The Legislature’s latest fiddles to the mayoral-control law leaves Mayor Adams’ power over the city Department of Education hanging by a thread — and that was the intention.
Combined with similar changes the same lawmakers made two years ago, it makes it certain that decisions by Adams’ schools chancellor, David Banks, will regularly be blocked by the Panel for Education Policy, which must approve many key moves.
CUNY Graduate Center Prof. David Bloomfield described the plan as a “putrid kettle of fish cooked up by the Legislature.”
Back in 2022, lawmakers insisted on limiting Adams to choosing just 13 of the PEP’s 23 members, and removing his power to replace his nominees at will.
This year, they brought it down to 13 of 24, just over half — by adding a new independent voting member who will chair the panel.
The mayor gets to choose that chairman or -woman, but only from candidates nominated by the state Senate, Assembly and Board of Regents (whose members are themselves chosen by the Legislature, and in effect by the Assembly speaker).
In practice, this means that no one will get nominated to chair the PEP without an OK from the city United Federation of Teachers, which basically bosses the Legislature on these issues.
And the chair runs the meetings, no matter what other PEP members think, which is an enormous power when it comes to setting the agenda.
In the original mayoral-control law, the PEP (and especially its chair) was supposed to support the mayor and chancellor; now they’ll struggle to get their agenda voted on at all, let alone approved.
Unless City Hall manages to ensure every one of the mayor’s picks for a PEP seat will be a complete loyalist (rather than, say, a reasonable voice who might disagree from time to time), the panel will regularly wind up going rogue: UFT lobbying and intimidation is sure to be relentless (it always is).
Even without the lunatic new chair, the UFT last year was able to engineer PEP rejection of DOE decisions to award (perfectly available) space to charter schools looking to expand
This is pretty much the culmination of a decades-long UFT drive to eviscerate mayoral control, which has picked up steam with progressives’ rise to dominance in the Legislature.
We’re nearly back to the days of the old Board of Education, when voters had no one to hold accountable for failing schools — and so the city wound up with a lot of them.
Except that now the Legislature is sporadically micromanaging the DOE, as with the new PEP-chair gimmick as well as the “class size” law — which will wind up downgrading the teacher corps for the city’s neediest students, among other ill effects, while doing “good” only for the UFT.
And UFT pawns like Speaker Carl Heastie (D-Bx) and state Sen. John Liu (D-Queens) will keep at it until someone holds them to account.
Mayoral control was always about ensuring someone would have the power and the motive to demand accountability from teachers, principals and the sclerotic education bureaucracy.
The Legislature’s steadily made that back into a dream.
Parents and voters furious at the state of the schools are stuck driving up I-87 north to gripe to Albany.
NEWS CREDIT
