Gov schooled
Blaz: Forget Albany, we can run system ourselves
BACK OFF and let us run our own schools, Mayor de Blasio told Gov. Cuomo on Wednesday.
The mayor never mentioned the governor by name as he defended his own turnaround plan for failing schools.
But he made it perfectly clear he wanted Albany to butt out.
“I don’t think bureaucrats 150 miles away are going to do a better job of solving our problems than our own chancellor and our own principals and teachers will do,” de Blasio fumed at Brooklyn’s Automotive High School.
“Here, we have absolute and total accountability,” he said. “State interference in that will only slow down the changes that we need to make.”
Cuomo has proposed letting the state seize control of the lowest-performing schools and turn them over to other organizations to run.
De Blasio held an event at one of the 94 struggling schools he has targeted for improvement in an effort to stave off that plan.
At the Automotive High School, once one of the city’s most dangerous schools, he said the number of kids on track to graduate has increased 11% since last year, violence has fallen 33% while suspensions are down 47%, and attendance hit 83%, its highest level in a decade.
Under the $150 million “renewal schools” program, the school is getting additional class time, more after-school programs and more Advanced Placement classes, and staffers are calling students’ families when they fail to show up for school.
All teachers will also be required to reapply for their jobs for next year.
De Blasio repeatedly stressed he is moving with “speed” and “urgency.”
“If we don’t see progress, I will shut them down. It’s as simple as that. I take personal responsibility for the decision,” he said.
Cuomo spokeswoman Dani Lever defended his school reform plans. “The governor is committed to enacting an aggressive reform agenda to fix New York’s broken education system that spends more per pupil than any other state in the nation while condemning over 250,000 students to failing schools over the last decade,” she said.
Cuomo’s office has suggested renewing mayoral control of city schools will be left until after the state budget is passed — a possibility that also irked de Blasio.
“It’s very, very simple. There’s no debate here. It’s time for Albany to renew mayoral control,” he said. “Albany should just act on it now. . . . This really shouldn’t be about politics.”