Bernard Gassaway, left, talks about his resignation with Errol Louis (photo: @InsideCityHall)
The latest indictment of the Department of Education's management of failing schools was personified last week by Bernard Gassaway, the recently self-retired principal of Boys and Girls High School.
As he stepped down after five tortured years at the helm of the storied Bed-Stuy school, Gassaway took a verbal backhand to the DOE for failing to produce a plan to turn around the chronically failing school.
Predictably, the DOE shot back that Gassaway was the problem and that the they were planning to get rid of him anyway. But the hard truth is that we as a community – from DOE policy makers, Gassaway and school leadership to the parents and surrounding community-based institutions – ultimately failed the students of Boys and Girls and have been doing so for years.
I believe that the wider community of parents, teachers and neighborhood-based institutions - not just a singular principal or a fix-all plan handed down from Mount Tweed - has the resilience to produce a thriving learning environment if it is engaged through an effective community school model.
The mayor, having promised 100 community schools, has already designated 42 of them. Boys and Girls, in a cluster with other schools in the area, should be included in the next round.
Boys and Girls offers robust services as many community schools do, and is the site of countless community events. It also has the support of local politicians. However it struggles to offer the high academic standards and broad collaboration that are essential elements of effective community schools.
Specifically, parents and the surrounding community have remained under-informed regarding the school and under-engaged in determining its fate. A community school is not just a school within a neighborhood, but an academic and socio-economic hub for the surrounding community. Is this yet another supposed solution-in-a-box? No.
A community school model doesn't suddenly address all the challenges posed by poverty, institutional racism, and DOE bureaucracy. For instance, Boys and Girls will continue to fail under any plan, under any leader, if it continues to be used as the high school of last resort. But with adequate resources, intelligently invested in a community school model, Boys and Girls can begin to address the physical and emotional needs of not just the whole child, but the whole family.
While the Children's Aid Society in New York and Community in Schools, a national network of community schools, provide evidence that community schools demonstrate higher academic achievement levels, the model ultimately rises and falls on the strength and organizing skills of the community behind it.
This is a critical moment in the transition for Boys and Girls, which just named Gassaway's replacement. We've all seen principals, who, from a single centralized command, keep parents at a distance, see community institutions simply as service providers rather than partners, and treat peer schools as competitors. With so much pressure to meet city and state standards, schools often morph into fortresses and focus their attention inward. In effective community schools, principals are not dictators, but savvy community organizers and collaborators who know how to harvest the talent of the people and organizations around them.
Neither a new principal nor a new plan by the DOE will alone "fix" Girls and Boys. But within a community school framework, they can both provide a rare opportunity to re-think how to build investment and accountability among a broader set of people deeply engaged in the success of a school.
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Mark Winston Griffith is the Executive Director of the Brooklyn Movement Center, a community organizing group developing leadership among Central Brooklyn parents.
Public Advocate James listens to testimony from DOC Commissioner Ponte (photo: William Alatriste)
New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer issued the latest in a series of reports on mismanagement at Rikers Island last week, pointing out that the city's jail costs twice as much per bed as similar facilities in other big cities and is besieged with violence. Over the last year the New York City Department of Correction has been buffeted by scandals, lawsuits, and accusations of incompetence, corruption, and mismanagement. Throughout this period the Department's main oversight body, the New York City Board of Correction has been largely missing in action. Mayor Bill de Blasio needs to intervene to reinvigorate this important but largely dormant oversight body under his control.
The Board of Correction was created in 1957 as part of the City Charter and has the authority to make rules for the Department of Correction, conduct investigations of conditions and acts of misconduct, and issue public reports. It also has the ability to issue subpoenas and hold oversight hearings. The Board is made up of 9 members that oversee a professional staff of investigators and monitors.
Currently three of the nine seats on the Board are vacant and the chair is a holdover from the previous administration. The City Council chooses three members and the city's judiciary has a say in three more, but these must be approved by the Mayor, who also appoints three members directly, including the chair.
In August, US Attorney Preet Bharara issued a scathing report outlining a "culture of violence" among guards at Rikers Island, especially in its juvenile facilities, and raised major concerns about the use of solitary confinement for 16- and 17-year olds. Bharara has threatened legal action unless there are major reforms forthcoming.
His report was in response to widespread allegations of excessive force by guards—especially against juveniles, mistreatment including the deaths of people with mental illness in the "mental observation" unit, and widespread access to contraband, leading to the arrest of two corrections officers and a nurse in recent months. In August, The New York Times found that officer use of force had increased by 90% in the last 4 years.
The new Commissioner, Joseph Ponte, has recently been criticized for his appointment of William Clemons as Chief of Department. The city's Department of Investigation (DOI) had recommended demoting him after they found widespread failures to report violence in the juvenile facility where he was warden. The DOI, based on a review of video tapes and other documents, uncovered 375 incidents of violence that were not reported. Evidence of this wrongdoing was then withheld from the Department of Justice during its investigation.
The treatment of people with mental illness remains a profound problem at the jail. By some accounts 40% of those at Rikers have significant mental illness, including as many as 50% of juveniles. This vulnerable population is much more likely to be subjected to violence from both guards and prisoners and are heavily over-represented in solitary confinement units, where their conditions often worsen. Even the special mental observation unit is plagued with problems. In September of last year, Bradley Ballard died after days of neglect by guards and health workers—despite his obvious extreme distress. In March, homeless veteran Joseph Murdough literally baked to death in his cell because of faulty heating equipment and negligence, despite being on suicide watch.
This week the Associated Press reported that they have discovered 14 cases in the last 5 years where inmates at the jail died of preventable causes due to inadequate health care as a result of failure of guards to notify medical staff or failure of medical staff from the for-profit health group Corizon to provide needed treatment.
Mayor de Blasio needs to take a more active role in bringing about changes at Rikers. The Board of Correction, which could be a major player in investigating problems and making changes to rules and procedures has been at best a bit player. Despite the mandate to make public reports about problems at the jail, their last two reports, while useful, were remarkably thin—calling for enhancements on recreation time for people in solitary and pointing out some of the problems with mental health treatment through case studies of three inmates. After initially rejecting calls for major reforms to solitary, the Board is now preparing rules to restrict or eliminate its use for juveniles and those with mental illness and limit its use in general. Much more is needed.
There are currently three vacancies on the Board and the Mayor needs to step in and make strong appointments to revitalize the Board so that it can be a force in implementing reforms called for by advocates and the US Attorney. In particular, he needs to appoint a chair with a strong commitment to active intervention and a mandate to use its full powers of investigation to uncover abuse and recommend appropriate solutions. The Jails Action Coalition has urged that at least one of the new appointees be someone formerly incarcerated at Rikers and this seems like an important way of grounding the Board's work in real life experiences. Rikers could be a model of enlightened corrections policy; instead it is reviled as dysfunctional, dangerous, and corrupt. The mayor must change this.
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Alex S. Vitale is associate professor of sociology at Brooklyn College and author of City of Disorder: How the Quality of Life Campaign Transformed New York Politics. He is senior policy adviser to hte Police Reform Organizing Project and serves on the New York State Advisory Committee to the US Civil Rights Commission. You can follow him on Twitter: @avitale
The New York Fed's Small Business Credit Survey (image via @NYFed_News)
Small businesses are critical to the jobs recovery. They employ half of private sector workers and have generated roughly two-thirds of the nation's net new jobs since 1995. Despite the economic significance of this sector, local policymakers lack high quality information about small firms' performance and their financing and investment decisions, including decisions to hire new workers. The New York Fed, working with a coalition of community partners, is trying to fill this gap.
Since 2010, the New York Fed's Outreach Team has surveyed small businesses in the greater New York region about their performance, financing needs and choices, and employment experiences. We work with organizations that serve the business community—including government agencies, chambers of commerce, and nonprofit service organizations—to gather timely intelligence and help shape programs that benefit small business owners.
Two themes have emerged from the survey: unmet small dollar credit needs (loans of $250k or less) and high credit application costs.
First, small business loans under $250k are the most frequently needed and hardest to come by. According to the latest Small Business Credit Survey (SBCS), 90% of small businesses in our region that applied for credit in 2013 sought amounts under $1 million, with the bulk of demand under $250k. These figures are consistent with national data, which show that small dollar lending through large and small banks hasn't returned to pre-recession levels.
Why do firms need small dollar loans? The most common need is working capital to finance day-to-day operations, including financing inventory for an outstanding contract or to smooth seasonal cash flow. However, approval rates for these smaller amount loans were significantly lower than those for higher dollar amounts. The most common credit challenges are weak performance, often resulting in a weak credit score, and insufficient collateral.
City and state officials at the Department of Small Business Services and Empire State Development have used these insights to shape industry-specific loan and grant programs and to design post-Superstorm Sandy recovery programs. Our team at the New York Fed has used the findings to shape Access to Capital workshops, which we hold regularly in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. The workshops demystify the credit application process by featuring direct conversations with lenders. They also introduce businesses that cannot qualify for traditional credit to alternative credit sources such as community development financial institutions, which can assume greater risk than banks and feature credit products designed to introduce (or reintroduce) firms into the financial mainstream.
A second and related finding from our research is that the credit search process can be quite costly in time and effort. Small business borrowers report spending more than 30 hours on average applying for loans—the better part of a workweek of a full-time employee. Consistent with this, small firms report growing interest in obtaining credit from non-traditional sources, including online lenders, which promise faster credit decisions. Even though this market currently represents less than $10 billion in outstanding loan capital, compared to the $700 billion from traditional sources, it is estimated that the portfolio balance of online lenders is doubling every year.
While the online sector has streamlined the credit application process, the terms and conditions can be quite costly. For example, online balance sheet lenders like OnDeck and Kabbage typically provide small short-term loans at an annualized rate that can range anywhere between 30 to 120 percent. Peer-to-peer lenders like Lending Club and Prosper, on the other hand, normally target near-prime borrowers and lend larger amounts for longer terms; interest rates for these loans range from 8 to 24 percent.
Given the importance of these trends for the economic health of small businesses and the US economy, the New York Fed remains committed to finding ways to maximize opportunities from credit innovations and minimize risk. Our goal is to provide high quality information and analysis on small businesses and to increase transparency about new sources of credit that may profoundly affect firms' financing options.
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by Claire Kramer, AVP, Director of Community Development, and Diego Aragon, Associate Director, Outreach and Education
Find the New York Fed on Twitter @NYFed_News and on Facebook here.