Walcott Hears It From The City Council

The NY Times covers the greeting incoming schools chancellor Dennis Walcott got from the City Council yesterday:

Mr. Walcott, the deputy mayor appointed Thursday to replace Cathleen P. Black, was forced to defend proposed budget cuts, which are being imposed on virtually every city agency but have been most contentious in the school system because they may lead to widespread layoffs.

At one point, Councilman Robert Jackson, chairman of the education committee, challenged him. “Let’s talk about the 7,500 teachers,” Mr. Jackson said. Mr. Walcott was quick to correct him, saying the number of teaching positions projected to be lost to layoffs or attrition was actually 6,133. It prompted a couple of chuckles from the audience.

Councilwoman Margaret Chin brought up a line in next year’s Department of Education budget that calls for more money for full-time support staff members and asked, “Who are these people?”

Councilman G. Oliver Koppell offered Mr. Walcott a stern admonishment: “Saying you’re going to have to lay off teachers is a very ominous statement. What you should be saying is, ‘I hope we’re not going to have to lay off teachers.’ ”

Indeed, to Charles Barron, the outspoken Brooklyn councilman, Mr. Walcott said, “I don’t want to lay off teachers.”

“Don’t!” Mr. Barron retorted, adding dismissively that Mr. Walcott was “smooth enough, sharp enough,” and that he would have an answer for everything.

Mr. Walcott testified for nearly four hours. He deferred to the department’s top deputy, Shael Polakow-Suransky, for explanations about instruction, curriculum and testing, and to its chief financial officer, Veronica Conforme, for details about the numbers, but he took most of the questions himself.

Whenever there was something he did not know, he promised to find out.

Just in case anybody is under the impression that policies will change under Walcott, the new chancellor dashed those hopes:

He defended the city’s policy to offer space in public school buildings to new charter schools, but acknowledged the process could be improved. He pledged to keep “the pedal to the metal” and praised the school system’s “remarkable progress” since Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg took its reins in 2002.

“I believe in what we’re doing, and I haven’t had any evidence that what we’re doing is wrong,” said Mr. Walcott, who as deputy mayor has advised Mr. Bloomberg on education matters.

He also repeated a mantra of the Bloomberg administration, that the state law protecting the most senior teachers in the event of layoffs was “one of the most crippling policies on the books.”

As he testified, the teachers’ union president, Michael Mulgrew, scrawled “sick of it” on the back of a printout of his testimony. “This isn’t about the chancellor,” Mr. Mulgrew said afterward. “It’s about the policies, and they don’t seem to have changed.”

Two things here - first, if Mulgrew is sick of the policies, then he ought to fight them better than he has done so far.

From Green Dot to lifting the charter schools cap to school closures to co-locations to bedbugs and PCB's to merit pay to teacher evaluations to the outside consultant boondoggles, Mulgrew and the UFT have NOT done a good enough job articulating what the problems are and how they can be solved so that the school system is improved for children AND teachers.

That's the first thing.

Next, if Walcott cannot see anything that Bloomberg has done as part of his school/education policies that is wrong, then he's either not that smart or not looking hard enough.

Or he's lying.

I have no doubt that Mr. Walcott is NOT an idiot like Cathie Black, so I suspect he is either not looking hard enough or he's a liar.

Or both.

From the chaos that has been created by the school closures and charter co-locations to the refusal to make schools safe from toxins and vermin to the over-reliance on technology and outside consultants to the numerous systemic reorganizations to the plummeting test scores under the Klein/Bloomberg regime to the demoralization of teachers and administrators in the system to the low approval ratings New Yorker's give for Bloomberg's education policies, there are PLENTY of examples of things Bloomberg and Walcott have done wrong on education.

That Walcott refused to acknowledge any of this at the hearing is not a surprise.

It is simply another indication that the Bloombergian policies will not change under Mr. Walcott, they will just have a smarter, more skillful advocate for them than the overmatched and unqualified Ms. Black was.