Education Roundtable: Merryl Tisch

Q: In December you replied to Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s request for input on specific problems in the education system, and you urged him to look beyond those issues he raised.

MT: He just wanted to talk about failing schools and evaluations, but it’s such a broader picture. We obviously were appreciative of the questions, and we answered them. But we went beyond—we talked about extraordinary circumstances and receivership, about the importance of teacher evaluations, about professional development and other issues related to school finance. One of those issues for us is the equitable distribution of resources to school districts. There are school districts in New York State that spend $35,000 a kid. There are school districts that spend 16, 17, $18,000 a kid. I brought up the issue that in New York State we have probably the most segregated school system in the country. There are 700 school districts, and how we fund schools and how we build into existing formulas to help districts create patterns of change is a very important piece of it.

Q: What else did you bring up?

MT: I also brought up the receivership in Lawrence, Mass. The idea there was to look at what you might do in these complicated circumstances where students and parents have been held hostage to dysfunctional school boards, or entrenched problems that never get resolved—like in East Ramapo. In extraordinary circumstances you absolutely need to consider extraordinary pathways. And the idea there was to look at cases where schools are perennial failures. I mentioned the fight over tenure as well. Many people are not seeing the forest for the trees: Instead of fighting about what to do with the teachers who are already in the pipeline, who came into this profession with certain expectations, let’s focus on the new teachers coming in, because we know that over the next decade thousands and thousands are going to be retiring. How can we create a circumstance in which we have a thoughtful conversation about how to modernize the issue of tenure for the new teachers coming in? And we should talk about granting tenure after five years for new teachers. Now they gain tenure after three.

Q: You also noted that the Board of Regents doesn’t have the power to enact a lot of these reforms.

MT: A lot of what we brought up requires legislative fixes. The evaluation system is law. And the percentages that are used on all the various segments of the evaluation system are part of the law. In order to go to the next generation of evaluation systems, you need to change the law. Issues of tenure are also in law. He asked us for an opinion. I gave my opinion. And in his State of the State he included much of what we put in the letter.

Q: How do you feel about the proposal to lift the cap on the number of charter schools in New York City?

MT: As everyone knows, I have been a very big fan of charter schools. That being said, we should only focus on quality seats. I voted against keeping failing charter schools open. I think that in New York City we have many charter schools that are simply not hitting the mark, and I do not think that we should be incubating and draining resources out of the regular system to foster these failing schools.

Q: A recent report from the governor found that more than 109,000 students in the state attend a failing public school. How should this be addressed?

MT: Each of those schools is in a different circumstance and this really needs to be looked at on a case-by-case basis. In extreme circumstances like in Buffalo, you have four or five schools that are in their 20th year of failure, and the receivership that we put into the letter really applied to these extreme examples of failure. When we hired Hank Greenberg to do the report on East Ramapo, he talked about a monitor. Now that monitor needs to have total authority over the school system: instructional authority as well as fiscal authority. He or she needs to be able to veto bad practice. That is what we had in mind with the receivership.