To the Editor:
The Gadfly review of NYC Schools Under Bloomberg & Klein: What Parents, Teachers and Policymakers Need to Know was perfunctory and unfair. As one of the editors and a contributor to the volume, I would like to set the record straight.
Your reviewer faults the book as one-sided, because the book takes a critical view of the Bloomberg-Klein regime. This is accurate. The book does indeed have a point of view. It is a critique of the Bloomberg/Klein policies and an incisive examination of the negative results in terms of student achievement, equity, school overcrowding, and classroom conditions--in order to correct the generally one-sided and distorted picture that has so far dominated the mainstream media.
If a book must be disqualified as "unfair" because it has a clear point of view, nearly every publication of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute is equally guilty. David Whitman's Sweating the Small Stuff advocates for paternalistic schools and thus by this token is "unfair" to non-paternalistic schools. Louisa Moats argues for phonics, which would make her "unfair to Balanced Literacy." "Fund the Child" advocates weighted-student funding, but ignores the negative, destabilizing consequences of this approach. In the future, perhaps Fordham's publications should be equally balanced between the pro and con views on choice, charters, and accountability and other issues of the day.
What your reviewer failed to mention is that our book contains well-documented evidence that the Bloomberg-Klein administration has overstated its gains in virtually every area, including the achievement gap, national test scores, equity issues, and the progress of small schools. Our authors are an extraordinary group of scholars, advocates and public school parents, including your colleague, the historian Diane Ravitch; Jennifer Jennings, the sociologist previously known as eduwonkette; Deborah Meier of New York University; and Aaron Pallas, a senior sociologist at Teachers College, Columbia University.
I hope your readers will judge for themselves by downloading the book at lulu.com.
Leonie Haimson
Class Size Matters