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Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning everyone. It's Thursday, June 22nd, the first full day of summer. Happy Solstice if you celebrated that yesterday, and never mind that the temperature won't get out of the 60s in the New York area today. The last eight years, were still the eight warmest years on record globally, according to the National Weather Service and Europe's official climate change service, but somewhere on some other show, on some other station today, maybe right now someone will be saying, "In the 60s on the first full day of summer in New York City, but all they want to talk about is climate change."

Someone somewhere will say something like that here on Thursday, June 22nd, not acknowledging that the eight warmest years on record globally were the last eight years. If it's a Thursday in June, it's also a Supreme Court decision day and the rulings come down at 10:00 AM which is now. The Legal Affairs Bureau of the Brian Lehrer Show, that's our producer, Lisa Allison today, our legal Affairs Bureau is keeping her eye on their feed for the major decisions we're awaiting on student loan forgiveness, affirmative action in college admissions, denying business services to gay customers and more.

We will let you know if anything comes down in these coming minutes if anything does. Then we have Elie Mystal justice correspondent for The Nation standing by to come on later in the show once he's had a chance to read whatever decision comes down and do analysis for us, but we will let you know as soon as something breaks, if something does. Also, we talked on yesterday's show about the corporatization of medicine as experienced by doctors. We'll talk today about the corporatization of medicine as experienced by patients even when they're insured with Karen Pollitz from the health policy organization, KFF. She will share the results of a new KFF survey in which Americans describe their health insurance shortfalls.

You know how we say pregnant people sometimes these days, not just pregnant women? I tend to use both in order to respect the small minority of people who give birth but experience themselves with different gender identities. Well, for Pride Month, the least we could do is not just talk about those people, but to talk to one of them, so we will welcome Krys Malcolm Belc today, author of the memoir, The Natural Mother of the Child: A Memoir of Non-Binary Parenthood. All of that is coming up in the next two hours, and we start here. Politico calls it New York City's most fiercely contested election you probably never heard of.

Now, you did hear about it on this show when the voting started last month, but unless you were personally involved, you probably let it go by. It was the election for members of the community and Citywide Education Councils. The Education Department's website says education councils are part of New York City's school governance structure. There is a Community Education Council for every community school district, there are also for Citywide Councils. Well, guess what just happened in those elections folks?

Maybe because hardly anyone knows about them or votes in them, according to Politico, close to 40% of the seats were won by a group with conservative education politics, including in some cases right-wing culture war leadings. The group is called PLACE, which stands for Parent Leaders for Accelerated Curriculum and Education, PLACE. As that name suggests, emphasizing accelerated curriculum, they are for keeping the various high stakes standardized tests like the SHSAT to get into the city's elite high schools like Stuyvesant and Bronx Science as the sole criteria for admission.

It's not just that, Politico cites the views of someplace members who have compared critical race theory to Nazi ideology and called the public school system, "An oppressor woke environment" where the Department of Education makes them pledge allegiance to the LGBTQ+ religion. A quote from, I guess according to Politico, at least one person from the group, PLACE.

The group also endorsed Lee Zeldin for governor last year and there's no law against that or any of their opinions, but your Republican political and endorsements represent 40% of the parents in New York City. Obviously not, but this group, well organized when perhaps others were not, just 140% of the seats on the community and citywide education councils. About those high-stakes tests that they support. Another piece of news you may have seen is that based on the test alone, Stuyvesant High School will have an incoming freshman class in September of 762 kids. Exactly, seven of them will be Black.

Let's talk education now with the Chair of the New York City Council Education Committee, Rita Joseph of Brooklyn whose district includes Crown Heights, Flatbush and East Flatbush, Kensington, Midwood, Prospect Park, and Prospect Lefferts Gardens. Council member Joseph, always good to have you. Welcome back to WNYC.

Rita Joseph: Well, thank you. Good morning, Brian. Thank you for having me back. Wow, what an introduction. [laughs]

Brian Lehrer: That's where we are in New York City right now. Let me apologize in advance for the interruptions that may come if the Supreme Court hands down any major decisions while you're on because that may happen during this particular segment. We'll go back and forth if need be between me describing the details of those decisions as they come out and you and I having our conversations about education and taking calls.

Rita Joseph: Absolutely.

Brian Lehrer: You are the Education Committee Chair, just to let our listeners know you a little more in part because you have a background in the field, the Master's degree in general and special ED. Were you also a teacher?

Rita Joseph: Yes. I was an educator for 22 years. I literally left New York City Public School 17 months ago.

Brian Lehrer: Wow. 22 years. Where'd you teach?

Rita Joseph: I taught at P.S. 6 in Brooklyn right next to Rasmus Hall in District 17.

Brian Lehrer: All right. All that time.

Rita Joseph: All that time, and when I left, I left as an ENL coordinator, which would've been very, very handy right now as we receive all of our new asylum seekers. The job entails screening them and placing them in the proper ESL support system.

Brian Lehrer: For full disclosure, I think you'd call yourself a progressive. You have the Working Families Party endorsement for your reelection and things like that. I imagine you're no fan of the group PLACE. Fair enough.

Rita Joseph: Well, I don't know the group enough not to be a fan, so as an educator, I always have an open mind. We meet people with a blank page and we allow them to write their own narrative.

Brian Lehrer: Well, you say you don't know them, so I don't know if you can comment on this or not.

Rita Joseph: I've just been through the articles and that's about it. I'm not too familiar with them.

Brian Lehrer: They certainly say they are not affiliated with the national right-wing education culture-war group, Moms for Liberty, or anything like that. The standardized testing and keep the gifted and talented tracking system in place is a serious debate that many people have different views on, so I guess how much of the hardcore culture war stuff like calling critical race theory Nazi ideology or comparing it to that or calling the whole school system woke oppressors. If this group won almost 40% of the Community Education Council and Citywide Education Council seats, what do you think we're in for?

Rita Joseph: A lot of new things, but remember CC is also an advisory group. I don't think anything is law-abiding. It's just resolutions that they're putting out. Everything is not law-abiding so I think they're--

Brian Lehrer: It's not binding, right?

Rita Joseph: Correct. It's not binding. They are suggestion and they're advisory group to New York City public schools. I've always said that parents' voices are important in decision-making and they should also be part of their child's educational journey. For me, I welcome all voices. Doesn't mean I have to agree with everything that I hear.

Brian Lehrer: Sounds like a good attitude for a leader to have. About those education council elections, many listeners might be confused that we're even talking about that topic because we always hear that ever since the Mayor Bloomberg days, we have mayoral control of the New York City public schools. The Mayor, whoever it is, through their handpicked chancellor, sets education policy, not any kind of elected groups. Like you were just saying, these are advisory, they don't make policy. Even if people are alarmed by who some of the winners are, what power do they have?

Rita Joseph: As I mentioned before, just to advise and give some of their concerns because we've heard some of their concerns as they ran. G&T, we heard specialized high schools, we've heard of that and some other-- What did they feel? That we were pushing a woke oppressed curriculum on them, so we've heard all of that.

Brian Lehrer: Again, that was a quote from one person as I understand it, not an official position of the group, just to be fair to them. PLACE itself does list eight goals for education policy. Number 1 is to keep the SHSAT exam as the sole admissions criteria to the specialized high schools, Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, and the handful of others. Item number 3 on their list includes academically screened middle schools. Number 7 is maintaining the New York State Regents exam as a requirement for high school graduation. Do you oppose all of that?

Rita Joseph: I've always said when the SHSATs came out, it's 50 years old. We've changed in time, we've grown. I think it should also be revisited to see how we adjusted to the times. Middle Schools, there are a lot of districts who don't have. I applaud the chancellor when he allowed districts to choose how they wanted to screen their middle schools. There's some great models out there that do not screen their middle schools and the kids go on to do very, very well. District 15 is one of them.

Brin Lehrer: What's the point of screening in your opinion? If districts, the whole community worth of families can do well in districts that have screening for middle schools and don't have screening for middle schools?

Rita Joseph: Follow the model. I think, whenever we have best practices, as educators when we have best practices in an area we go. I remember when I was in the classroom, we would go visit schools that were doing things very, very well. Maybe they need to take a trip to those schools in those districts that are doing very well, unscreened middle school entries and see how the model works, and may be duplicated across the city versus just requiring one set of rules for all kids.

I've always said education is not a cookie-cutter model. We have students that learn in different styles. That doesn't mean they're not geniuses, but they learn different. For myself, I'm a visual learner, I'm not an auditory learner so I need to see what I'm learning but that doesn't mean I'm not a good student. I think that's what should be applied here as well.

Brin Lehrer: Now, listeners, we invite your calls. If you voted in or ran in the Education Council elections that were just held in New York City, progressive candidates and voters, PLACE candidates and voters let us know what you stood for and what impact you think these elections might have, or defend or oppose the SHSAT as the sole admission criteria for the specialized high schools, or defend or oppose the idea of selective middle schools in New York City or anything else for city council education committee chair, Rita Joseph. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692.

We'll get to your calls in just a minute as some are starting to come in. Just let me get your quick take on Stuyvesant High School incoming freshman class. Much like their usual incoming class, 762 students, only seven of them are Black. In your opinion, does the test discriminate against them or does the test reveal an underlying problem in the school system's ability to provide equal education outcomes in the lower grades, or maybe something else?

Rita Joseph: A holistic approach I think you mentioned all three of them. Maybe we need to look at how students are being prepped for these exams. We need to also look at the underlining issues. Well, students are still coming out of a pandemic, remember so learning loss is still major. Recovering in our schools, make sure that we need to provide all the resources. I would have loved to meet these seven students and find out what did they do differently.

What should we be looking at in order for more of our students to go into Stuyvesant? I remember when I was growing up, there was a lot of programs that allowed you to take prep courses. I took prep when I was an undergrad when I wanted to take my teacher's exams. I wanted to find out what are they doing differently and should we start earlier. I've always said that we shouldn't wait till kids get to sixth grade, we should start as young as ending of fourth grade entering fifth grade to get students ready for specialized exams.

Brin Lehrer: By the way, somebody just tweeted and reconfirmed it, that the Community Education Councils or the Citywide Education Councils do have at least one binding power. They approved school district zoning lines. We have is it 32 neighborhood school districts in New York City. Is that the right number?

Rita Joseph: Sure.

Brin Lehrer: I guess the Citywide Education Councils or the Community Education Councils approved those district lines. Do you think anything's at stake with that? Where the lines are drawn for where's District 15, where's District 14?

Rita Joseph: No. I think it's always community. There has to be a community engagement in order for that to happen and just happen on the sole. There has to be community engagement in order for these things to happen. They don't happen in silos or a sole person. I think it should be in community.

Brin Lehrer: Let's take a phone call. Janet in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Hi, Janet.

Rita Joseph: Hi, Janet.

Janet: Good morning. I took the test in the '60s and have never seen anything like that in my life. I had never. I went to a pretty good school. Then I realized that when my daughter did it in the late '90s, there was a special program that was funded by the Board of Education. She took the program and she tested into Brooklyn Tech, though she ended up going to a private school on the Upper East Side. What I realized is I don't think what the students learn in high school, whatever, prepare them.

I also had to pay for testing program. I think those community whose children are more represented in the science, I'm sure they do a lot of extra prep. I'm sure they pay for it. Also, I think the community has emphasis on education, which I don't think is necessarily what is represented. I'm an African-American, I don't think it is necessarily represented in the African-American community. I keep the test because if you study hard, and people do study hard, they will make it but they need to teach for the tests. Thank you.

Rita Joseph: They have to teach to the test and make sure they're taking prep courses and have resources available for students who may not have that at their disposal. Is that--

Janet: Like I said, yes. I don't know if they should teach to the test but what they learn in high school has almost no relationship-

Rita Joseph: To what's on the exam?

Janet: -to what is on the exam. I felt that when I was a kid-- My daughter went to a good school, and there was nothing on that. There was nothing on that. She never learned that trick.

Brin Lehrer: That did seem relevant to the test. Janet, thank you very much for that call.

Janet: Thank you.

Brin Lehrer: Well, Janet raises a few issues there obviously. One of them, she's suggesting, or at least implying that if there was some kind of city-wide test prep system, then it would even out a lot of the inequality in terms of being prepared to take the test, especially if the test is looking for different things than what the kids are getting in their curriculum in middle school. Do you like that idea?

Rita Joseph: I like that idea. Absolutely. I would support something like to support students to get the prep test because like I said, I took a prep test when I was taking my teachers' exams as well. The skills there is it shows you what you need to do, how to time yourself, how to write your essays, how to answer the questions, and what to look for. Those skills are also important. Not everyone does very well on tests. I know I get anxieties, I sweat a lot, I get nervous. All of these factors also play into it. Then those are the skills they also teach you in the test prep course.

Brin Lehrer: Let's take another call. Tom in the Bronx, you're on WNYC. Hi, Tom.

Tom: Hi, how are you?

Brin Lehrer: Good. Thank you.

Tom: Thank you. I want to say thank you to Chair Joseph for being on today. For people who don't know me, my name is Tom Shepard. I am the member on the panel for educational policy that was elected by CC presidents. When we speak of CCs having a strictly advisory role, one of their functions is to elect a member to serve on the PEP. I think it's important to highlight that. The second point--

Brin Lehrer: Let me ask you to take a step back just to make sure the listeners are keeping up with you. The PEP or the Parents Educational Policy counsel. I don't know if I got that acronym exactly right, but you do specifically advise the chancellor on policy. This is sort of the highest-level parents' groups that has the chancellor's ear.

Tom: Sort of. The panel for educational policy serves in state law as the New York City Board of Education. The panel's responsibility is to vote on matters of policy related to educational achievement and student performance contracts, et cetera. We serve as the school board. Our community education council presidents elect members to serve, five of them now, on the panel. I needed to highlight that part because while every day function is advisory, they do serve a very important role in shaping policy by voting or electing members to serve on the city's school board.

Brian Lehrer: As a member of the panel for education policy, can you cite an example where you think the panel really has had an impact on policy? Because usually in the media, we either hear from the mayor directly or we hear from Chancellor Banks.

Tom: Yes, I can give two. One is, in January of '21, the panel voted on the Pearson Gifted and Talented High School contract, and it was clear that the public had an interest in doing away with that contract.

Brian Lehrer: They made the tests, right? Pearson is the company that made some of the tests.

Tom: That's correct, and the public came onto that PEP meeting and indicated, in large part, it was roughly two-thirds of people said that they didn't want that test, so the panel voted against it. There's one clear example. Another one is really around the debate around charter schools. Up in the Bronx, back in January, the community was really clear that it did not want a Success Academy at the Richard R. Green Campus in District 11, and PEP members and the community really pushed the Department of Education to look at that particular co-location, but also to have a bigger conversation around charter schools and how they are distributed disproportionately in places like the Bronx.

Brian Lehrer: I understand. Well, you're giving us a really clear description of how members of the community education council's exert power up the chain to elect people like you who serve on the Panel for Education policy, which effectively can communicate community sentiment to the Chancellor. Really, really interesting. Tom, let me ask you one more question. What do you think the implications are of this group, PLACE with its conservative leanings and specific or explicit Republican ties endorsing Zeldin for governor last year, which would certainly not represent 40% of New York City parents because we know the outcome of that election in the city, but they have now 40% of the seats after the election recently on these community and citywide education councils. What do you think the implications of that might be for your level, the higher panel for education policy, or for policy itself with the chancellor?

Tom: There are two things to unpack in that. The first one is this conversation around 40% of the CEC or the Community Education Council seats being held by PLACE members is a bit inaccurate. 40% of the people that they endorsed were elected, and many of those members or many of those people that were endorsed, one, did not know they were endorsed. Two, reject PLACE's positioning, and a few even reached out to PLACE and said, "Remove me from your endorsement list."

There's one part of that. The other part is we or the community at large, we have really been pushing back against an ideology that says that this system needs to pay additional attention to gifted and talented students, et cetera, at the expense of students in communities like the Bronx who have been just disproportionately overlooked. The implications, that depends. I think that really depends on who the mayor and the chancellor decide that they want to listen to. Do they want to listen to a small group of parents, or do they want to listen to the overwhelming majority of parents that do not agree with the positions that PLACE takes?

Brian Lehrer: Really interesting. Tom, thank you very much and thank you for a more sophisticated understanding for all of us of how some of this works. Please call us again. Thank you very much. Our guest is the City Council Education Chair, Rita Joseph of Brooklyn. Chair Joseph, that was really interesting and one of the most interesting parts for me was that even though PLACE itself, this isn't just media reporting. PLACE itself, and I'm going to get the exact language because I have their press release here somewhere. Let's see if I can do this on the fly.

Here it is. No, here it isn't. I'm going to have to go to their website, but they're claiming 40% victory, but Tom is saying that some of the people they endorsed didn't even want their endorsement or didn't even know they were being endorsed by PLACE. Who knows? Maybe PLACE was endorsing people who they didn't really have a big investment in, but who they thought were going to win just so they could poof this number and get these headlines. I don't know, but it's interesting that he puts it in that perspective that we should take that 40% number that's being reported with a grain of salt.

Rita Joseph: Thank you, Tom, for the clarification. Wow, it is enlightening. Brian, you know we're also in the budget season as well and the council has some priorities that we're also fighting for us, especially for me as the education chair. Art education is major for me. Community schools, restorative justice, forced the youth being bused and immigrant family outreach, language access, and 3-K. These are some of my priorities that I'm fighting for.

Brian Lehrer: We're going to take a break here and then we're going to come back. I'm going to play a clip of Mayor Adams from before he was mayor, taking one position on the specialized high school test as the sole admission criteria. That's different from the position that he's taking as mayor, but we're also going to talk in more detail about what you just brought up council member, which is the budget battle. I don't know if battle is too strong a word taking place right now.

Let's say the negotiations between you on the city council and the mayor for what kind of education spending there's going to be in the new fiscal year, which begins July 1st, and how it pertains to some of the issues you just mentioned. Callers will keep talking to some of you on a very crowded board. In fact, our full board when we talk about these education issues, so stay with us. Brian Lehrer on WNYC.

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Brian Lehrer on WNYC as we continue with New York City Council Education Committee Chair, Rita Joseph of Brooklyn on the results of the recent Community School Council elections which were surprisingly dominated by a group with conservative ties and explicit Republican party ties called Parent Leaders for Accelerated Curriculum and Education, or PLACE is the acronym, and their website, which I'm reading from right now, placenyc.org says a significant--

Let's see. Well, I'll read the whole sentence. Nearly three-quarters of the parent hopefuls backed by PLACE, won school council seats and will now make up a significant 40% of all elected representatives on the citywide and community education councils, the city's version of school boards for the 2023 to 2025 terms. They are claiming that they have 40% of those seats. We heard from our previous caller who's higher up in the system that that just means PLACE endorsed those candidates. That doesn't mean those candidates agree with all of their views. We have that complication. Council member, Joseph, do you know that Mayor Adams, who now supports keeping the SHSAT used to oppose it? Here's a clip of Adams from, I don't have the exact year, but it looks to be 2017 or 2018, but it was before he started running for mayor. Listen?

Mayor Adams: The real test is not the exam that our children will take when they sit down in a sterilized environment of their classroom. The real test is our ability to get rid of the test. When we do that, then we have really passed the examination.

Brian Lehrer: No ambiguity there. Now he supports keeping the SHSAT as at least a criteria if not the sole criteria. I guess he supports sole criteria because he hasn't made any waves to change it from that. What do you make of the politics or philosophy of the mayor on this issue council member?

Rita Joseph: I think people change their positions as they move up the ladder. That's all I can say. He doesn't have the power to change. It's on a state level. We need to reach out to state colleagues and talk and discuss and see what we can do with that exam. It's not in our power to change on the city level. As I said before, I believe that exam is about 50 years old, if I'm correct. Maybe we need to revisit and see how it should align with the curriculum. As the previous caller said before, when you're taking the test and what you've learned in school does not match.

Brian Lehrer: We'll get to the budget in a second, but how far do you think with all your experience teaching for 22 years, having a master's in general in special ED, being the chair of the City Council Education Committee, how far do you think it would be best to go to untrack education? Should kids basically be placed together randomly, or what would you describe as the ideal?

Rita Joseph: Oh, wow. It's a lot. It takes different things for us to put all kids together. You're going to have to meet the needs of the students that are faster learners, students who grasp things really quick because you also don't want anyone bored. You want to make sure that you are meeting their needs. Like I said, education is not cookie-cutter.

You have to make sure you're meeting the needs of the students as well because then if you're not meeting their needs, you're going to create other situations and you don't want to handle that. It's providing the right setting for the right student. That's going to be important as well. Project-based learning is also good. There's a lot of hands-on programs that we've done in the past that accelerated having AP classes for students that are pretty advanced, having the resources for the students to meet their needs. That's going to be all. Also, Black parents support.

Earlier, someone said that, Black parents support. I remember my parents invested a lot in my education, making sure that I have the right setting, the right tutors, and my parents were immigrants who didn't speak English, so they made sure that we had the right support for us to succeed in schools. Education is key to a lot of parents in this city. Just that maybe more resources need to be added to certain areas in our city to make sure that our students are there to have the proper support.

Brian Lehrer: Johanna in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Hello, Johanna.

Johanna: Hi there. Thank you. I'm a parent of an eighth grader, so I just went through the high school process. I'm glad you said the word tracking because that's really what we're talking about, isn't it? As we are really talking about electing parents who are so in favor of expanding screens and screening our kids and sorting them into buckets.

I don't understand when so much research has shown that tracking kids is detrimental to especially the kids who don't fall into the highest tier and doesn't have that much of a benefit to kids who've tested for the highest tier, why we aren't really holding that gun? I've never met a parent who is thrilled about a system of tracking when they know their child is not going to be in whatever is deemed the top tier. Really, I would love to see this all, whenever we start talking about screens, whenever we're talking about tracking, whenever we're listening to the choruses of parents who are using coded language about screening their kids into programs that we hear, who do you not want your kid to be in school with?

Who do you not want your kids to be in class next to? How are systems of tracking ever going to benefit the kids who are not tracked into the top tier?

Brian Lehrer: I think a lot of parents would answer the two questions that you ask, parents who support tracking, by saying, "We're certainly not trying to avoid having our kids sit next to kids of different races. What we do want to avoid is having our kids in an environment where there are those who are learning much more slowly than my kid can learn and holding them back or kids who have disruptive behavior problems. Whether that's legitimate or not, in your view, that's how a lot of parents who support tracking would probably answer the question. What would you say to that?

Johanna: As long as it's not my kid, I think that's the thing is everybody says, "Oh, well my kid's disruptive behavior is because they're bored. Your kid's disruptive behavior is because they're interfering with the education of my child." What do you do? How does track education serve a child who is tremendously gifted in math, but struggles with ELA or who is-- You can't get that granular. When we were looking at schools, we really liked the education opt model where you could really have kids together with diverse learning abilities and then a differentiated environment.

Brian Lehrer: What about getting that granular, like when I was in high school, I was in advanced placement math, but I was in Science for Dummies. That was me. They had it in every course, the tracks. I'm not supporting it. I'm just saying it exists.

Johanna: I'm a little older. What I found was the kids who were tracked lower than considered themselves, they knew it. They knew who they were, and they knew what the expectations were of them. Those are the kids who were failing when we set up these tracks, and especially when entire schools are tracked this way.

Brian Lehrer: Johanna, thank you so much. Council member, you were trying to get in there.

Rita Joseph: I wanted to say that when I was an educator, and as the parent mentioned earlier, for example, a child is good at math but didn't like reading, I used that strength to build on the weakness. I didn't make it a weakness like, "Oh my God, you can't read, you can't read." Everything falls, goes hand in hand.

Nowadays when we're taking exams or whatever type of exams, you're reading a word problem. You're no longer doing simple computation, five plus four is nine. You have to explain as to why it's nine. How did you know this is an add-in, this is the answer to the addition problem? You have to explain. Therefore, what I used to do was use that weakness to build on the strength. The strength to build on that weakness. I had an advanced class one year, fourth grade. All of my students were great writers, but they all hated math. I used that as a way to build on that strength.

Not every kid is going to come to you well-rounded and versed in every subject. You're going to find that strength, and that's why in the beginning of the school year, you assess students, and that assessment would also drive your instruction.

Brian Lehrer: One more call. Jesse on Staten Island. You're on WNYC. Hi, Jesse.

Jesse: Hi. I took a Stuyvesant exam, let's see, back in 2000, so 23 years ago. Tested into Stuyvesant. Prior to that, since I'm Chinese, my parents sent me to a weekend prep class in Flushing. We did that weekends and summers. It was at my own request because I wanted to get into Stuyvesant and every single-- Not every single, but a lot of the kids I met at that prep class wound up getting into Stuyvesant or Bronx Science or Brooklyn Tech. In my middle school, we had 16 kids all get into Stuyvesant and they were all in my middle school algebra class. Nobody outside of that class got into Stuyvesant.

I had some friends I knew in elementary school who went to the same middle school, but they weren't in my algebra class, but they weren't in honors class, I guess, and they got into Brooklyn Tech. There was a lot of sorting back then.

Brian Lehrer: What's the moral of the story in your opinion for getting more equality of outcomes?

Jesse: Well, I know that Asian parents, they network a lot and they pass around prep schools and all that. I remember reading about when the city offered free prep classes after school, it was mostly Asian parents who took advantage of that instead of Black or Hispanic parents. I don't want to say something about the culture or anything, but I know that Asian parents they value education a lot, and not saying that other parents don't but there's a lot of parent involvement.

Brian Lehrer: Jesse, thank you. That always comes up, Councilmember. What are you thinking as you hear Jesse?

Rita Joseph: In terms of what, parent involvement, which part that he said a lot?

Brian Lehrer: Yes, that last part about parent involvement, Chinese-American culture.

Rita Joseph: Parent involvement, I've always said that we should also keep parents engaged in their child's educational journey. You heard what he said, most importantly, he said, networking. Maybe parents need to start setting up networking. I remember when I was in school, there was a network of parents that took care of each other. If one parent couldn't pick up, there was one designated parent that would pick up all the kids. There was a network of parents to support each other. Maybe that's what we also need to create a network of parents to support each other, to know where the resources where they can also guide them.

Brian Lehrer: I know you got to go shortly. I know you want to talk about the budget. We are in the home stretch of the New York City budget season now with a new fiscal year about to begin on July 1st. Our US education chair, leading any negotiation with the mayor's office on the size of the education budget or specific education lines within it?

Rita Joseph: Absolutely. I'm at the table making sure that art education is included in our budget. We know what art does in our schools. It really boosts, upgrade morale, confidence in students. Community schools more than ever they needed coming up to the pandemic with the wraparound services that they provide for schools, for students, and parents, and restorative justice. We've seen where we need less punitive punishments and more restorative justice.

Also, foster youth busing is something that I'm fighting for big. Immigrant family outreach, more than ever, we will need immigrant support, language access and expansion to support our new New Yorkers. Those New Yorkers that were already here that is still multi-language learners, that we see that parents. I grew up in a household where my parents didn't speak English as well so having that support is very important. 3-K, early childhood education is also very important.

Brian Lehrer: How much are you in the council and the mayor on the same page, as this budget goes through?

Rita Joseph: We're at the table. Some of the stuff we see eye-to-eye, some of the stuff we have to negotiate. This is the budget dance that we do every year, so we're doing it. There's a back-and-forth. We're working on it and we're negotiating.

Brian Lehrer: City Council Education Chair, Rita Joseph, from District 40 in Brooklyn. Councilmember, thank you. We appreciate it so much.

Rita Joseph: Thank you so much for having me.

 

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