An evening with CEC13
This week I want to write about a fascinating experience I had last month involving a local push against the Trump administration’s incursions into public education. It’s a story of success, but also fear and confusion.
I recently moved to Brooklyn from Philadelphia and one of the things I’ve had to do is start trying to understand the school finance regime here. After eight years in Philly I felt like I’d gotten to know the regime there somewhat, and now I’m starting again.
New York City Public Schools is a huge, sprawling municipal government with intricate interfaces between both the city and state governments, as well as significant involvement of the federal government. It serves a million kids. The district is a district of districts with a sprawling decentralized network of institutions that fall under a simultaneously centralized umbrella of mayoral control. Led by a chancellor, it contains 32 districts, each with its own superintendent and community education council (CEC).
The CECs all report to a citywide council, as well as the Panel on Education Policy, which (I think) sets policy along with the superintendents, who report to the chancellor, who then reports to the mayor. It’s these topmost tiers that have the most power, but the lower ones have a participatory efficacy that’s important.
I went to a general meeting of my district’s CEC. I’m in District 13, covering a section of northwest Brooklyn. I went because I’m interested in running for a seat on CEC13 and I wanted to get to know the body better. I also just really like meetings of all kinds, you can get so much information about the situation from them: policies, practices, personalities—all manifesting the social structure immanently. A sort of bottom-up zeitgeist right there in front of your eyes.
And there was a very intense immanence at this meeting I went to, where I witnessed a distinct moment of our conjuncture in education.
I found out about the meeting through NYC-DSA’s Comrades with Kids (CWK) group, where I’ve been active since we came to the city. It’s essentially a signal chat with socialist parents of all ages sharing the highs and lows of parenting in capitalism but also opportunities to organize and participate in various campaigns in the chapter (it was through this channel that I got connected to Zohran Mamdani’s exciting campaign for mayor and its education policy working group, which I’m helping out with).
Someone in the CWK chat mentioned the CEC meeting, so I put it on my calendar. I wasn’t expecting anything—I didn’t know how these meetings go, whether big or small, procedural or informal. But like I said, I love meetings and education policy so I went.
The meeting was at a school in Vinegar Hill, a small neighborhood next to DUMBO. I saw a group of people standing outside the front doors of the school and asked them if they were here for the CEC meeting. They said yes, and one of them gestured towards a pizza box and said “I bought way too much pizza, so please eat some!” I said I could certainly help with that and took a slice (New York pizza is more a modality of being than food, it’s a lifeworld unto itself).
As I got my slice, an older guy gave me a handout. I was expecting an agenda, but as I saw others joining our scrum and yet others entering the school building, I sensed that I’d been organized. When I looked at the paper I’d been handed, I knew it to be true: it was a two-page resolution for the CEC to reject Trump’s executive order about indoctrination in K-12 schooling. The vote would happen that night.
I’ve linked it there, but the TL;DR is that, by passing this resolution, the CEC would direct the District 13 superintendent to tell educators to ignore Trump’s Executive Order on “indoctrination.” When they handed me the resolution, they said we would be the first district in the city to bring such a resolution to formal vote.
More and more people joined our group, took pizza, read the resolution, chatted. These people had the look of progressives from the queer community. I talked with a few. By then it was time to go in, and I entered the school along with a mom and her toddler, who she sweetly directed up the stairs and down the hall, the three of us trying to find the school’s library.
After circling around the hallways, we found it and entered There was a long table positioned to the side of a smart board, which displayed a zoom call and an increasing number of attendees. The library was relatively empty, and several people who were setting up the meeting were looking at each other like they’d never seen this many people come to a CEC meeting before. There ended up being about fifty people attending this meeting, the biggest any of the members could remember, as they’d mention later.
The reason people were there was to speak to the resolution. In favor of it.
But the meeting didn’t get right to that issue. There were a number of other items of business to take care of. The superintendent led that first part of the meeting. Apologetically, she mentioned that that meeting happened to be the meeting when all superintendents in the city were obligated to give a half-hour presentation on NYC School’s budget for the upcoming year.
I was so excited. I love that stuff, as you probably would guess. But everyone else in the room chuckled nervously. I felt an eye-roll vibe. The juxtaposition of this presentation, going to into the details of NYC school finance (something I’m trying harder to understand) with the resolution blocking the executive order gets to what this newsletter is all about: understanding that the Trump resolution and the budget presentation are equally political, ideological, and important—even if the latter feels technical and boring.
I’ll have to write a separate newsletter about that presentation (I actually can’t find my notes right now, ugh), but I learned that NYC Schools has a $40 billion budget, more than 60% of which comes from the city government; there’s a fair student formula with a complex series of weights that sends money to districts and then schools; there’s a school construction authority and a city-specific teachers pension. I could go on and on. It was an astounding artifact of municipal finance: the fact that a city this big could fund schools for that many children, even slightly functionally, I found impressive (though of course there are many injustices to confront in the system here, namely hold harmless, which I spoke with the superintendent about after the meeting).
But the main event was the resolution. It created that special kind of chaos that public meetings about controversial topics can culture, where the participation overflows facilitation and connect up with the larger social forces at play in and through them.
I won’t detail every single thing, there was too much happening. I’ll just note a couple aspects of the experience.
The most intense aspect of the vote was how one CEC board member, Lisa DiPietra, took up all the oxygen in the room. Even though she was outnumbered 50:1, the entire group addressed spent more than an hour’s worth of its energies on her. Why? In the 2023 elections for CEC, she’d been recommended by the local Moms for Liberty formation in NYC, called PLACE, and won. She’d been the right wing presence on the district board for two years.
So when another CEC board member, with quavering voice, motivated the anti-Trump resolution and recommended the board vote for it, she raised a question. The question was something like (and I’m not quoting her directly here, just going from memory):
“While I’m on board with 95% of this resolution, what I don’t feel comfortable with—and this is why I ran for CEC—is how it doesn’t specify what role parents play in a child’s exposure to certain ideas. I’m wondering if we could edit the resolution to include something giving parents the right to talk to their children first about certain topics rather than teachers at the school? What if I don’t want my children exposed to these ideas? That’s what the Executive Order is trying to do, in my eyes.”
To say the tension was palpable doesn’t capture the milieu of the room, after she finished speaking in her calm, almost chatty way. It was like the air stilled. A certain sweat entered the ether, a spike of scissioning. The other board members sighed, looked at each other, and started to decide, in unspoken and whispered ways, how they’d respond to this comment.
At this point, the discussion took place entirely at the front of the room, by the board members, while the audience listened, both physically and online. A couple board members spoke in favor of the resolution, and then against DiPietra, addressing her directly. They praised the member who had introduced the resolution. All of these supporting board members were Black, most of them Black women, and several of them noted that it was Black History Month, pointing to the clear connections between the long fight for educational freedom in the Black community and liberation in the queer community.
It was an inspiring moment: a clear coalition across race, class, gender, sexuality and other categories had articulated in that moment. The hinge point was DiPietra, and comments from board members, while they started off in support of the resolution, began to be exclusively directed at her, against her position and the presumptions loaded into her question, attention and words floating to her like she was an ideological-gravitational force.
She responded to each of these comments in turn, causing waves of reaction, at first low and then more audible, in the audience of queer and queer-allied parents. DiPietra responded in that same calm, chatty, weirdly indefatigable way. She’d obviously had experience and training. She was accustomed to this reaction to her reactionary politics. To use a tired image, she became a lightening rod and withstood the electricity.
The board members’ responses to her, and her responses to them, flowed out into the audience. People raised their hands and were recognized by an older CEC member, a man with a baritone boom of a voice, who recognized audience speakers that raised their hands (apparently many people had signed up in advance to speak, but this list wasn’t used for some reason, angering many in the audience who had prepared comments).
One of these audience members was a teacher at the elementary school where we all sat. A science teacher. Trans man, identifying as such (if I recall correctly). He spoke about his upbringing, the danger his parents presented to him, how all students must be accepted and if the school is a place for them to be accepted, then so be it (again, I’m not quoting directly, going from memory). It was powerful testimony. Several parents of queer students at that school and other schools in the district spoke as well.
When they spoke, their voices shook. They were nervous addressing the group. They were even more nervous, I thought, directly confronting DiPietra, who listened to them with that same cold mien, receiving their comments and responding with the maddeningly chatty intonation. They all tried to take a conciliatory, dialogical tone with her, saying they understood her perspective but they respectfully disagreed, a seething rage beneath their shaky words.
DiPietra was skillfully responding to each comment, continuing to take the floor. At some point, the audience members who had signed up became frustrated that DiPietra got to respond to every question, and others who had been waiting had no way of taking the floor. Eventually the superintendent put a stop to the dynamic and wrote the first names of everyone who was waiting on a white board. The member with the booming voice read the name aloud, cutting them off after two minutes had elapsed.
I noticed something in all this that still has me thinking. DiPietra was the only person who advanced her positions: parents rights, discomfort with trans issues, against antiracism, against equity, equality, against real history rather than fantasy history, etc. She was one person in a room of 50 people. Parliamentarily speaking, she had no chance moving any of the other board members or the audience. She was a tiny minority. And yet: this room of people spent time, energy, and feelings attempting to respond to her.
While she lost the vote, I wonder if she’d snatched another sort of victory: she emplaced her ideology as the one to which response must be given. She made it all about her. Got people upset. To me, it was a zeitgeist moment, where a position held by a relative minority has taken the floor in educational politics and is now directing the energies of the entire population. This ideology, with its frenetic combination of calm confident chaos, rode waves of controversy into party politics and won control of the educational state apparatus at the federal level.
Ultimately, the CEC has little power in NYC schools when compared to the federal executive branch, which contributes a quantitatively small but qualitatively meaningful percentage of the school budget (somewhere around 5%), hundreds of millions of dollars. They can and will claw this money back, draw it down, weaken and disorganize the Department of Education and start to prosecute and repress teachers and parents and students for all kinds of reasons laid out in the executive orders.
I felt the immensity of the moment then. The room erupted in applause when the resolution passed, but there was an eerie feeling as everyone trickled out of the room and back out onto the street. Democratic politicians have begun saying that the people must rise up and take these streets, though in many cases it’s been these same politicians that have tried to depoliticize and de-energize such tactics for decades.
It was good that the resolution passed, the articulations it occasioned and the protections it represents (and hopefully puts in place) are essential for what’s ahead. I was inspired. But the street outside the school was dark and cold and empty as I left the meeting.