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Opinion

Fighting Back in the Trump Era


corey johnson rally via city council

Corey Johnson, the author (photo: William Alatriste/City Council)


January 20 marked the beginning of a dangerous new era for our country. For the first time in many of our lives, we now have a president who rose to office on the power of racist, sexist, classist, and xenophobic campaign promises. These are promises he is already working to keep.

Of course, Donald Trump's agenda does not truly represent our nation. The day after his inauguration, millions of people marched in cities around the world to reject Trump’s divisive ideology.

The Women’s Marches on Saturday sent a clear message about where we stand as a people. But speaking truth to power is only the start. We must now organize our communities and engage with our democracy in unprecedented ways. The fates of our economy, our health care system, our environment, our national security, and our most vulnerable populations depend on it.

We can start by creating change right here at home in New York.

As Attorney General Eric Schneiderman recently put it, “When they go low, we go local.” Indeed, there’s an enormous opportunity to create change at the local level and ensure that our City and our State remain on a progressive course.

We have made great strides here in New York, from a rising minimum wage to a strong health care marketplace, and we will have to fight hard not to be taken backwards in the Trump era.

That is why I call on all New Yorkers to get engaged, get involved, and make sure that when local elections take place in 2017 and 2018, we choose representatives who are committed to executing your vision for our City and state. The New York State Senate, for example, is still controlled by Republicans, despite the fact that registered Democrats outnumber Republicans two to one. This should not be.

Nationally, 2018 will present us with an opportunity to elect federal representatives who can stand up to Trump in the halls of Congress. New Yorkers need not look very far for seats we can flip – a third of New York’s 27 members of Congress are Republicans!

It will take nothing short of an all-out blitz to turn many of these seats from red to blue, and we need to start organizing now. As the Women’s Marches showed, there is nothing like action. It is time for everyone who cares to be engaged.

While we act locally, we must demand that our representatives in Washington, D.C. cede no ground to Trump and his extreme agenda. As New York Congressman Jerrold Nadler says, we must not normalize his extreme views on issues like immigration, religious freedom, women’s rights, and climate change. Keep the heat on your federal representatives to ensure that they do not buckle in the face of pressure. Anyone who compromises on our essential values should not be re-elected.

Let your federal representatives know how you feel. As an elected official, I can tell you that these calls really do matter.

So step up and be heard. Take your rightful place at the forefront of our democracy. The election may be over, but it’s never too late for passionate and dedicated individuals to put our country back on the right path.

***
Corey Johnson represents District 3 in the New York City Council, which covers the neighborhoods of Hell’s Kitchen, Chelsea, the West Village, and parts of Flatiron, SoHo and the Upper West Side.‎ On Twitter @CoreyinNYC.

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Teacher Certification and Recruitment: Boats Against the Current


teacher students pink pencil cases

(photo: NYC DOE)


First, do no harm. Ha!

On Tuesday, the New York City Council will hold an oversight hearing on teacher recruitment and retention. The Council announcement states that a hearing is necessary because “there’s a growing teacher shortage across the United States, although it is impacting some states more than others. This is the result of a nationwide trend that has seen the number of college students enrolled in education majors decrease by 35% in the past five years, as well as an increase in teachers leaving the profession.”

This attention follows on the heels of the recent New York State Regents proposal to roll back rigorous 2014 teacher certification requirements and congressional efforts to rescind recently enacted U.S. Department of Education regulations.

We’ve got to stop the madness.

The constant revision of teacher preparation and certification requirements has real consequences, with the bad far outweighing the good. The reason for the problems identified by the City Council -- to be further illuminated at Tuesday’s hearing -- are of our own making. The fact is that policy-makers are in the dark because we really don’t know what is required to make a good teacher. Not a great teacher, mind you, since certification, despite the political cant, is about formulating minimum standards for public school job entry. A Google Scholar search of the field reveals hundreds of articles published in the last year alone on this highly technical subject, which no regulatory policy can hope to encompass.

The system of certification and retention is a sieve that screens more for those who persevere through the procedural maze than for talented educators. Every state comes up with its own scheme, blundering around in the politically-appointed regulatory kitchen since no workable recipe has been found. Private school teachers need no certification. Many charter school teachers are uncertified, provided exceptions under state law.  Tens of thousands of New York City public school students are taught every day by staff teaching “out of license.”

And every time some new half-baked hurdle is raised, an industry of preparation programs and their students is thrown into chaos. I work in higher ed. Curriculum changes are a big deal. Sometimes whole courses need to be developed, taking months to refine and sometimes longer to be reviewed and approved by layers of faculty committees and administration. Even small changes in course content require time for instructors to research, identify readings, determine assignments, and create assessments. And for every new course or curriculum tweak, other once-favored material needs to be adjusted or dropped. Students are whipsawed among confusing mandates, across overlapping certificate categories, with variable, dizzying deadlines. What is easy for politicians and regulators to order becomes a hornet’s nest to implement.

And then, once set, it starts all over again as current city, state, and federal actions attest. We run in place with the urgency of lame hamsters on a wheel, every step dictated by some imperfect previous step and the political imperatives of change. Or, borrowing a more eloquent metaphor to describe our vain, pedestrian predicament, “we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

[Read: Teacher Recruitment, Retention Will Be Focus of City Council Hearing]

***
David C. Bloomfield is Professor of Education Leadership, Law, and Policy at Brooklyn College and The CUNY Graduate Center.  He is the author of American Public Education Law, 3d edition (2016). On Twitter @BloomfieldDavid.

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Calling for True Police Reform in 2017


nypd cops dogs subway

NYPD officers and dogs in the subway (photo: @NYPDnews)


Over the past five years, in the course of our research and advocacy efforts, we at PROP have become convinced that the NYPD's unjust policies not only violate our country's central founding principle of providing equal justice for all, but also that the department's racist practices are so entrenched, so long-standing, that only fundamental and far-reaching changes can end -- really end -- abusive and discriminatory policing in our great city.

Relevant facts and PROP findings show the dire need for real reform:
-In 2015 the NYPD made over 20,000 arrests for the possession or sale of small amounts of marijuana; and 92.5% of these arrests involved New Yorkers of color. This, despite the research showing that white people use and sell the drug in equal or greater proportions than African-Americans and Latinos.

-Recently, defending his police reform record on WNYC radio, Mayor de Blasio stated, "we stopped the arrests for low-level marijuana possession." In fact, during the first nine months of 2016, the NYPD made nearly 14,000 misdemeanor arrests for marijuana possession, about 12% more than the figure for 2015.

-The largest category of NYPD arrests in 2015 was fare evasion, with over 29,000 arrests, 92% involving New Yorkers of color. During 2015, NYPD officers also issued nearly 124,000 summonses for fare evasion, bringing the total number of punitive interactions between officers and New Yorkers for this offense to over 153,000 for the year, or an average of nearly 420 per day.

-Of the NYPD's juvenile arrests in 2015, 94.9% involved African-American or Latino young people.

-Of the New Yorkers locked up on Rikers Island and in other city jails, about 88% are African-American or Latino.

-Over the past two years, PROP's Court Monitoring Project, where volunteers observe proceedings in arraignment parts of the city's four major boroughs, found that over 90% of the observed cases involved New Yorkers of color. Virtually none of the defendants was even charged with a predatory or dangerous offense.

These and similar undeniable facts, among other things, have shown us that NYPD daily practices are marked by a stark racial bias. We know, too, that political leaders, whatever their motivations, have at worst lied to the public about this ugly truth or at best misrepresented the harsh reality of NYPD practices.

Given our well-founded skepticism about mainstream leaders' willingness to address the problem of discriminatory and abusive policing and our understanding of how deeply embedded the problem is in the NYPD's institutional policies and culture, we at PROP have chosen as a principal strategy for 2017, a year of city-wide municipal elections, to focus our determined efforts on injecting sweeping reform proposals into the public debate.

Our recommended changes will aim to advance substantive remedies that no mainstream politician will currently support. Not because they don't make sense or are not the right things to do, but because they are too politically charged.

PROP's proposed reforms for fundamental change will include:
-Abolishing "broken windows" policing that targets low-income New Yorkers of color for engaging in petty infractions that have been virtually decriminalized in well-off white communities.

-Eliminating the quota system for evaluating officers' performance that emphasizes only their punitive interactions with New Yorkers and that, in effect, incentivizes bad policing.

-Reducing the budget, personnel, resources, and power of the NYPD -- the guiding principle being, in part, the time-honored shibboleth that "power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely," applied to the unchecked power of the NYPD.

-Transferring traffic enforcement -- in 2015, NYPD officers issued over 1 million traffic summonses -- to another government agency.

-Having mental health professionals, not police officers, be the first responders to emergencies involving persons in psychiatric crisis.

America teaches her young people that she provides equal justice for all, not equal justice for all except if you're a person of color, except if you're poor. America teaches that under her legal system, you're innocent until proven guilty, not that you're innocent until proven guilty except if you're poor, except if you're an American of color.

Our goal for 2017 is grandiose and, admittedly, quixotic: to, starting with New York City, call America home, to create an America, starting with the Big Apple, that adheres to the founding principles of which she is so justifiably proud. And it's only by agreeing to and instituting fundamental and far-reaching changes, starting with her policing and criminal justice systems, that America can fulfill its stated vision of a just, livable, and inclusive society for all its people.

***
Bob Gangi is the executive director of PROP, the Police Reform Organizing Project. On Twitter @PROPNYC.

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