![]() Susana Torruella Leval |
For 19 months after its creation, the Panel for Educational Policy worked in relative obscurity. The state legislature established the unpaid 13-member group in 2002 when it gave the New York City mayor control of the school system and abolished the Board of Education. In contrast with its more powerful predecessor, the new panel, the law said, "shall exercise no executive power and perform no executive or administrative functions." And Mayor Michael Bloomberg said of his appointees, "Their job is to give advice to the chancellor, not advice to the press. I do not expect to see their names, ever, in the press, answering a question either on the record or off the record."
But the panel garnered attention last week as it prepared to vote on Bloomberg's plan to leave back third graders who score poorly on a standardized test. Fearing he would lose the vote, Bloomberg requested the resignation of two members who had indicated they would vote against the policy.
The ousters came after a week of turmoil at the Department of Education. Only days before, Deputy Chancellor Diana Lam, the department's top educator, had to resign in the wake of nepotism charges. The department's top lawyer also stepped down.
Susana Torruella Leval, a former director of the Museo del Barrio, was one of the Bloomberg appointees dismissed from the Panel for Educational Policy. In an interview with Gotham Gazette, Leval describes what led up to the ouster of the panel members and spoke about the role of the group and the state of educational reform in New York City:
It was a great honor to be on the panel. When the mayor appointed me I remember saying, "You know Mr. Mayor, I'm not an education expert so are you sure that I should be taking the place of an educator on this panel?" He said, "Oh certainly, because what we want are people from other worlds, other perspectives. What we want is a different point of view."
I'm a private citizen. I have no agenda. I'm a person from the art world, and I'm an ex museum director. Perhaps because I was not from the world of education, I took great pains to educate myself on all the issues that were coming up before us.
We were not hired to rubberstamp the mayor. Who would go on a panel if that were the purpose? The panel's role was advisory, and perhaps it was naĂŻve that we took this to be real. We worked very closely for a year and half with the chancellor sometimes but mostly with the staff that does the day-to-day work.
I was privileged to be on the inside looking at this extraordinary team of people, a team that in my mind included the work of former Deputy Chancellor Diana Lam, which was excellent work no matter what happened later. It was a privilege to observe the team and to have an interaction with them as advisors. They took us very seriously. We were refining and tinkering with proposals that came up and in some cases even challenging them, but we always got to the other side. I am very sad to not be able to continue to serve with the wonderful colleagues on the panel and with the great staff.
Whether the panel can continue to do good work if what the mayor wants is simply approval and not advice, I don't know. The members of the panel all felt that they were on a real advisory panel. No one would have signed on to be on a rubber stamp panel. If you look at the people on the panel, they are people of weight, intelligence and experience. And there was immense passion and belief in this reform.
It's extraordinarily courageous of the mayor to take on educational reform as a test of his mayoralty. I thought that, in the past, the system has been in such shambles that, of course this is going to be good.
Change is very painful, and change makes people unhappy, and change takes time. We have not seen any statistics yet because the school year isn't even finished. But most of the comments that the panel has gotten from parents and teachers have not been very positive. On the administrative side, there seems to be great confusion and on the curriculum side there's a lot of complaining too.
The reform could still turn out to be very good news in the end. It's just how can you expect to turn a whole system upside down and get immediate good results? You can't. Maybe you can do that in a corporation. In the real world, it doesn't work that way.
Promotion was one of the first issues that people on the panel were seriously and intellectually divided on.
Absolutely no one in the panel is for social promotion. So, I'm puzzled and actually sad that there are descriptions of the members who were going to vote against this as "foes of the mayor" or people who are against reforms. I wasn't voting in defiance of the mayor. I was voting because my brain of 60 years has taught me to look at things and analyze both sides.
What most of us were listening to and reading about were the very serious objections from the expert professional educational and scholarly community. Those objections were mainly twofold. They were against high-stakes testing. There seems to be immense proof that high-stakes testing is a very bad practice, and even the test makers have said that they don't agree that it should be used as a sole measure. No one is against tests, and no one is against standards. What we are against is using one test -- and exclusively that test -- as the marker of what should retain a child.
The second issue that expert opinion seemed to not be divided on is on retention. They do not see retention as a solution. That does not mean that social promotion is the answer. Neither retention nor promotion are solutions.
There are a lot of very serious and good educators on the panel. Led by them, we had proposed a whole host of interventions and programs for reading remediation -- including smaller classes, of course -- that would prevent the problem of having a third grader not knowing how to read.
There was a mayoral mandate in January for immediate implementation. The test is in April. We were all arguing for more time. We felt that if we had one year more -- in other words if whatever initiative to end social promotion was implemented in 2005 -- that we would have the next year to work with the chancellor's staff. What we were arguing for was a well-thought-through educational plan that could take a year to put in place; maybe it would have taken less than a year.
The resolution looked totally different on March 15 than it had even one week before. Thinking how much the resolution had changed in one week, I really feel that if we had had another year, even another month, we would have ended up in a better place. We have a new vice chancellor, Carmen Fariña. It would have been very interesting to see if she could have helped come up with new aspects that would have made most of the panel comfortable with the resolution.
Over the last year and a half, the haste of some reforms have caused a lot of criticism. If you slow down, you can think things through.
I am sad to say that Diana Lam's leaving contributed to the atmosphere of chaos. She was in favor of the promotion policy, but she had expressed the ability to listen to taking more time, to slowing down. Despite her public persona, I always found her to be thoughtful and willing to listen.
I had been in conversation with the mayor and people close to him. We had been having what I thought was a real debate. That debate continued until noon on Monday. Then I got home at two on Monday and had a call from a mayor's representative who said, "If you cannot vote for this resolution, then the mayor would like your resignation." And that was it.
![]() Anwar Hussein, 34, has been vending in New York for 13 years Also, by another street vendor in New York City: • Selling Jewelry, Spending the Night in Jail by Aeisha Related:
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I'm from Bangladesh, and I have an accounting degree. I worked for the telephone company there, but I can’t get the same job here because I don’t have a diploma from this country. Vending is the best for me, because there is no education requirement, and with my family, I don't have time to take courses.
In 1991, I got a food vending license from the Health Department. If somebody has legal documentation, it’s not that hard, they can get a license. I don't make much money selling hotdogs, $350 to $400 a week. I live with my mom, my wife, my four daughters and my son. I'm able to take care of my family, but I work long hours.
But my license doesn't give me a right to a spot. Every person, when they get a license, finds themselves a spot. Once I got the license, I went to the hot dog company, I rented the pushcart, and I looked at the area around Canal Street. I saw this guy on one block, this guy on another block, and I saw a spot with nobody there.
I set up my cart and started working -– one day, two days, one week. If somebody would have come, and said, "This is my spot, my friend, you have to move," I would have moved. But nobody came, and I've been working this spot for over 10 years. Not only me, but my mom also used to work there, my wife, my uncle. It’s a family business. Now, I have two different spots, and my uncle has another, all near each other.
Every day at nine or ten, I pick up my pushcart from the garage downtown, buy merchandise from another garage, and push my cart to my spot on Broadway and Canal Street. I work from 10 to 7 -- longer hours in the summer -- every day of the week.
Maybe 60 percent of my customers are regulars. They come, they talk. They know me, they know my mom, my wife, because I’ve been working here so many years. Everybody knows me. For the first eight years, everything was good, until the 11 of September.
Since then, business has been going down, and we’ve also been having a lot of problems with the police.
When police come to us, they don't give us respect, they don't ask us nothing. They just come to us, maybe they stay inside the van and say "hey food guy, bring your license." They write the ticket without even getting out of the car. Sometimes they are even smoking while writing tickets.
Last year I got 27 tickets, from $300 to $2,000. They are usually for being less than 20 feet from a store entrance, but I’m 26 feet from the door. I have a tape measure but the police don't want to measure it; they just take the license and give the ticket.
Me, my wife, my mom, everybody, we all did a lot of complaining to the police department because we were all getting tickets. Sean Basinski from the Urban Justice Center helped me take pictures of my spot. When I go to the judge, with a lot of pictures, he sees that I am set up legally. He said I can work here, police should not bother me, and dismissed the fines.
A vendor's job is not easy –- rainy days, snowy days, sunny days, we're outside. Why? Only to make money to take care of our families. But still the police are bothering us. Even if we give them respect, they don't want to take it. They don’t want to think about our life, our situation.
New York City Council Stated Meeting Report
Every two weeks the New York City Council meets for its Stated Meeting to introduce and pass legislation. As a regular feature, Searchlight covers these meetings and posts a summary of the bills passed.
STATED MEETING - March 10, 2004
Quote of the Day:
"Councilman James Davis died in these chambers as a result of gun violence... I am asking that we stand together in his memory... and vote to repudiate the statements of the NRA... I'm doing this in the spirit of Councilman James Davis who speaks through me today." - Brooklyn Councilmember Letitia James urging support of a City Council resolution denouncing the National Rifle Association.
Meeting Summary:
The main item of business at the March 10th City Council meeting was the approval the council's $45 million operating budget.
This money pays for council member salaries of $90,000 a year, bonuses, and operating costs for the legislative branch. It also funds the 279 employees who work for the City Council.
Speaker Gifford Miller said that the budget reflects the "serious fiscal situation the city finds itself in" and cuts $207,000 or about a half of 1 percent from the previous year's budget.
While the council's total operating budget did decrease, the amount of money for council member salaries and bonuses actually increased by $70,000 because more stipends were added for those who chair committees. (See a list of each council member's salary and bonus.)
The council passed no new laws on March 10, in part because much of its time is currently consumed by budget hearings. The council holds public sessions on each area of the city's $45 billion budget and then makes recommendations to the mayor. (See a schedule of budget hearings.)
The council did pass three resolutions, which hold no legal weight, but reflect the official opinion of the City Council.
One (Res 123-A) joins local governments of Chicago and Los Angeles in calling for more federal homeland security funds for cities.
Another (Res 177) seeks justice for Hungarian holocaust survivors who had works of art and money stolen from them in World War II.
And the third (Res 11-A) calls on the Republican National Committee to "repudiate the irresponsible and dangerous policies of the National Rifle Association."
Several Democrats and the three Republicans voted against the resolution, arguing that while it would be appropriate to protest on the steps of City Hall, the legislative process should not be used for such an issue.
"This is inappropriate, a slap in the face to our Republican colleagues, and partisan politics in the worst way," said Democrat Tony Avella.
The majority of council members supported and passed the resolution.
"This is not a condemnation of Republicans or the Republican Party," said Speaker Miller. "The NRA supports policies that cause death and violence in our country and our city."
The council also honored the life of Harriet Tubman, a slave who escaped from the south in 1849 and helped thousands of others do the same as part of the "underground railroad." Fulton Street in Brooklyn will soon be renamed in her honor.
The next stated meeting is scheduled for March 24, 2004
For an archive of past meetings and council votes, visit Gotham Gazette's Searchlight.