Michael Bloomberg’s Disastrous Public Education Legacy
As of mid-February, Michael Bloomberg has spent over $400 million on his presidential campaign, including blanketing the air waves with ads and is on track to spend more than a billion dollars. As a result, he has risen sharply in the polls, and in turn, begun to receive critical attention regarding his record on certain issues, such as racial profiling and his stop-and-frisk policies.
However, Bloomberg’s record on education has been glossed over. When it is mentioned at all, he has been vaguely praised, as in a recent Thomas Friedman column, for championing “virtually every progressive cause” including “education reform for predominantly minority schools.”
But the reality is that Bloomberg’s education record is far from progressive. In fact, when I heard that he was running for president, it felt like the return of a bad dream that for many of us had begun to fade away long years ago.
Aggressive Free-Market Ideology
For voters who do not live in New York City or never sent their children to public school here, you might not be aware that Bloomberg embodied an aggressive free-market ideology with policies that were contrary to research and hugely disruptive — in the worst sense of the word. Far from the benevolent, pragmatic centrist his campaign likes to portray, Bloomberg and his chancellors reigned over NYC public schools for 12 years with an iron fist, autocratically imposing destructive reforms with little concern for how they upended the lives of communities, students and teachers.
In many respects, his policies contradicted his campaign promises. When he first ran for Mayor in 2002, he didn’t mention the wrecking-ball he later deployed on the school system, but instead pledged to implement a proven reform: to lower class sizes in all schools to 20 students or less in grades K-3. Class-size reduction has been shown to benefit all kids but especially students of color, who make up the majority of kids in New York City schools.
Instead of following through on this promise, subsequent audits from the state and city comptrollers showed, his administration misused hundreds of millions of state dollars meant for class-size reduction. As a result, class sizes stagnated and then rose sharply in his second term.
In 2011, at a speech at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Bloomberg announced that if he had his way, he would double class sizes by firing half the teachers. He would “weed out all the bad ones” and pay the rest more. It would be “good deal for the students,” he insisted. What he didn’t mention, of course, is that his own daughters attended a private school where class sizes averaged 14-18 student CONTINUE READING: Michael Bloomberg’s Disastrous Public Education Legacy | The Indypendent