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Sol Stern Writes the Truth About the Bloomberg Public School "Reforms":
"...what mayoral control has given New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg is the means to shape the education debate on his own terms , to deflect criticism, dominate the media and use the schools as campaign props. After all, he now has absolute power over a $17-billion education empire that doles out jobs and no-bid contracts and that spends millions on a well-oiled public relations machine while disdaining independent research and evaluation of its new classroom programs." We agree. Betsy Combier
          
I realize the NAEP is not perfect and has its flaws too, mainly in the area of exclusion rates and the questionable caliber of the reading passages; and I am nervous about our having a national test which could possibly lead into a national curriculum. However, without the NAEP, mayors such as Mayor Bloomberg of New York City and other similar politicians and state education agencies would be free to boast about the academic successes of their administrations without there being any way to verify their statements. Thanks to the NAEP, those such as Mayor Bloomberg who make vain-glorious statements can be called to account just as Sol Stern has done in the following article.

Donna Garner
wgarner1@hot.rr.com

PR but not the 3 Rs
By Sol Stern, SOL STERN is a contributing editor of City Journal, from whose latest issue this is adapted.
March 25, 2006

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RESIDENTS OF Los Angeles and other cities in the L.A. Unified School District are understandably frustrated by the sorry state of their public schools. But before they turn over control of the school system lock, stock and barrel to Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, they ought to consider the New York City experience with mayoral control. It's not quite as rosy as Villaraigosa would have you believe.

New Yorkers also came to support mayoral control after years of frustration with a dysfunctional board of education. The theory was that a mayor's political future would be endangered if voters felt that he presided over continued education failure, thus motivating him to press harder for school improvement.

But what mayoral control has given New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg is the means to shape the education debate on his own terms - to deflect criticism, dominate the media and use the schools as campaign props. After all, he now has absolute power over a $17-billion education empire that doles out jobs and no-bid contracts and that spends millions on a well-oiled public relations machine while disdaining independent research and evaluation of its new classroom programs.

His administration has cut off the flow of essential information to the media, to education reform groups and to scholars- the institutions and people that citizens normally count on to help them make informed judgments on school performance. Thus the mayor could sell most New Yorkers on the falsehood that students were making significant academic progress.

The most egregious case in point: the administration's hyping of fourth-grade reading scores just a few months before last year's mayoral election. In 2005, the percentage of city fourth-graders who demonstrated proficiency on statewide tests rose 10 points, to 59.5%. Bloomberg trumpeted this rise as "historic" and "record-setting."

But the fourth-grade test-score gains proved to be illusory. For starters, 2005 scores rose significantly throughout the state. In large urban districts, such as Rochester, Syracuse and Yonkers, they went up by even higher percentages than in New York City. Because none of these districts had switched to mayoral control or used the Bloomberg administration's new programs, there's no logical reason to credit Bloomberg for the city's gains.

There's another, unimpeachable source undermining the Bloomberg administration's claims: the National Assessment of Education Progress, or NAEP. The NAEP has served as the federal Education Department's "above politics" testing agency since 1990, with its fourth- and eighth-grade reading and math tests often described as the "nation's report card."

The NAEP administered its 2005 fourth-grade reading tests within weeks of the New York state tests, and the results clearly showed that New York education officials - city and state - have indulged in unwarranted self-congratulation about student achievement. Compared with the nearly 60% of New York City students reaching proficiency on the state test, only 22% of city kids reached the comparable NAEP level. Also, the NAEP showed no upward movement toward proficiency for New York City students since 2003, the last time it tested them.

In other words, not only were the city's fourth-graders reading at a shamefully low level, the mayoral reforms had produced no significant academic improvement.

With media attention focused on the Bloomberg administration's claims about fourth-grade scores, almost no one paid attention to student performance data for the school system's upper levels.

Not only did Gotham's eighth-graders score abysmally in reading on the state test - dropping 2.5 points to 32.8% - and the NAEP, but their math results were stagnant - and crummy - on both tests. And only 20% of city students met the not very high eighth-grade state proficiency standard in social studies (the NAEP has no social studies test). Also, under Bloomberg, the percentage of city eighth-graders meeting state science standards has plummeted from 54% to 45%.

The picture of student achievement during the first Bloomberg term is coming into clearer focus - and it's not pretty. Aside from fourth-grade math, stagnation or decline has marked every important benchmark test from the early grades to high school exit exams. But the prospects for real education reform suffer terrible damage when a taxpayer-funded public relations juggernaut gets away with spinning poor test outcomes as "historic" in order to improve a mayor's electoral prospects. Dare we ask whether mayoral control might actually have undermined democratic accountability in the schools and made things worse?

To read the full article, please go to: http://www.city-journal.org/html/16_1_test_scores.html

Potemkin Education Reform
Bloomberg and Klein offer more of the same instead of real change

17 November 2004

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Catherine Hickey is vicar of education for the New York Catholic Archdiocese and one of the city's unsung heroes. Against all odds, she runs a school system that successfully serves thousands of the city's poor and minority families. Despite an average per-pupil expenditure of only $4,500 or so, Catholic high school graduation rates are twice as high as the city's public schools. This accomplishment is even more impressive -some would say miraculous- when viewed against the backdrop of the Campaign for Fiscal Equity lawsuit that the state is facing. After a decade of litigation, the New York Court of Appeals ruled in 2003 that the main reason New York City's children weren't getting a "sound basic education" as guaranteed by the state constitution was gross underfunding of the city schools.

Gotham's education budget stood at $13.8 billion a year at the time. It is currently $15.3 billion, making for a per-pupil expenditure of nearly $15,000. Mayor Bloomberg recently testified in the remedy phase of the case that no one could expect him to provide the city's schoolchildren with a decent education for such a piddling amount. Nothing less than an extra $5.4 billion in annual aid from the state -bringing the city's per-pupil spending up to $20,000 -would enable him to fulfill the promises of academic improvement he made when Albany gave him control of the schools.

When I told Catherine Hickey about the mayor's plea of poverty, she seemed flabbergasted. An ever-increasing spending gap between the public and parochial school systems is already putting enormous pressure on the Catholic schools. As the city education budget increases, some of that money goes to increased public school teacher salaries: first-year New York City schoolteachers will soon be earning about $42,000. That's more than what even veteran teachers make in parochial schools. To keep their teachers from leaving to work in the public system, the Catholic schools will have to boost teacher salaries, too, forcing tuition to go up and putting the squeeze on their low-income families.

Once upon a time, we would have expected Gotham's conservative education reformers to rally to the aid of the Catholic schools, recognizing that a healthy parochial school system is in the city's interest. No one saw this more clearly than former Mayor Rudy Giuliani. He knew that Catholic schools challenged the public school monopoly to do better, reminding us that the neediest kids are educable and that throwing more and more of the taxpayer's money at the public school problem isn't the answer. He pushed for a pilot voucher program that would allow thousands of poor kids to escape their failing public schools and attend a private school of their choice. Stymied on taxpayer-funded vouchers, he then supported a private voucher program sponsored by a group of conservative New York philanthropists.

Today, though, conservative education reformers seem to be expending much of their energy cheering on Mayor Bloomberg's reform agenda. This was understandable early on, when the mayor seemed to be applying the lessons that the Catholic schools taught. Notably, Bloomberg didn't complain about money. Instead, he recognized that the problem was a "dysfunctional" and uncompetitive system. He also promised a "back-to-basics" curriculum and an end to bilingual education -both hallmarks of the Catholic school approach -and a thorough reform of the teachers' contract.

Now, three years into Mayor Bloomberg's term, it's time for conservatives to rethink their enthusiasm. True, Bloomberg deserves some kudos for his plan to open 50 charter schools (of uneven quality, though, and a drop in the bucket of a total of 1,200 schools) and for allegedly ending "social promotion" in the third and fifth grades. But the city schools have seen no movement on bilingual education and work-rule reforms. Worse, the city has turned classroom instruction over to a claque of progressive education ideologues who are enforcing a leftist pedagogy that endangers the worst-off kids, who most need a highly-structured pedagogical approach. Not only does Bloomberg oppose vouchers, his schools chancellor, Joel Klein, has blocked thousands of students in failing schools from exercising their right to public school choice under the No Child Left Behind Act.

Bloomberg's conservative supporters should find it particularly disappointing that he is now resorting to the not-enough-money excuse of every failed educrat. There is no reason to believe that, without radical structural reform, the $21 billion education budget that the mayor is demanding will finally bring about significant academic gains for the students. One thing is for sure: it will put an enormous additional burden on the state's perilous finances and almost certainly require new taxes.

Even more troubling is the "civil rights" spin that Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein have put on their money demands. Klein has given speeches in black churches arguing that it would violate the spirit of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education desegregation decision if the state failed to provide the additional $5 billion in education funding.

This is pure demagoguery - and Klein knows it. As a private attorney in the 1980s, he represented the State of Missouri in one of the nation's original "fiscal equity" lawsuits. Klein argued that pouring more money into Kansas City's schools was not the answer to the city's education woes. The court found otherwise, but Klein turned out to be right. Twelve years and $2 billion in extra taxpayer dollars later it became clear that Missouri's experiment in judge-ordered school financing was a costly failure.

In the Giuliani years, conservatives understood that the best civil rights strategy in education was not spending more and more money but instead giving poor kids trapped in failing public schools the means to transfer into private and parochial schools. With the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that tax-supported vouchers are constitutional, with a voucher program now underway in the nation's capital, and with President Bush likely to push for more school choice, New York's conservatives should not be content with the crumbs Mayor Bloomberg has thrown them.

Destined to Fail
Sol Stern

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Okay, we'll end social promotion. Then what?

As a strong supporter of high educational standards, I should be cheering Mayor Bloomberg's plan to end social promotion for New York's third-graders. After all, a school system that cavalierly advances children from grade to grade even if they haven't mastered basic reading and math skills is just hurting those kids and is certainly demanding little of its teachers and principals. But I'm not cheering and the reason has to do with pedagogy. A system that holds children accountable for their performance must teach those kids using programs and classroom methodologies that really work. And here, the whole panoply of the Bloomberg administration's ballyhooed education reforms fails miserably.

In August 2002, after a one-hour phone conversation, Chancellor Joel Klein picked progressive-education ideologue Diana Lam as his deputy for teaching and learning, at a salary of $250,000 (matching his own) -surely one of the dumbest hiring decisions in the annals of New York City government. With a very lackluster record of past accomplishment, Lam roared into town with guns blazing. She purged the Department of Education's top ranks of educators favoring a traditional pedagogical approach. She dumped a phonics-based reading curriculum, Success for All, which had boosted early-grade reading scores in some of the lowest-performing schools in the city. Worse still, she installed in almost all city schools a "whole language" reading program, favored by creaky progressive-ed bastions like Columbia University's Teachers College, but with no track record of success in any urban district in America.

Lam also neglected to inform city hall that, because it had no scientific evidence behind it, her favored reading approach risked losing the city federal funding. She thus led the Bloomberg administration blindly into an embarrassing clash with the Bush education department.

Lam's forced resignation, the result of a nepotism contretemps, gave the Bloomberg administration a perfect opportunity to repair the educational damage she had caused. With a blueprint in place to hold back up to 15,000 third-graders who had failed standardized reading and math tests and aware of the political opposition the plan would spark, the mayor and his schools chancellor could have announced that they were reviewing instructional approaches, especially in the early grades, to make absolutely sure that the schools used research-approved reading and math programs that worked.

But in canning Lam, Chancellor Klein made it clear that he stood by her worldview. The tough ex-prosecutor is now a progressive-ed true believer, deriding the solid scientific evidence that supports phonics. His choice of Carmen Farina as Lam's temporary successor sends this message loud and clear. If anything, Farina, a regional superintendent and a teachers' college stalwart, is even more a fan of whole-language reading and "fuzzy" math curricula than was Lam. In a 2002 article in El Diario, Farina claimed that the Lam-favored reading program had won the imprimatur of the National Reading Panel -a blatant falsehood. For good measure, she denounced the program's critics as "fanatics" and "extremists."

Presumably one of the fanatics she's referring to is Reid Lyon, President Bush's reading advisor and a chief official of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. It's no secret that Lyon believes that the city's current reading program fails the kids. At a recent UFT-sponsored reading conference in New York, he argued that picking a reading program is "a matter of ethics": not to use what we know works, Lyon said, "is education malpractice." Chancellor Klein, who received an invitation to the conference, declined to attend.

One wonders how rigorously Bloomberg's no-social-promotion plan will be enforced, anyway. Most of those empowered in the instructional chain of command during Lam's two years of misrule are progressive-ed ideologues. The same philosophical impulse that leads these educators to reject the "teacher-centered" pedagogy of phonics also makes them suspicious of standardized tests. Believing that children learn naturally and at their own pace, they are loath ever to hold students back. Given their pedagogical beliefs, they're all but certain to try to sabotage the mayor's initiative.

Gotham's experiment in mayoral control of the schools will not succeed unless Mayor Bloomberg shifts gears on progressive-ed pedagogy. But time has about run out.

 
© 2003 The E-Accountability Foundation