Daily News: “Teacher Against Mayoral Control: All that power hasn’t made things better”

Arthur Goldstein is an English-as-a-Second-Language teacher at Francis Lewis High School in Queens, and he’s furious at Mayor Bloomberg. In a Daily News article published Sunday, May 24th 2009, Goldstein fumed that “mayoral control has been an absolute disaster.” Although he teaches at an “A-rated” school, Goldstein can still see that “class sizes just took their biggest leap in 10 years.”

As a teacher, Goldstein knows from first hand experience how much class size matters: “The fewer kids I have,” he wrote, “the more individual attention each one gets.”

Bloomberg’s charter schools, of course, have smaller class sizes and get the best technology.

Goldstein’s school “was built to hold 1,800 but enrolls 4,450 students.” He went on to paint a horrific picture of the conditions: “My kids sit in a crumbling trailer, with no technology and often no heat in the winter.”

Goldstein pointed out that we need a chancellor that is accountable to the kids and to our families, not to the Mayor. This will be impossible, “if the mayor can fire him for not following his orders.”

Goldstein also exposed how Bloomberg’s top-down actions have lacked any accountability to students or families: “A few years ago, the mayor fired two members of the Panel for Educational Policy who had the nerve to disagree with him. Consequently, the PEP is a mayoral rubber stamp. No mayoral appointee dares to stand up for kids.”

In Goldstein’s view, the continuation of Mayoral control over the schools “guarantees the privatization and destruction of public education in New York City. That’s a prospect we should all oppose.”