Mayor announces PEP appointees
A week after the State Senate re-newed the law granting Mayor Bloomberg control of the city’s public schools, the mayor announced today his appointees to the Panel for Educational Policy, the oversight board that replaced the old Board of Education. The PEP is made up of eight mayoral appointees and one appointee from each borough president’s office. The panel is charged with approving educational policies proposed by the chancellor and voting on the Department of Education budget (and some contracts); but it has had no real decision-making power.
Mayoral appointees serve at the pleasure of the mayor and there are no term limits. Four of the eight appointees are “repeats” - Philip Berry, David Chang, Tino Hernandez, and Richard Menschel. Only two of the four new members are public school parents: Joe Chan, president of the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership and Linda Lausell Bryant, executive director of Inwood House, a nonprofit that supports families and teen parents. Gitte Peng was formerly an education policy advisor to Deputy Mayor Dennis Walcott and was a key player in crafting the legislation that established mayoral control of schools. Tomas Morales, also a new member, is president of the College of Staten Island.
Critics of the PEP claim that it has no real power and that its members mostly rubber-stamp the mayor’s initiatives. In April, the New York Times reported that, at the poorly attended monthly PEP meetings, volunteer panelists “do not debate the educational issues of the day, but spend most sessions applauding packaged presentations by staff.” The lone “voice of opposition” on the old panel, Patrick Sullivan, was reappointed to the panel by Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer this week.
First on the agenda for the newly reconstituted PEP: voting on the mayor’s proposed promotion policy for 4th and 6th-graders.
No date for the first meeting of the reconstituted PEP has been set, yet.
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