

• Central Harlem’s Community School District 5. At 13 elementary schools offering pre-K, seven of eight third-graders can’t read proficiently.
•  Community School District 7 in the South Bronx. At 16 schools where pre-K is available, nearly nine out of 10 third-grade kids don’t make the grade.
• Community School District 16 in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood has 15 schools with pre-K. Unfortunately, 86 percent of these children flunked the third-grade reading exam.

Assuming that the pre-K students continued on to third grade in their schools, these data clearly show there may be little to no long-term gains resulting from New York City’s current pre-K program. Yet we have not been informed as to how the new pre-K program will have different outcomes.

Pre-K may be important, Mayor de Blasio, but then what? Too many elementary and middle schools are performing at a low level. It follows, therefore, that any gains that may result from the pre-K experience are likely to belost by the third grade — and certainly by middle school.

So, the question must be reiterated: Where’s the plan, Mr. Bill?

After all, many city parents are reluctant to send their children to their local public schools because they don’t believe the neighborhood school is a good school.

Parents see charter schools as imperfect symbols of freedom from a segregated, “Zip Code-locked” system where a higher percentage of lesser-quality teachers are in schools dominated by non-white students.

Yes, data also show that higher percentages of teachers receiving an “Unsatisfactory” rating are teaching within Zip Codes that are majority non-white.

Then there are the middle and high schools. Middle-school after-school programs can’t substitute for good subject-matter teachers during a child’s most difficult years. And while some obsess about the admissions test for the city’s specialized high school, the rest of us are wondering why every high school isn’t as good as Stuyvesant, Brooklyn Tech, Bronx Science or Staten Island Tech. So, Mr. Bill, where’s the plan?

Some of us may not like standardized tests or believe their results, but no one denies that our children are not as well-educated in public schools today as we were in our day. Only 23 percent of today’s high-school graduates are deemed “college ready” — and it’s just 13 percent for non-white students.

Tragically, less than half of all students can read and write on their grade level. And after 12 years of mayoral control, only half of our high-school students actually graduate. You wanted to keep mayoral control, Mr. Bill, so where’s the plan?

Focusing on pre-K, middle-school after-school programs or the specialized-high-school tests may be politically helpful, but it begs the question again: Where’s the plan, Mr. Bill?

You are a public-school parent, sir. How are you as our mayor going to move our public-education system to a point where every student receives a high-quality education that will prepare them for a global economy and for their roles as good citizens?

We need to hear the specifics, Mayor de Blasio, not just the well-crafted rhetoric. The campaign is over, and it is time to govern.

Mona Davids is the founder and president of the New York City Parents Union, http://www.nycparentsunion.org.

https://nypost.com/2014/04/08/hey-de-blasio-whats-your-plan-for-better-schools/

By Mona Davids | August 7, 2015 |

One-hundred days into his term as mayor, as Bill de Blasio entered the spring of 2014 with no education plan in sight, I asked “What’s the Plan, Bill?”

Hundreds of thousands of New York City parents like me had children stuck in failing schools — and we wanted to know what the mayor was going to do about it.

Neither de Blasio nor his chancellor, Carmen Fariña, had an answer.

But now, thanks to Susan Edelman and The Post, we know de Blasio and Fariña do have a plan. It’s the Oprah approach: You get a diploma! And you get a diploma! There’s a diploma under every seat.

My 17-year-old daughter and her classmates are entering 12th grade at a great high school, with highly effective teachers and administrators. And they’re furious about the diploma giveaway.

My daughter and her classmates work very hard, go to school every day, study diligently to get excellent passing rates on their Regents and AP exams and to get good grades on their report cards.

But they’ll receive the same diploma as the students that didn’t attend school daily, didn’t complete schoolwork or homework and haven’t earned their diploma, because of de Blasio and Fariña’s corrupt management of the school system.

My daughter and her classmates say the Department of Education has completely devalued the worth of their diploma and their three years of hard work. Unfortunately, they’re 100 percent right. A diploma from the DOE isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on.

Thanks to the city’s credit recovery/teacher-job-protection scheme, New York City DOE diplomas are worthless.

And it’s outrageous and offensive that students who don’t do their schoolwork or homework can receive a high-school diploma. It isn’t fair to the students who actually do work hard.

De Blasio and Fariña are betraying our children and all New Yorkers by not holding teachers accountable for the educational outcomes of their students.

As the mother of an incoming second-grader who has been condemned to a failing zoned school — a school that has failed to educate students for years and failed to hold teachers accountable for their abdication of educational responsibilities — I can unfortunately predict that the supermajority of students currently not at grade level will never be properly educated, because teachers and administrators know de Blasio and Fariña will protect them no matter what.

The mayor and chancellor will never hold teachers accountable for the unprepared students who will go on to middle school and “graduate” high school thanks to the credit recovery/teacher-protection program.

And if the mayor and chancellor get their way, there will be no accounting for the distorted value system they’ll pass on to students unprepared for the real world.

To ensure this travesty continues, de Blasio and Fariña have created the Regulatory Task Force on Academic Policy to examine credit-recovery programs and supposedly prevent academic fraud.

In other words, they have created a fake task force to cover up and safeguard the continuation of their teacher-protection scheme.

Instead of holding teachers accountable by putting our children’s interests first, de Blasio and Fariña plan to protect teachers and administrators from being exposed for the outright fraud of not doing their jobs.

I thank Gov. Cuomo and the Legislature for limiting mayoral control to only one year. Our children would be better off if de Blasio were to be stripped of mayoral control completely.

I hope Cuomo and the Legislature are paying attention and will put the interests of our children first and abolish mayoral control at the next legislative session.

Perhaps a future mayor, who won’t subordinate the needs of the city’s children to the demands of the teachers unions, will earn it back.

Mona Davids is founder and president of the NYC Parents Union and chair of Title I Parent Advisory Council at the Parkchester School.

https://nypost.com/2015/08/07/the-great-diploma-scam-robs-all-city-schoolkids-including-mine/

By Mona Davids | March 5, 2015 |

My heart was in Albany yesterday, with the thousands of students and parents demanding an end to the system that condemns New York City students, mostly poor and minority, to failing schools that have failed to educate children for generations.

After all, my group, the NYC Parents Union, is an independent grass-roots organization of public-school parents that advocates for the right of every child in the city schools to a safe, high-quality education.

But I couldn’t go up to Albany (though others from our group did): I’m committed to an afternoon academic-intervention program at my school.

The program is something we parents set up in a desperate attempt to make up for Mayor de Blasio and the United Federation of Teachers cutting “extended day” instruction in their last contract.

And that’s the real issue here: For decades, the interests of the teachers union and its members have been put before the education and futures of our children.

But the days of students being held hostage by the United Federation of Teachers are coming to an end.

In New York City, 143,000 students are trapped in persistently failing schools. Every single day, our children’s futures are being stolen. At 75 city schools, all students in at least one grade failed the state math or reading test.

Citywide, 65 percent of students failed the state math tests; 71 percent failed the English exam.

Our children can’t wait any longer for the teachers union to put our children’s education first.

Parents are demanding options. Charter schools, like magnet schools, are options for families whose children are condemned to failing schools because of their ZIP code — but that’s not enough.

Another good idea: Gov. Cuomo’s proposal to take persistently failing schools into receivership, so they can be restructured and run by nonprofits or charter-management groups. That, too, begins to finally put our children’s interests first.

We applaud the governor for standing up for our children. But his ideas don’t go far enough.

In hundreds of city schools, more than half of all students aren’t reading, writing and doing math at grade level. My son’s school, PS106x in The Bronx, is one of these schools.

Across The Bronx, 65,000 children are stuck in failing schools.

These schools are held hostage by the teachers-union contract, which gives self-interested teachers the right to refuse to make any changes, including extending the school day or providing extra instruction time so students can learn.

Cuomo’s receivership proposal doesn’t help these students and parents. It targets the very worst schools, but not the greater number of still-failing ones. In these schools, desperate requests to restructure the school to improve the educational outcomes of students is held hostage by the UFT contract. The contract says no changes to the schools our children attend can be made without the teachers’ approval — even when the school has been failing for years.

It is time for parents to take control and use the power vested in us under state law — and convert our failing schools to charters.

That will let us have a longer school day and longer year, as well as rigorous academic instruction — plus arts, music, sports and other extracurriculars for our children.

Under this law, parents decide which nonprofit or charter-management outfit they want to work with to fix their school. Here in New York, empowered parents at five schools have already voted and converted their schools to charters.

Mona Davids is the founder and president of the New York City Parents Union, www.nycparentsunion.org.

https://nypost.com/2015/03/05/parent-advocate-put-an-end-to-unions-holding-students-hostage/