Advocate for Students Gets Used to Standing Alone
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After Mayor Bloomberg fired two of his appointees who were expected to vote against his social promotion policy, many New Yorkers wrote off the Panel for Educational Policy as a rubber stamp for the mayor’s proposals.
Since then, almost every panelist has backed almost every proposal – well, every panelist except for Martine Guerrier.
Ms. Guerrier, who was appointed to the panel in February by the Brooklyn borough president, Marty Markowitz, has often presented alternative resolutions at monthly panel meetings, and, because she votes “nay” as often as “aye,” she is getting used to being the panel’s lone dissenter or lone abstainer.
“My role is to represent the best interest of parents and students in the system,” she said last week over lunch in Lower Manhattan. “I have a different perspective on how the school system functions and can recognize potential trouble spots for implementation.”
Ms. Guerrier, 33, says she has a different perspective from other panelists because of her three-year experience as the president of Community School Board 13 in Brooklyn. Her colleagues said her background advocating in Albany on behalf of the Educational Priorities Panel also gives her a different perspective.
Her boss, Mr. Markowitz, put it this way: “Martine’s only constituents are the students and parents of Brooklyn’s public schools. On the Panel for Educational Policy, she uses her vast experience as a public education advocate to give students and parents a stronger voice in a system that has effectively shut out parental involvement.”
Mr. Markowitz sent out a press release in September announcing that Ms. Guerrier was the sole abstainer on the 13-member panel from the vote on the mayor’s plan to hold back failing fifth-graders. He called his appointee “the bright light on the panel” and said her “independence and resolve” benefit all students in public schools.
Ms. Guerrier grew up in Queens and attended Townsend Harris High School before getting a degree in social economic policy at Wells College in Aurora, N.Y. After college she jumped from odd job to temp job until 1998, when her son turned 2 and she started looking into pre-schools. Her neighbors warned her not to send him to public school.
She said she wasn’t about to make a life choice for her son based on an urban legend about how terrible the public schools were. So she decided to roll up her sleeves and find out what was actually happening in the public-school system by getting involved. She ran for school board president, and she won.
Ms. Guerrier said the biggest problem she combated was a lack of clear standards for communicating with parents, and she said the most frustrating thing about the job was learning that the budget drives school policy, not the other way around.
“At the end of the day, money was what held up many efforts to ensure that every kid was receiving a world-class education,” she said.
After her experience at the school board, she went to the Educational Priorities Panel, where she became the Albany legislative representative and later the communications director. When the Brooklyn borough president approached her, asking if she could be a champion for parents on the advisory panel, she jumped at the chance. She attended her first meeting in March.
The executive director of the Educational Priorities Panel, Noreen Connell, said she was “surprised” when Ms. Guerrier joined a city panel that Ms. Connell said doesn’t play “any significant role” in education policymaking.
But she said Ms. Guerrier, who’s still at the nonprofit organization, was certainly qualified for the appointment. “She likes people, and she’s very good at avoiding conflict, at putting conflict aside and trying to work out how best to proceed,” Ms. Connell said. “She’s very focused on the ultimate outcome, and how it will benefit children.”
Ms. Guerrier’s first meeting was the evening of March 15. As the panelists took their seats, word filtered through the Manhattan high school auditorium that the mayor and the Staten Island borough president, James Molinaro, had fired a total of three panelists who were expected to vote down the mayor’s proposal to hold back struggling third-graders.
A panelist, Natalie Gomez-Velez, introduced a motion to table the vote on the policy until the April meeting. It failed, on an 8-5 vote, with Ms. Guerrier voting with the minority. Ms. Guerrier then made her own proposal: conducting a year-long study of the academic interventions under consideration, and then voting on the mayor’s plan at the May 2005 panel meeting. That was defeated, on a 7-5 vote, before the mayor’s proposal was approved by an 8-5 vote.
In May, Ms. Guerrier voted with the minority for a proposal that would have forced smaller class sizes on the schools with the lowest-performing elementary students.
In August, she was the only panelist to vote against the city’s budget-allocation formula, which she said seemed to be forcing schools to “cannibalize their budgets in an effort to cover their overhead costs.”
In September, she was the only panelist who abstained from voting on the mayor’s policy to hold back failing fifth-graders.
Between meetings, Ms. Guerrier is known for sending long, thoughtful emails about the policies under consideration.
One of her panel colleagues, Joan Correale, said, “As issues come up, what we do is we get an issue, and we go to briefings, and we hash it out.” On the fifth-grade policy, she said, members made suggestions that helped shape the policy before the vote. Ms. Correale helped change the wording on the special-education part of the proposal. Ms. Guerrier made other modifications.
Ultimately Ms. Guerrier abstained because she wanted the resolution to be more detailed than the other members did. “We didn’t have as many details as we wanted to see go into that, so our things were covered,” Ms. Correale said. “Martine wants it very specific. It’s part of her nature to be so detail-oriented.”
She said even though Ms. Guerrier was the only one not to raise her hand in support of the policy, the other panelists have a lot of respect for her. “She’s articulate, and so prepared,” she said. “She does her homework. She knows the facts.”
The schools chancellor, Joel Klein, who heads the panel, said, “Martine is a strong representative of children and families in Brooklyn on the Panel for Educational Policy.” He said she works “tirelessly to educate herself and Brooklyn constituents about the initiatives of the New York City Department of Education.”
Ms. Guerrier said she doesn’t know how long she’ll be on the panel. But she does know that when her son, who’s now in third grade, turns 18, the city’s public schools won’t look at all as they do now.
“My hope is by the time he’s through with school, I will have ensured that every kid in this city has received a world-class education,” she said, “so I can move on and do something about higher education.”