Should Mayor de Blasio Unravel Bloomberg’s Reforms?
INTRODUCTION
Mayor Bill de Blasio and his new schools chancellor, Carmen Fariña, tour the Bronx School of Young Leaders. Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times
Last month, Mayor Bill de Blasio named Carmen Fariña schools chancellor. The appointment of this 40-year veteran of the New York City school system signals a “sharp departure from the education policies” of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who focused on test scores, closed low-performing schools and brought in charters.
Is she what the city needs?
DEBATERS
Diane Ravitch, a historian of education, is the author of several books, including"The Great School Wars," a history of the New York City public schools.
Bruce Fuller, a professor of education and public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of the forthcoming "After the State and Market."
Don’t Be Too Quick to Dismiss the Former Mayor’s Efforts
Mayor Bill de Blasio has tapped Carmen Fariña as schools chancellor. Choosing someone who has been critical of Mayor Michael Bloomberg's efforts to reform New York City schools suggests that many of the changes that defined Bloomberg's tenure are about to be reversed.
Is this the end of student testing? Are teacher evaluations over? Will charter schools be shaved back? Will the teachers union regain its power over classroom staffing? Although I didn't agree with all of Bloomberg's policies, de Blasio should think twice before dismissing what the former mayor accomplished.
Too much testing is nutty, but a moratorium on testing isn't the answer.
De Blasio says he will stop closing mediocre schools. Yet when such schools were closed, small and nurturing high schools sprouted in their stead, helping to improve the graduation rate to 69 percent from 51 percent over the past decade. De Blasio also wants to slow growth of charter schools and make them start paying rent in the buildings they share with traditional schools. But hard findings show the truth is that these human-scale options raise the learning curves of city students – half from neighborhoods in which the average family earns under $38,000 annually – more steeply than kids attending regular public schools.
Fariña once worked for the Bloomberg administration but quit in 2006, worried that excessive testing was subverting the wider aims of education. Her boss, Chancellor Joel Klein, went on to require four more annual exams on top of Albany’s yearly testing regime. Too much testing is nutty, but a moratorium on testing isn't the answer. City schools need clear measures of student progress; they are essential for tracking racial achievement gaps and detecting lousy teachers. If de Blasio backs away from testing, he will never know whether a child’s destiny is defined by how hard she works or by her ZIP code.
Many parents now hunger for a return of art and music classes, an enlightened pedagogy that deepens writing skills and delves into rich literature and challenging mathematics. Bloomberg’s trust in local principals sparked kaleidoscopic innovations along these lines, helping to attract middle-income and affluent parents back to city schools. Tracking progress requires smarter, not fewer, exams as teachers ramp-up for the state’s rigorous Common Core curriculum.
De Blasio’s focus on inequality is right: Learning gaps among fourth- and eighth-graders have failed to budge in reading and math over the last 12 years, defined by students’ race or social class, according to federal data released last month. But the rookie mayor’s penchant for entitlements could reinforce, not close, yawning disparities. We know that quality preschool spurs early learning for poor childrenbut not in sustainable ways for middle-class and well-off peers. And shrinking class size, habitually pressed by union leaders, typically yields pallid benefits unless focused on poor students.
As de Blasio and Fariña move beyond populist rhetoric, hard evidence and not political expediency should drive their emerging policy thrusts, even those crafted by the former mayor.
De Blasio Should Fix What Bloomberg Did Wrong
At the end of Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s third term, the issue where he had the least public support was education. The latest New York Times poll showed that only 26 percent of New Yorkers approved of his education policies. After 12 years of claims about “historic” gains, the public had had enough.
The Bloomberg education program began at the same time as President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind program, and the two were like twins. They both relied on testing, choice, accountability and competition, but neither succeeded in winning the hearts and minds of educators and parents.
The Bloomberg administration imposed three major reorganizations on the school system, going from districts to regions to autonomous schools judged by data. It destroyed most of the city’s comprehensive high schools and replaced them with hundreds of small schools. It encouraged the opening of nearly 200 privately managed charter schools, enrolling 6 percent of the city’s children. Many of the new schools, both charter and public, tried to avoid students with disabilities and English learners.
Public schools function best when they have the resources and a collaborative relationship with parents and the local community.
The Bloomberg administration’s signature policy was closing schools and opening schools. Schools with low scores were closed and replaced. Large schools were closed and replaced. Some new schools were closed and replaced by other new schools. At public meetings of the school board, tightly controlled by the mayor, thousands of parents, students and teachers protested, but their voices were ignored. The schools belonged to the mayor, and he was free to close them whenever he wanted.
Mayor de Blasio should stop closing schools. Public schools are vital community institutions. His goal should be a good public school in every neighborhood. The mayor should listen to parents and the community about the fate of their neighborhood school and do whatever it takes to make it better instead of closing it.
Mayor de Blasio should stop grading schools on the A-F scale borrowed from former Florida Governor Jeb Bush. It serves no purpose other than to stigmatize schools and set them up for closure. The mayor should be a steward for the schools, not an executioner.
Mayor de Blasio should stop the expansion of charter schools and stop co-locating charter schools in public space. They are privately managed, they have private boards of directors, and they have private sources of funding (the Robin Hood Foundation raised $80 million in one night mostly for charter schools). More than a dozen charter leaders are paid more than the city schools’ chancellor, with two of them earning nearly half a million dollars a year.
Mayor de Blasio should scrap the Leadership Academy, which not only failed to produce exemplary leaders but also demoralized every administrator who spent years as an assistant principal learning to be a principal.
Mayor de Blasio should reduce the emphasis on testing, which narrows the curriculum only to what is tested, and he should insist that all schools have a full curriculum, including the arts, foreign languages and daily physical education.
Mayor de Blasio should fulfill the true promise of mayoral control by making sure that every school has regular access to the city’s social services and to a health clinic so that children get regular medical checkups. Every school should be a community center that serves families as well as children.
Bill de Blasio has the chance to be a national leader in the revitalization of public education. Having been a member of a local school board as well as a parent of children in the public schools, he understands that public schools function best when they have the resources they need for the children they enroll and a collaborative relationship with parents and the local community.
Bloomberg Was Right to Push Choice and Empower Principals
How our children are nurtured inside schools, which students enjoy the strongest teachers and who gets to decide remains an essential democratic debate. So, yes, Bloomberg too often limited dissent locally, aggressively pushing technocratic change without the consent of teachers -- taking it to them, not collaborating with them, to paraphrase Mayor de Blasio.
The evidence is in. Corporate reform is a train wreck.