Preventing parents from helping children
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The hundreds of kindergarteners on waiting lists for schools all over the city are not the only sign of crowding in the schools, as many schools fear being forced to open extra classes in rooms that are now used for art and music. Rather than looking for the source of these failures in enrollment projections or capital planning, the Department of Education is going on the offensive against parents. In this case, their target is parents and parent associations who fund part-time arts, chess, and assistant teachers to make up for DOE shortfalls. The new DOE approach threatens to end services for hundreds if not thousands of children.
In a series of letters and school visits, the DOE has asserted that parents must hand their money over to DOE, subject to DOE rules about timing and amounts, before that money can be used to pay for part time aides and enrichment. A few years ago Klein abolished Project Arts, the program that used to reserve funds to ensure that all public school kids would receive music, dance, and visual arts. Now the DOE is trying to crack down on parents’ efforts to provide access to these fundamentals of a decent education.
The Post slammed these “rogue” parents, who refused to accept DOE attempts to take enrichment out of public education. The fact that a fair measure of the children receiving the benefits of these parent-provided services are eligible for free or reduced lunch seems of curiously little interest to the DOE. It seems that music and chess are fabulous if they’re provided by a charter school (the Broad Foundation recently gave $2.5 million to two charter networks that tout “crucial developmental programs” like arts and chess), but are a problem when the fundraising is done by public school parents at mainstream DOE schools.
Tomorrow night, parents will get another chance to speak when Betsy Gotbaum and Assembly member Linda Rosenthal hold a Town Hall on the Upper West Side. Parents can hope that Ms. Gotbaum and Ms. Rosenthal will find a way to prevent DOE from demolishing yet another shard of parent involvement in the New York public school system.
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The mere fact that the DOE considers music, dance and visual arts to be “enrichment” and not a mandatory part of the public school curricula is outrageous. The arts should not be considered extra-curricular in any educational system that intends to educate the whole child. The same goes for physical education — schools with no gyms and/or adequate play space, PE only a few times per week? Again, outrageous.
Now every hard-working PTA has to submit funds to the DOE so they can decide which and when these essential programs will be implemented? Private school, here we come!
Comment by denanngo — April 29, 2009 @ 11:27 am
How can this be legal?
Comment by kz — April 29, 2009 @ 3:15 pm
because, when parents pay for school extras, only kids at schools with wealthy parents get those extras… what exactly is the “fair measure” who “are eligible for free or reduced lunch”?
Comment by umm duh — April 29, 2009 @ 10:09 pm
“only kids at schools with wealthy parents get those extras”..…I am not a wealthy parent and I do not live in Manhattan, I live in Brooklyn. PTAs in out area work hard to raise money for extras for their children. If Eli Broad can give 2.5 million, why can’t folks at PS…. give money as well? Parents pool their money, Broad distributes his. Is that the difference?
Comment by em — April 29, 2009 @ 10:49 pm
The problem with parental giving is that schools in more prosperous areas or with kids from more propserous families will likley have much more money donated, created inequities. Because race and income are too closely correlated in this country, this will create racial inequities.
The issue here is not one of “preventing parents from helping children.” Parents surely can donate to a general fund. The issue is of preventing parents from helping *their own children’s school(s)*.
If parents can direct money to their kids’ school(s) without going through their taxes, the arguement goes, then they will demand lower taxes and pay that money directly to their schools. More prosperous families will get more bang for the buck, and the children of less prosperous families will just get less.
Is this a perfect answer that problem? Of course not! But perfect answer might not exist. The question for those parents who have the means and the motivation to donate to their children’s school(s) is whether this will create or exacerbate inequities. If the answer is “yes” or “I don’t care,” then there is a good reason an entity that does not have a vested interest just a minority of systems’ children to prevent those parents from take such actions.
Comment by ceolaf — April 30, 2009 @ 10:31 am
Parents around the country raise funds to provide extras their school budgets cannot. This is no different. The DOE already provides more financial support to schools with higher proportions of students of poverty, color, English language learners and other disadvantages in order to provide those schools with opportunities that PTAs pay for in wealthier districts, and I wholeheartedly support this budget priority.
This is not about the DOE addressing inequality. This is about The DOE’s failure to improve achievement. So now they are trying to reduce achievement at wealthier schools through deliberate overcrowding and attacking the PTAs. Why doesn’t the city want to keep its middle and upper middle class families in the city? They are doing everything they can to make families want to leave the city.
Comment by Public School Parent — April 30, 2009 @ 10:42 am
It seems everywhere we turn, the DoE is fighting parental involvement. They welcome corporate involvement, however. PTA fundraising helps all children regardless of income. If middle class parents can’t send their children to adequate public schools, then they will move to the suburbs, lowering the tax base and shrinking the school budget. Schools with active PTAs aren’t “rogue” and they aren’t rich. They are merely organized. Why doesn’t the DoE help with PTA organization in poor schools? Because they don’t WANT parental involvement. They only want parents who don’t ask questions and are happy with the crumbs thrown to them.
Comment by Kathleen Byrne — April 30, 2009 @ 11:24 am
If parents were required to donate to a general fund and not to their own schools’ PTAs, I guarantee you that rather than distributing the money equally to all schools, the DOE would distribute the lion’s share to “needier” schools, and my children’s school wouldn’t see a dime, as is the case for so many DOE, state, federal initiatives already in place.
Comment by a parent — April 30, 2009 @ 12:03 pm
The “needier” school receive Title 1 funding from the federal government, so, surprisingly, middle class school receive less money and are dependent on PTA/PA fundraising. Truthfully, this is outrageous because even in my small hometown, parents are able to fundraise to support sports, arts and after school programs. The fear about pooling the money is not that a less fortunate school will receive the money, but that the money will disappear into the abyss of the DOE bureacracy and fund yet another non-essential six-figure bureacrat, instead of going into the classrooms and schools to directly benefit to the children the NYC public school system.
Comment by ase — April 30, 2009 @ 12:48 pm
Let us really focus on why the PTAs raise the funds in the first place- Because the DOE has failed to properly support or provide enrichment in our schools. And IF class sizes were lower as they should be and IF the DOE had been actively looking for more space to house more schools and creating said schools and IF the DOE had been using the millions of dollars that they have spent on no-bid contracts in our classrooms instead- then PTAs would not be forced to work their butts off to raise money to pay for TAs.
This entire school year, my District has been put in the position of one school being pitted against another school over one issue or another- First it was zoning, then it was moving schools around, then it was phasing out schools, then it was putting charter schools in place of zoned schools. In each instance, parents were fighting against parents and it was all caused by the DOE. This is just the latest example of DOE meddling that will cause the “haves” to complain and the “havenots” to say well it isn’t fair in the first place because all PTAs are not equal in terms of fundraising. Sad but true. But when you have charters getting more money and Title 1 schools deservedly getting more money, it isn’t ever going to be equal. Unless parents band together and bring down mayoral control in its current form, this crap will keep happening- Parent infighting- Schools against other schools. It’s just what the DOE wants.
Comment by Bijou — April 30, 2009 @ 1:13 pm
Educated, involved parents and people are an enormous inconvenience to Bloomberg (and Klein) and his ultimate goal of a two-caste city made up of the extremely wealthy and people who in one way or another rely on the city for their livelihoods.
Comment by TJ — April 30, 2009 @ 1:27 pm
The elementary school my child attends has an active PTA that funds enrichment and teacher’s aides, the latter increasingly necessary as classes reach 30. This funding benefits the well-off and needy children in our school alike–perhaps the latter more than the former? We are losing middle-class parents right and left due to rising class sizes and the lack of decent middle schools, and this short-sighted policy surely will encourage the trend. And how much of that money will then go to bureaucrats whose job will be counting the money and dispersing it? What an idiotic decision!
Comment by district 13 parent — April 30, 2009 @ 5:33 pm
Wow. Klein and Bloomberg can go no lower. Why is this story not on the front page of the NY Times?
Preventing parents from supporting their schools? Isn’t this what they spent years urging PTAs to do - raise money? The very organizational purpose of the typical PTA is to support the school attended by the children of the parents (the P in the PTA) and where the teachers (the T in the PTA) teach. As a former PTA president who spent many hundreds of hours raising money for my child’s elementary school, most of which did not particularly benefit my child, I would testify under oath that no PTA would any longer be able to raise money if they had to turn it over to DoE. Many would be prohibited from doing so by their organizational documents, and moreover, most parents do not trust DoE or believe it has their children’s best interests in mind. Instead, some individual parents would buy things for their child’s classroom, or slip extra money to the teachers when they ask, as they always do, for supplies and contributions to fund classroom activities. Overall, parent support would decline drastically - think 90%. And in the areas where schools are sort of marginal and really depend on parent funding, the schools will become more and more impoverished and parents will move away. Boy, I feel sorry for the principals!
My son’s current Brooklyn middle school, which is economically and racially quite diverse, is — at the principal’s pleading — in the middle of trying to ramp up fundraising. If the PTA is going to have to put the money raised in a DoE slush fund, never to be seen again, well… forget about it. We have other things to do.
District 15 Parent
Comment by bkparent — May 3, 2009 @ 1:18 pm
What the DOE is doing is sick, they are taking away all the power that parents have and this is time to fight back, parents unite and fight back, they want to divide us, we are all parents who want the best for our children. Lets stand together and say not, this is our money little or alot what ever the amount is it belong to us and we decide how to use it.
Comment by Rosa Flores — May 3, 2009 @ 11:50 pm
They are going about this all wrong. What Klein and Bloomie should do is just unzone every district and make them all lotteries for elementary school. I guess district 2 would have to be made a little smaller (my goodness, perhaps district 2 and 1 could be redrawn to actually make geographic sense?) Then all these whiney PTA types would be would be dispersed over a broader spectrum of schools, some not the most desirable, and the rising tide would lift all boats.
Comment by Julie — May 4, 2009 @ 9:52 pm
If the rising tide will lift all boats then why does everyone feel as though they are on a sinking ship?
Comment by Anonymous — May 5, 2009 @ 9:56 pm