When Michael Bloomberg ran for election as mayor of New York City, he pledged to make the improvement of the public schools his first priority. After he was sworn into office on January 1, 2002, he said that he wanted to be judged by whether the public schools improved.
Most elected officials, recognizing how contentious school reform is and how long it takes to show results, are happy to be insulated from education policy debates by a lay board. Not Bloomberg. To his credit, he stepped up to the plate and said, "Give me control and hold me accountable." His readiness to take over the biggest municipal problem--the uneven quality of the city's public school system - was due in no small part to Bloomberg's remarkable self-confidence. This is a man who built a massive communications empire, whose personal fortune is estimated to be well in excess of $4 billion, who flies his own jet to his many vacation homes and regularly socializes with stars from every field of endeavor. Having conquered the world of American business and high finance, and having been elected the Mayor of the City of New York on his first try at elected office, Bloomberg surely thought that fixing the schools was a not terribly difficult challenge.
When he took office, confidence in the city's public school system - and especially its creaky, convoluted governing structure - was at a low ebb. State tests showed that large numbers of students were not meeting state standards in reading and math. In some districts and schools, the number of students who failed to demonstrate competency in basic skills was truly alarming. Certainly there were some excellent schools, including several esteemed high schools with competitive admissions. But the system as a whole was no better (and surely no worse) than a score of other distressed urban school systems that must educate large numbers of children who are poor, non-English-speaking, or in need of special education.
What was unusual about New York, in contrast to other cities, was its bizarre governing system, the result of a legislative compromise in 1969. In order both to placate and to fend off demands for "community control" (which was championed at the time by black and Hispanic activists), the legislature created a complex decentralized system. At the top was a central board of education comprised of seven people appointed by six different politicians (the mayor appointed two, and five borough presidents each appointed one). The central board acted not on behalf of the city as a whole, as it should have, but in response to the needs of the person or region that appointed them.
In addition to the central board, there were 32 community school districts, each run by an elected local board. These boards were responsible for K-8 schools, and each board selected its own superintendent and principals. To make matters even more confusing, the central board retained control over the high schools.
Over the thirty-plus years of decentralization, participation in local school board elections was meager, usually less than 10 percent of eligible voters. Some local boards were corrupt, dispensing jobs and contracts to friends and relatives of board members.
Meanwhile educational reform flourished, along the lines of letting a million flowers bloom. So many were blooming, in fact, that it was difficult to tell which were roses and which were weeds. Any educational reform that was happening anywhere in America was likely happening somewhere in New York City's public schools, but good ones didn't spread and bad ones remained forever. With regard to reform, the schools were akin to an archeological site, with reform piled on reform, programs proliferating without end, many added and none subtracted. One chancellor after another introduced signature reform programs, all of which co-existed side-by-side. New York did not lack reform. What it needed was leadership, coherence, direction, standards, and accountability, as well as a real commitment to choice among the buzzing array of offerings.
Along comes Michael Bloomberg, who never saw a problem that he could not solve. First he persuaded the State Legislature to abolish the central board and local community boards and give the mayor control of the school system. Previous mayors had sought this change without success. Rudy Guiliani had tried for years to gain control of the school system, but the Democrat-dominated State Assembly did not trust him with that power. Bloomberg, stubborn and adamant, won it.
Having gained control, Bloomberg conducted a highly secretive search for a chancellor. The press was dying to find out what was going on, but the mayor's staff let it be known that any candidate whose name appeared in the press was finished. Sure enough, Bloomberg surprised the world by picking Joel Klein, a lawyer who had previously served as President Clinton's White House Deputy Counsel (after the suicide of Vincent Foster) and had prosecuted Microsoft for antitrust matters as assistant attorney general at the Justice Department. Klein's biography suggested that he could keep his mouth shut (a necessity for anyone who works for Bloomberg) and that he was prepared to dismantle a giant monopoly.
Klein in turn assembled his own unconventional team, headed by Diana Lam, who had been superintendent in several smaller urban districts (Chelsea, San Antonio, Providence, RI) and had built a reputation for imposing pedagogical reforms, shaking things up, producing quick test score increases, then leaving with an angry school board baying at her heels. (In San Antonio, after she left, 80% of the elementary teachers voted to drop "Everyday Math," the NCTM-math program that Lam had installed.) The other members of Klein's leadership group do not have school experience; they come from the worlds of foundations, government, the military, and business.
Klein spent several months assembling his "Children First" program of reform. The first part was announced on December 11, 2002, when he revealed that he was creating a "leadership academy" to train school principals along the lines of the General Electric executive program. For this, he gathered an advisory board composed of Richard Parsons, the chief executive officer of AOL TimeWarner, John (Jack) Welch, the former CEO of GE, and Anthony Alvarado, a former chancellor of New York City who now works for the San Diego school system. The academy itself is to be directed by a corporate executive; several foundations pledged $15 million to get it started.
Bloomberg announced the rest of his "Children First" program on January 15, 2003. It focuses on changes in governance and pedagogy. The mayor said that he would close the 32 community school districts along with their staffs and replace them with a streamlined, top-down, command-and-control structure. The mayor appoints the chancellor, and the chancellor appoints 10 regional superintendents, each of whom will oversee 12 supervisors, each of whom will be responsible for a cluster of 10-12 schools. Instead of 32 community district superintendents, there will be 112 regional and cluster supervisors. The only mechanism for public involvement will be the chance to vote (or not vote) for Mayor Bloomberg at the next election. (In lieu of a conventional board, the legislature did create a "panel on education policy" appointed by Mayor Bloomberg, but it has no discernible authority, serves at the pleasure of the mayor, and has apparently been instructed to remain silent for the duration of its term.)
As part of his plan, the mayor announced that he would install a "standardized curriculum" for schools in which large numbers of students have not met state standards. Of the city's 1200 schools, only 200 will be free to select their own curriculum, while the rest must use the programs selected by Klein and Lam. On January 21, the chancellor announced that he had selected "Everyday Math" and "Month by Month Phonics" as the "standardized curriculum" for those hundreds of schools.
Neither of the latter programs is an obvious choice: Everyday Math is controversial among university-level mathematicians; it was twice rejected by the California State Board of Education on the ground that it skimps on the basic operations of math. Few reading experts that I contacted had ever heard of Month by Month Phonics. The few that know the program said that it is a whole language program with incidental phonics. No one was aware of any research base to demonstrate its effectiveness. No one knew of any large district that uses it. The urban districts that recently won the Broad Award for most improvement do not use this program. Houston, the top Broad winner, uses Open Court, as does Los Angeles; Atlanta, another finalist, uses Scholastic materials.
Now surely it will be a huge step forward just to know that there is a serious effort to coordinate what schools across the city are teaching. A common curriculum is likely to have some real benefits: children who change schools mid-year will encounter consistency, teachers will know what is expected of them, teacher training and professional development can become coherent. For these reasons, it is puzzling that what is proposed is not really a common curriculum for the city's schools, but a curriculum only for unsuccessful schools, which would seem to vitiate the rationale for doing it in the first place. I suspect that those who chose these programs are not making a distinction between a curriculum (what is taught) and a pedagogy (how to teach). In general, it is best to set common expectations and then leave schools free to meet those expectations with the methods they find most effective for their circumstances. By mandating both curriculum and methods, the city will drive out some very effective, research-based programs like Open Court, Core Knowledge, Harcourt, and Scholastic, replacing them with programs whose effectiveness has not been demonstrated.
The style and substance of the reform program pose other problematic issues. One is the elimination of external checks and balances in the school system. There is no role for the public at any point, no boards to which the chancellor must report, no outsider to monitor the accuracy of data, no one to question the leadership. Imagine a corporation that operated without a board of directors. We know that many boards of directors have gotten into trouble lately for their failure to exercise adequate oversight of the corporate leaders, but how much worse it would be if the leaders reported to no outside board at all.
Second, what seems to be emerging is a perfect government monopoly. One elected official appoints a leader, who then selects everyone else. Far from demolishing the monopoly, Chancellor Klein - the experienced trustbuster - has strengthened it. Before 1969, when the school system was decentralized, there was always a lay board, a place to which whistle-blowers could turn. No longer.
Third, it is hard to see how it will help to train principals to be leaders when they have so little control over their staff, resources, or discipline policy. Unless the mayor can sunset the burdensome and detailed "chancellor's regulations," and unless he renegotiates the contracts that limit the principals' authority to lead, this training will be a waste. No corporate leader could be a successful manager with as little authority as most school principals have.
Fourth, all deliberations about policy and curriculum to date have taken place in an atmosphere of total secrecy. The new team seems to believe that public discussion will only mess up a great plan. The administration has remonstrated against "leaks" that reveal what they intend to mandate. Secrecy is prized. In a democracy, however, leaks and previews serve a valuable purpose. They allow the public to comment and react before it is too late to make changes. Some officials even plant leaks (called "trial balloons") to find out what the flaws in their plans might be. But the dedication to secrecy in this school administration is unprecedented. As one public official said to me, "These guys don't know what transparency is, and if they do, they don't believe in it."
Fifth, at no point in the Bloomberg plan is there any proposal to allow families to choose the public school their child attends. Vouchers, of course, are out of the question. Not only is there no interest in helping children attend non-public schools, but the last teachers' contract seeks to lure experienced teachers from the city's beleaguered Catholic schools with extra steps on the salary scale, even though this would have the effect of crippling this sector. The mayor's speech did mention charters as a good idea, but none has actually been proposed or created even though the chancellor has unlimited power to do so.
This is, in essence, a military-style reform program. Maybe that is what NYC needs, at least as a transition from a period of decentralized educational anarchy. And yet, one cannot close without noting in the pronouncements of the Department of Education an undercurrent of suspicion if not hostility towards principals, the key instructional leaders in every school. In December, headlines warned that 50 or 150 principals would be fired. Without naming names, Chancellor Klein made it clear that a significant number of principals were incompetent or stupid. Then he compiled "grades" for every principal based on data, and some of these grades were leaked to the press, imperiling the reputation of some decent school leaders who are working in difficult situations. Even teachers (whom the administration has courted due to the political power of their union) complained that the administration was giving poor grades to principals who had a high suspension rate, and that this would compel principals to withhold discipline when it was needed. The result would be a lower suspension rate, but less safe schools.
Beyond the Tweed Courthouse where the inner circle sits, many experienced leaders in the school system are scared. They don't know who will be fired or moved tomorrow or the day after tomorrow. They know that their views have not been solicited. The school system that they have given their lives to and love to complain about is being dismantled before their eyes by people they hardly know and do not have reason to trust. So far, in the new school administration's public statements, respect for working professionals has been conspicuously absent and the danger of demoralization on a wide scale is not a small one. This will encourage many excellent principals to retire early and imperil future recruitment of replacements.
The day after the mayor's speech, I was talking to a first-rate principal, who admitted to trepidation about the impending changes. She had read what CEO Jack Welch told the New York Times. He said, "We used to say in the corporation, `Any one of you jerk managers who's got a dull crowd hanging around with you don't deserve your job,' &Well, we'll say that to principals." In response, the principal said, "Mr. Welch will think I hang around with a dull crowd. They don't go to theater or dinner parties or important events. They haven't traveled abroad. Most of them can't read or write. They are New York City school children. I don't think they are dull, but maybe he will."
We will keep a close watch on the grand experiment in New York City. The mayor and chancellor are set to prove that corporate-style changes, imposed from above without consultation, without public participation, without "buy-in" from the professionals, and without any form of school choice, are the answer. Let's see.
Diane Ravitch is a Research Professor at New York University and a trustee of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation
