JFK (photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
Many are the sins of the Port Authority. Administrators made bad decisions about the original design for JFK, saddling the airport in the 1950s with large and widely separated terminals that have complicated renovation ever since. They also resisted creating mass transit links to JFK, finally opening the AirTrain over half a century after the first flights took off over Jamaica Bay.
Nor did the Port Authority over the decades show much talent for day-to-day management of facilities at the airport, leading to dirty bathrooms, shabby terminals, and delays.
Yet in the last two decades the Port Authority, and the airlines that operate at JFK, have spent billions of dollars collectively to redevelop the airport's terminals.
We now have a popular and functioning rail link, at least to the subway and LIRR. The AirTrain, a passable mass transit option, carries over six million travelers and workers per year. Most airport roadways have been rebuilt, signage is better, and security much enhanced. New air traffic technology is slowly reducing delays.
JFK is still regularly voted one of the country's "worst airports," but the truth is that the place works about as well as anything else in New York--and therein lies the problem.
JFK has rebounded in international travel, in large measure because the New York region has had a tremendous growth in tourism. In 2000, 6.8 million international visitors came to the city; last year it was an amazing 12.2 million.
JFK is handling two thirds of the international travelers flying into the metropolitan area's three major airports. But the airport cannot boost the region's economy at full throttle if New York's leaders, and the people who elect them, do not change the rules of the game.
Companies need better access to workers, customers, and suppliers on a more reliable aviation transportation system. Otherwise, they will pack up and go somewhere else. Consumers also rely upon air cargo more than they realize. Whether it's Tiffany's, Walmart, or Apple; an affordable sushi dinner, inexpensive roses on Valentine's Day, or antibiotics when you get sick—high volume, low cost air cargo makes it all possible.
Every year, New York's airports ship in and out over $200 billion dollars worth of products including machinery, apparel, food, and medical instruments.
Yet the region's leaders have not done anything, beyond the AirTrain, to upgrade passenger connections to create the all-important "one seat ride" from Manhattan business centers to the airport. Nor have the many plans to upgrade freight access to Long Island and JFK reached fruition despite JFK's tremendous loss of market share in air cargo over the past three decades.
This lack of action, which discourages much trade and business at JFK, is the result of inaction by many political leaders and agencies rather than malfeasance of the Port Authority.
JFK also remains hemmed in by unnecessarily congested highways, a situation that has eroded the airport's supremacy in air cargo and hurt its passenger business.
Although larger tractor-trailers were finally allowed last year on New York City highways, no city in the world has as many truck free "parkways" girdling an airport. As a result, the heavily congested Van Wyck Expressway and slow service roads remain the only routes out of JFK for trucks. Long Island and city residents, concerned about a stagnant economy, may have to reconsider the logic of narrow landscaped parkways.
The four runways at JFK are also far below what is needed to handle the passenger business at one of the world's leading international airports. O'Hare, for instance, has eight and has spent billions reconfiguring its runways to reduce delays and boost capacity.
The Regional Plan Association, the Port Authority years ago, and many others have made some logical proposals for expansion of runways into Jamaica Bay or on the landside. Their pragmatic proposals would boost operations and reduce delays in bad weather with minimal noise and environmental impacts. Those plans have gone nowhere.
In light of the fact that Jamaica Bay has yet to realize its promise as a great ecological park, and was compromised further by superstorm Sandy, city and federal officials need to seriously consider using more of its surface for aviation.
The Bay and its environs are, after all, places where commerce, residence, and nature have always mixed. New oysters beds in the water under additional runways, and fewer marshes and gulls near the runways, would yield a cleaner and more resilient bay—and fewer bird strikes.
The Port Authority could also be forced to mitigate any habitat losses at JFK with marsh restoration on other sites, far away from airplanes.
There are many cities both here and abroad that stand ready to absorb New York City's growth; aviation technology is making it easier to bypass crowded New York.
JFK is a remade airport today, but its growth pales in comparison to its peer global cities. Transportation is the key determinant of where companies will locate.
If New York is going to have a diversified economy, including decent jobs for the working class, making space for air cargo and aviation—which employ large numbers of entry level workers—makes a lot of sense, especially because it can be done in an environmentally sustainable way.
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by Nicholas D. Bloom and Philip M. Plotch
Bloom is associate professor at the New York Institute of Technology where he is also Chair of Urban Administration and Interdisciplinary Studies. He has written many books including The Metropolitan Airport: JFK International and Modern New York and the forthcoming edited collection from Princeton University Press, Affordable Housing in New York: The People, Places, and Policies That Transformed a City.
Plotch is an assistant professor of political science and director of the Masters in Public Administration program at Saint Peter's University in Jersey City. He is the former director of World Trade Center Redevelopment and Special Projects for the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, and the former manager of planning for New York's Metropolitan Transportation Authority. He is the author of Politics Across the Hudson: The Tappan Zee Megaproject.
Chancellor Fariña (photo: @NYCSchools)
There’s been lots of news and commentary lately about fraudulent credit recovery schemes and grade fixing practices at city schools. The editors of the New York Post predictably want to pin the blame on Mayor de Blasio – with op-eds written by critics such as Senate Majority Leader Flanagan, who claim that these scandals are a good reason to question the extension of mayoral control of city schools.
Truth is that these schemes spread like a virus first under Mayor Bloomberg – the result of pressure on schools to improve quickly or be closed, combined with a troubling lack of oversight to see that improvements were based on real learning and not gimmicks. Credit recovery was widespread, along with instructions from principals that teachers should pass 60 percent of their students “or else.”
Despite the fact that this troubling phenomenon occurred during the Bloomberg administration, Senator Flanagan was then one of the biggest boosters of mayoral control, and in 2009, helped renew it for another six years. This was probably not unrelated to the fact that Bloomberg was also the biggest financial contributor to the Republican Senate majority.
Now that de Blasio is mayor, the hedge-funders and the charter lobby have replaced Bloomberg as the biggest contributors to the state GOP, and keeping its members in charge of the Senate. And as de Blasio has consistently opposed the efforts of these same groups to expand charters and privatize our public schools, Flanagan and the editors of the Post are predictably eager to use the scandal to threaten him with the loss of mayoral control.
To her credit, reporter Sue Edelman, who has broken many of these stories, made it clear in the Post that these fraudulent practices are not new:
Credit- and grade-boosting schemes went into full swing under Mayor Mike Bloomberg, who boasted of raising the citywide graduation rate to 64.2 percent in 2014. Last year, the rate rose to 68.4 percent. But both years only 38 percent of the grads had test scores high enough to enroll in CUNY without remedial help.
But even if this credit recovery and other artificial methods of juking the stats took hold during the Bloomberg years, the de Blasio administration cannot be let off the hook for allowing them to continue.
Edelman’s piece recounts the scandalous allegations at Dewey, Flushing, Richmond Hill, Bryant and Automotive High Schools, which until recently were met with little more than a shrug from both Chancellor Farina and the mayor. Teachers at Dewey in particular had been reaching out desperately for more than a year, before their copious evidence of fraud was finally taken seriously, and principal Kathleen Elvin dismissed in July.
I began to get anguished messages from teachers at Dewey in September 2012. Starting in February 2014, teachers reported the credit recovery to Special Investigator Condon and others. Soon followed numerous exposés in the Post, and by Marcia Kramer of CBS News and Juan Gonzalez of the Daily News, who catalogued in great detail the outrageous techniques of the principal to boost the graduation rate.
Yet in March, de Blasio said, referring to the Dewey scandal and the much-derided capability of the internal DOE investigative unit, “I don’t assume because some teachers talked to you that that’s the whole truth. I believe very, very strongly in the quality of our investigations unit. I have absolute faith in the integrity of that unit.”
As recently as this past June, Farina minimized the clear evidence of the principal’s misdeeds.
In this way, she and the mayor have played into the hands of their opponents. Even now, by appointing a group made up almost exclusively of DOE officials to look into the scandals instead of an independent panel of investigators, the administration seems tone deaf about how its efforts to stem the tide of corruption will be portrayed.
The administration has been less than transparent on a whole host of education issues – as the NYC Kids PAC report card pointed out.
There are 94 schools on the city’s “Renewal” list. These schools, many of which have been struggling for years, are under tremendous pressure to increase test scores and raise graduation rates or be closed or taken over by the state. Yet so far, the remedies introduced by the administration focus on “wrap-around” services – which do not directly address these students’ academic needs – as well as replacing teachers, appointing new administrators, and encouraging more professional development.
These schools do not need a whole new raft of inexperienced teachers. In March, de Blasio visited Automotive High School and said, “It is impossible to sit in one of those rooms and not immediately identify the level of commitment so many of our teachers have – how much they believe in the work they’re doing...These teachers are committed, energetic, creative, and they’re committed to the future of this school.” And yet last month, it was reported that 63 percent of the teachers at those schools had left or been forcibly removed.
Nor do these school need yet more high-priced administrators, though the Renewal division at Tweed is expanding fast and will have 45 administrative positions, many of them at top salaries, filled by the end of the summer. It is also unlikely that more teacher training and professional development will turn around these schools. An article in Politico NY relates how Farina recently met with Karen Ames, the new Superintendent of District 8 in the South Bronx, who briefed her on efforts to improve the Renewal schools in her district:
Ames, [is] the new superintendent of District 8, which encompasses a swath of largely low-income neighborhoods in the Bronx…[Ames is] a former network leader in prestigious District 2, the same Upper East Side region where Fariña spent years as principal of P.S. 6, came prepared for her meeting with the chancellor, whom she has known for years….Ames recently led several principals of Renewal Schools in her district on a tour of District 2’s Salk School of Science, one of the city’s best middle schools. Fariña praised the idea of the Salk tour…
It is astonishing that principals of District 8 renewal schools are being asked to visit Salk Middle School on the East Side of Manhattan for tips on how to improve their schools, given their vastly different student populations. Salk is a selective middle school that takes only the highest scoring students, and serves a primarily middle class and even comparatively wealthy school population. Only 11 percent of Salk students qualify for free lunch, according to Inside Schools; and it is home to no English language learners. Its students are 64 percent white; 21 percent Asian, 4 percent black, and 9 percent Hispanic.
Contrast those statistics with the four Renewal middle schools in District 8:
According to the Independent Budget Office, all the Renewal schools have much larger numbers of English language learners, immigrant students, students with disabilities, and students in temporary housing, as well as more black and Hispanic students than the system as a whole.
What the students in these schools desperately need is intensive tutoring and small classes to make significant improvements, not a new cadre of inexperienced teachers or administrators breathing down their necks. And yet more than 60 percent of the Renewal schools still have many classes with 30 students or more, according to DOE data.
When Rudy Crew was chancellor, he drew the lowest-performing schools in the city into a new program called the Chancellor’s District, and capped class size in all of their classes at no more than twenty students. This worked effectively to raise achievement. Yet not a single elementary or K--8 school on the Renewal list had capped class sizes at 20 students in grades K-3 last year, as most experts would recommend. These were also the goals that the state demanded the DOE achieve citywide in its class size reduction plan in these grades, as part of the settlement of the Campaign for Fiscal Equity lawsuit in 2007.
Only eight middle or 6-12 schools out of 43 Renewal schools last year had capped class sizes at 23 students in grades 6-8, and only one renewal high school out of 31 had capped class sizes at 25 – the goals for those grades in the city’s original class size reduction plan. More than half of the high schools had at least some classes with 35 to 44 students - which mean they violated union contract levels.
The real scandal is that hundreds of thousands of New York City high school students, including those at schools that have allegedly engaged in credit manipulation, like Richmond Hill, Flushing, and Automotive, continue to struggle in large classes of 34 or more.
Rudy Crew had a vision of what high-poverty students need to succeed; but right now, there is no comparable vision on the part of this administration. If we are talking about accountability for schools and teachers, we must also address the accountability of those in charge of running our schools, and here the mayor and the chancellor have unaccountably failed.
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Leonie Haimsonis the Executive Director of Class Size Matters. Follow her on twitter @leoniehaimson
Christine Rodriguez, the author
For years, the school-to-prison pipeline has afflicted communities of color in New York. From a young age, students begin to be treated like criminals within the confines of their own schools—from being handcuffed, suspended, and arrested for minor incidents to starting the day by walking through metal detectors and having police be the first people they see.
Young people treated as criminals in school are much less likely to succeed. I've seen it first-hand among my high school peers. There are more police officers than counselors in our schools, which makes students feel like they are expected to end up in jail rather college.
This year, I graduated from high school, and I am committed to help end the school-to-prison pipeline. We must stop pushing youth out of school - New York City should be leading the way.
Recently, there was good news for New Yorkers who want to see an end to punitive discipline and more support of students to succeed. The Mayor's Leadership Team on School Climate and Discipline, convened earlier this year and of which I am a member, issued a set of recommendations last month that include measures to reduce school suspensions and arrests, address racial disparities, and collect more important data that will show what we know has been happening inside our schools.
The de Blasio administration, which convened the Leadership Team, has responded enthusiastically, and has committed to incorporating these recommendations into official city policy. Already, the administration has issued a new mission statement that includes a commitment to "reduce the use of suspensions as a disciplinary tool and will eliminate the use of summonses and arrests for minor school misbehavior while continuing to advance school safety."
The time is right for strong action. Students cannot wait. In 2011, Make the Road New York and many of our partners worked to pass the Student Safety Act, which for the first time made public what we already knew: too many black and Latino youth are being pushed out of school through arrests and suspensions for minor behaviors. The situation has improved under Mayor de Blasio's leadership, but there are still major disparities in school suspensions and arrests that are hurting young people of color and students with disabilities across our city.
And, under the 2011 law, we are still not able to collect data on hundreds of arrests by police offers, all suspensions, and the use of handcuffs and other restraints (which have been used on students as young as five years old). We look forward to getting this data soon.
The new recommendations from the Leadership Team acknowledge continuing challenges and signal a citywide commitment to reform. There is no time to waste.
The next step will be critical. In the coming months, the de Blasio administration, the Department of Education, and the NYPD will work to turn these recommendations into policy. Meanwhile, they will need to ensure that young people of color—who have been disparately affected by this problem—continue to be part of this conversation, weighing in on how we are being treated in our city's schools and making sure that our wellbeing is front and center in the public discussion.
Equally important, resources need to be allocated to implement new programs, trainings, and staffing to make policy changes effective and ultimately successful.
We're moving in the right direction, but we can't stop now.
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Christine Rodriguez is a Youth Power Project member of Make the Road New York, the largest grassroots community organization in New York offering services and organizing the immigrant community, and a member of the Mayor's Leadership Team on School Climate and Discipline. On Twitter: @maketheroadny