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As Albany considers whether to reauthorize mayoral control of New York City’s public schools, various stakeholders in the city’s education system are set to weigh in on the mayor’s progress and the prospects for the future. A new report by Independent Commission on Public Education, a reform coalition of public school parents, educators, advocates, and academics, highlights ways to increase community involvement in education and includes a bold proposal to create lobbying unions for city parents and students.
Highlighted by the Sun, the idea would help “counter the power of the city teachers union and business leaders in shaping school policy,” and would “use taxpayer dollars to create two new unions complete with their own budgets and lobbyists, one for public school parents and one for public school students.” In developing the proposal, iCOPE drew upon the results of student focus groups and surveys about the problems in the educational system. The student gripes were consolidated into a “Problem Tree,” which is quite possibly the scariest flowchart of all time.
Publicly-funded parent/student unions will probably be a hard sell in New York with city officials and the UFT–the city teachers’ union–but it has gotten off the ground in some places. Los Angeles is one of the few American cities to have an official parents union, which was created in 2006 and is operated as a 501(c)(3) non-profit.
