Opposition Mounts To Birks

On the eve of a vote to select a new schools superintendent, parents, students and elected officials Sunday added their voices to a growing chorus in opposition to the Board of Education majority’s choice.

Nearly 60 people chanted and waved colorful signs outside of City Hall at a Sunday afternoon rally, at which speakers (in both English and Spanish) demanded that the Board of Education reconsider last week’s 4‑to‑3 vote in a non-binding straw poll to choose Carol Birks. The official vote is scheduled to take place Monday night.

Birks, currently chief of staff for Hartford Public Schools, isn’t the right pick to lead New Haven, they argued, because of her connections to charter schools, support for student-based budgeting and emphasis on standardized testing data. (Click here to download a flyer from the event with the community’s concerns.) A chaotic search process, they added, only made students, including the two non-voting members Jacob Spell and Makayla Dawkins, feel ignored.

In just three days of organizing, the #NotMySuperintendent campaign against Birks has already gathered over 800 signatures in an online petition and convinced elected officials like State Rep. Juan Candelaria and Alder Darryl Brackeen, Jr., to come out in opposition.

The two other finalists for the job also earned more support from people attending a two-hour forum with them last week. As of 8:30 p.m. Sunday, Birks was also running a distant third to those finalists — Pamela Brown and Gary Highsmith — in an Independent ​“True Vote” poll.

With one day left before the official vote at a Monday night special meeting, the grassroots campaign is asking for the Board of Education to pick either Brown, the Spanish-speaking head of elementary schools in Fontana, Calif., or Highsmith, the homegrown director of human resources in Hamden. (Read all three candidates’ applications here.) They’ll need to flip one member of the four-member ed board majority — Mayor Toni Harp, Darnell Goldson, Frank Redente or Jamell Cotto — to change the expected result.

Throughout the hour-long rally in front of the Amistad statute on Church Street, powerful winds blew away signs and stung the protesters with a bitter chill. Despite the gusty weather, the protesters shouted in several calls and responses: ​“Listen to our voice! Make the right choice!” ​“Whose schools? Our schools!” and ​“Students first! No to Birks!”

Candelaria, who has represented the Hill and Fair Haven in Hartford since 2002, criticized the way the search had been carried out.

“This started as a transparent process, a democratic process, but it’s ending in a way that is not,” he said. ​“It’s not too late for this board to make the right decision. Look around: Everyone that’s here from every corner of this community, they’re saying they don’t want this candidate. This board needs to listen! This board needs to do what’s right! That’s why I’m here today, because it’s not about being elected or being appointed to this board; it’s about representing this community, these individuals that are here today.”

Brackeen, representing Upper Westville, was joined by two newly elected alders, Charles Decker of East Rock and Abby Roth of East Rock/Downtown, in calling for an end to the ​“old way of politics” in favor of empowering students and educators to decide what would be best for the school system.

Students Speak Up

Spell, a senior at Creed High School (who Friday wrote an op-ed asking board members to change their vote) said student input had been ​“stifle[d].”

“It’s time that the New Haven Board of Education listen to the community,” he said. ​“Though this has been a convoluted and delayed process, I at least had faith that the best candidate would emerge for our students. … Either certain board members are ignoring what is plain to see or they must have been part of a different interview process than I was, because I firmly believe that Dr. Pamela Brown and Mr. Gary Highsmith are the best candidates for this position.”

After a shout-out to his English teacher, Spell added that the board’s decision-making process reminded him of Sophocles’s Greek tragedy, in which an uncompromising Antigone defies the ruler of Thebes by violating the king’s unjust order, he said.

“An important lesson that I have learned from the story is the power of conscientious objection,” Spell said. ​“I know that the proposed selection for the next superintendent is not what is best for the students, and I refuse to let our futures be compromised for things that have nothing to do with education.”

Dawkins, the other student rep, said that she preferred either Highsmith, a local candidate (with a daughter at Co-Op) whose passion and empathy resonated with students, or Brown, an experienced leader who could connect with the district’s huge Spanish-speaking population and offer a fresh perspective, over Birks. ​“Keep up the fight,” she told the crowd. ​“Just stay strong. Everything will turn out fine.”

Other students said their voices should matter most in the decision, but they hadn’t been so far. One high schooler, Henry Seyue, class president at Metropolitan Business Academy, even asked that Spell and Dawkins be given a chance to vote on Monday.

“When we talk about education, the opinions that should be represented the most should be those of our students. I’m here today because I fear that’s not the case. The voices of our students seem to have the least value in the eyes of our Board of Ed,” Seyue said. ​“Not allowing students to have legitimate representation is the ultimate insult. It sends the message that the city does not trust the decision-making of its students.”

Tynan McFadden, a freshman at ESUMS, said he wanted a superintendent who’d recognize his interests, rather than seeing him as a data point. ​“I want a superintendent who cares more about children than testing. I want a superintendent that cares more about me than whether I can boost the district’s test scores,” he said.

Several teachers also objected to Birks’s candidacy.

Nataliya Braginsky, a teacher at Metro and member of the New Haven Educators Collective, said that Mayor Harp and the Board of Education ignored the group’s list of priorities for the next superintendent, endorsed by eight community groups. ​“Carol Birks falls short on every single one of these priorities,” Braginsky said.

In particular, Braginsky criticized a perceived reliance on standardized testing — a takeaway she made from the sheets of numbers Birks passed out at a community forum.

“We know that we are swimming in data already, but we lack accurate interpretations, explanations and interventions with regards to this information,” she said. ​“Research has shown that standardized tests are not an effective measure of students’ intelligence, skills or potential for success. … They effectively measure only one thing: the wealth of students’ families.”

And Braginsky called out Birks’s charter school connections, including her position on Achievement First’s board of directors and comments at the community forum, where she said, ​“I say we shouldn’t fight charter schools; we should learn from them.”

“Our schools are not for sale!” another speaker, Fatima Rojas, put it.

Yury Marciel-Andrews, a mother of two who took over as president of East Rock Community Magnet School’s PTO after the death of Daisy Gonzalez, contrasted the superintendent search process with Gonzalez’s advocacy for students.

“I had the honor to know and work in many occasions with one of the most ardent supporters of education, fierce defender of the voiceless, and advocate for progressive change in the district, our late Board of Education President Daisy Gonzalez, whom is undoubtedly here with us in spirit,” Marciel-Andrews said. ​“The process of selecting the superintendent for the New Haven Public Schools has failed to reflect the interests and needs of the students, parents and guardians, educators and the wider community. Dr. Birks is neither the best candidate nor the choice of New Haven’s educational community.”

City Hall Responds

Birks did not respond to a phone call and an email seeking comment on Sunday afternoon. But Jason Bartlett, the mayor’s school board liaison and youth services director, volunteered to speak up on her behalf.

“A number of people are disappointed that [opponents of the mayor] are spreading a disinformation campaign about Dr. Birks and maligning her character and her candidacy before she even gets here. We’ve had a difficult couple of years now with Garth Harries leaving the district and having an interim superintendent. One would hope the community would come together and unify and respect what looks like the majority vote of the Board of Education,” he said. ​“I just think forces at work are not for the kids; they want to pretend that they are.”

Bartlett accused several organizations, including the New Haven Independent, of spreading false information about Birks. ​“It’s lie after lie after lie,” he said. ​“To put all this stuff out there is just doing a disservice to the city. It’s unfortunate. I just feel badly that this has even occurred.”

According to him, rumors are swirling that Birks worked for charter schools, that she said she wants to open more in New Haven, and that she said she intended to close schools. (Click here to read about the initial criticisms of Birks and her on-the-record response.) He also said that the perceived political connections — due to shared sorority memberships and campaign contributions to the mayor — strike him as ​“foolhardy” and ​“offensive.”

Asked whether he felt Spell and Dawkins — who got to interview the candidates firsthand — had also been deluded by misinformation, Bartlett said that Spell missed some of the interviews and both could have been ​“swayed by other adults in the room.”

He said he couldn’t speak for Harp, but he believes that the school board has done its due diligence and will stick by last week’s informal vote. ​“As we go forward,” Bartlett concluded, the community ​“will come to love Dr. Birks.”

The Board of Education is scheduled to make its final choice Monday at 5:30 p.m. at Beecher School. The meeting will start with public comment, before board members vote to authorize contract negotiations and a background check.