Photograph; Mayor Bill de Blasio and his new schools chancellor, Carmen Fariña, tour the Bronx School of Young Leaders. Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times Originally Published at The New York Times. January 15, 2014
One door closes and another opens. In every life change comes. We know not what form it will take or where it might lead us. We only understand that there are new beginnings. This is true for you and me; it is true for New York City. A new Mayor begs the question, might this be an opportunity for reflection or rejection? It is hard to imagine that we might see any good in what we were sure was an education anathema. But then there are those occasions…In quiet moments, we might acknowledge that we were once adamantly against what we now advocate for. A form of testing, a curriculum…and oh my, could it be that once a Mayor or his policies moved us? That is the dilemma. Change, of any sort is a challenge. It begins with conversation. Let us listen; a dialogue between, Education Historian, Diane Ravitch and Education and Public Policy Professor, Bruce Fuller, University of California, Berkeley.
DIANE RAVITCHDiane 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 FULLERBruce 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,”
Is she what the city needs?
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.
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 children but 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.
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.
But Diane, your pitch for a return to tying students to neighborhood schools would reinforce disparities stemming from segregated housing patterns across and within boroughs. The strongest way to narrow learning gaps is to convene diverse students under one roof, not to perpetuate their isolation from higher achieving peers. Village control holds populist appeal but fails to integrate students. Bloomberg’s push for choice, while mind-boggling for parents at times, did result in low-income families winning slots in higher quality schools, compared with their neighborhood options.
But there’s a better approach. Based on my research, Education Option programs (Ed-Opt) do a great job at integrating students. These specialized academies attract hundreds of applicants each year, eager to focus on digital technology, photography, even animal care for aspiring veterinarians. And they don’t simply cream off the strongest test takers. Instead, aspirants are ranked and family background is factored into admission decisions. Unfortunately, their numbers shrunk by one-fourth to just 190 offerings under Bloomberg, but if de Blasio wasn’t so quick to discount school choice, he’d see their visible benefits, a key alternative to zoned schools.
Perhaps most refreshing about Bloomberg was that he believed school principals – free from voluminous guidelines and arcane union rules – would innovate and assemble potent teachers. And he’s right. Take Castle Bridge Elementary in Manhattan’s Washington Heights, which attracts equal numbers of Spanish-speaking and middling white families, integrating kids around a commitment to bilingual learning. Although its founding principal, Julia Zuckerman, says that Bloomberg’s reign was marked by disrespect for teachers, it was the former mayor’s trust in principals that sparked such a variety of schools citywide.
Mayor de Blasio’s schools chief, Carmen Fariña, must equitably spread invigorating teachers across the city’s diverse neighborhoods. Among new recruits who score in the top quartile on Albany’s certification exam, then enter a high-poverty city school, fully one-third leave each year. Rapid staff turnover simply teaches poor students to expect tenuous ties with adults.
We know that de Blasio differs sharply from his predecessor in style and substance. But his education team should dispassionately uncover what worked under Bloomberg, what didn’t, and how to build a more just school system.
Schools Across the Nation Are Watching New York City
Bruce, I’m not making “a pitch” for “tying students to neighborhood schools.” What I’d like to see is good schools in every neighborhood of New York City so that students don’t have to go through an elaborate, arcane “choice” process for middle schools and high schools, hoping to find one that will accept them.
The reality, as you acknowledge, is that choice has not reduced racial segregation. Segregation has not decreased in the past three decades, and the Bloomberg administration never made it a priority. Today, New York City’s public schools are the third most segregated in the nation, after Chicago and Dallas The de Blasio administration should actively pursue policies to reduce school segregation.
Although Mayor de Blasio did not run against Mayor Bloomberg, he was the Democratic candidate who was most critical of the Bloomberg education policies. For him to continue closing schools, as the Bloomberg administration did, would be a betrayal of his campaign promises. For him to ignore parent and community views, as the Bloomberg administration did, would be another betrayal.
What did not work in the Bloomberg administration was hostility and condescension toward parents and teachers. What did not work was to treat public schools as if they were shoe stores that might easily be closed and opened in a new location. What did not work was to give inexperienced teachers a year of training and place them into the job of principal. What did not work was to judge teachers and schools largely by scores on standardized tests, which invariably stigmatized schools that enrolled high numbers of English language learners, students of color and students who live in poverty.
At the same time, the de Blasio team must establish a genuine research department to replace the current public relations department. The research department should be tasked with telling the truth about resources, class sizes, staffing, programs, test scores, graduation rates, no-bid contracts and the progress of different initiatives. Bruce, you’re impressed with the city’s increased graduation rate, but you don’t seem aware that most of those who enter the City University of New York require remedial work in reading, mathematics or writing. A recent report found that “just 29 percent of graduates in the Class of 2012 had test scores high enough to avoid remedial courses at the City University of New York.” The same report concluded that “most high schools in New York City do not offer a full college preparatory curriculum.”
Of those who enter community colleges, nearly 80 percent require remediation; only 3.4 percent graduate in two years, and only 16 percent graduate in three years. Under pressure to raise their graduation rate, many schools offered “credit recovery,” a way for students to get course credit in a few days or weeks after failing the same course for a semester or a year. This boosted the graduation rate but it meant that large numbers of graduates were not ready for college. According to state data, only 12.5 percent of black students and 15.7 percent of Hispanic students are “college-ready.”
I don’t long for the “good old days,” but I do long for the days when the New York City Department of Education had a reputable research staff that published reports that accurately reflected what was happening in the schools — the good, the bad and the ugly — rather than press releases that “spun” the data. Back in the “bad old days,” I could call and easily obtain information about the school system or individual schools, rather than filing a “freedom of information” request with the department’s lawyers and waiting for months for an answer that might or might not come.
I would like to see higher standards for entry into teaching and greater emphasis on supporting and retaining teachers. I hope that the new team re-establishes the community school districts, but at the same time maintains an out-of-district network for those schools that prefer autonomy. I also hope the de Blasio administration encourages the expansion of the New York City Performance Standards Consortium, which has seen great success in preparing students for graduation and college while having a waiver from the usual state testing requirements.
I hope that the new leadership re-establishes some of the comprehensive high schools so that students have a choice among schools of different sizes. The comprehensive high schools are able to offer a more varied curriculum, more advanced courses in math, science and foreign language, and more ethnic diversity than the small schools that replaced them. A small school is just right for some students, and a comprehensive school is just right for others. In a city as big as New York, one size does not fit all.
Right now, parents and educators across the nation are watching what happens in New York City and hoping that Bill de Blasio and Carmen Fariña can create a new paradigm for schooling, one grounded in the joy of learning rather than a cold-hearted love of data.
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