A new study hails the success of Mayor Bloomberg’s small schools initiative. The mayor closed hundreds of schools and opened hundreds of schools.
This study follows soon after the release of a study by the Annenberg Institute of School Reform showing the Bloomberg small schools excluded large numbers of the “over the counter” students, the late arrivals who often have the highest needs, such as new immigrants. These students were diverted away from the mayor’s signature schools and sent to struggling schools that were slated for closure. They were tossed aside. Collateral damage.
That’s one way of creating a success story: keep out the kids with the highest needs. Fund researchers. Declare victory. Forget about the OTC kids.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Another “victory” of this effort has been the metastatic growth of redundant administration within school buildings, now overrun with administrators for the multiple “academies” – really test prep factories with marketing-savvy names – that inhabit them.
Physical education, sports teams, clubs and extracurricular activities have been sacrificed so that Principals and APs, many of whom are barely out of diapers and are selected for their Kool-Aid enhanced opportunism, can engage in endless turf wars over real estate within the buildings.
Bloomberg claims to have fostered “competition” within the school system, but that’s the furthest thing from the truth: he set off a war of all against all, for the benefit of those seeking to extract wealth from and exert power within the school system.
Diane has used the word “scourge” to describe so-called education reform, and that’s exactly what it is. The destruction of the neighborhood high schools, with their comprehensive programs and long histories as community centers, has been a conscious part of that greed and will-to-power driven vandalism.
Michael Fiorillo: spot on.
Your phrase “redundant administration within school buildings” would fit what some so-called “colocations” have turned out to be. Cut, cut, cut the public school portions to the bone and offer the choicest spaces to the charters, while increasing the number of highest paid adults in the buildings—who aren’t in the classroom. Then demand that the public school teachers accomplish a lot more with a lot less or they will be given ‘unsatisfactory’ on enough evals to lead to disciplinary action or perhaps even dismissal.
But not to worry. For self-proclaimed cage busters and gap crushers, the endless hunt for $tudent $ucce$$ makes a lot of ₵ent₵.
😦
We devalue expertise in education at a time when teachers & principals are being held to higher and higher standards. It’s ironic that there is a serious leadership vacuum in public education. Privatization is one factor that influences politicians to place unqualified people in critical education leadership positions.
http://smartblogs.com/education/2013/10/23/accountability-privatization-and-the-devaluation-of-the-career-educator/
Given referenced small schools may exclude children with challenges, can one definitively say smaller isn’t better?
The underlying assumption of this study (as Diane rightly points out) is that when a school is closed, the schools that open in its place take all of the same kids the old school had and super imposed new administrative structures on them and created a new culture that let the students succeed.
What they don’t say, is that there’s a very controlled “matching system” for students to schools and they control its guts. They like to pretend “oh we just put students wherever the computer’s algorithm thinks is a best fit” ignoring that when a school is “new”, it has no record, and they can tell it to exclude students within certain parameters in the interest of giving the school a “good start”.
The underlying assumption even that neighborhoods stay the same and that the problems kids faced several years ago are the same – neighborhoods do not stay the same no matter how much we romanticize the notion. Their boundaries change, their residents change, more or less police presence will be in a certain area. There may be more social services in an area from one year to the next or less.
Given that NY no longer has neighborhood schools in the strictest sense, and, that they control the system to place students, and, they aren’t given OTC students, and,they can exclude students that are exceptionally poor, ELL, or special education, and they can counsel students out, and, that they can place barriers on entry to those with participating parents – usually partially by lottery, and, the school report cards measure different things EVERY year, and…and..and…
This “study” has so many underlying assumptions about the nature of the students all connected to the idea that somehow the students would stay the same from one year to the next with this kind of change. As you can see, that assumption is not tiny and has lots of secondary effects that could inflate or depress school scores.
MANY have commented on this but when teachers are made to compete with each other to get higher pay, too many will opt for the higher pay, do their best to get the “bright” kids – those most academically gifted and as pointed out here, the rest, most often the poor get shunted aside. Some “very good” teachers were upset with me because I suggested that all the children in their classes were important, that those less gifted not be shunted aside. People saw them producing great results – which they did produce – but at what expense. The general public did not see that.
Recently I read about a district where teachers were given the CHOICE to either undergo an evaluation based in part on a student test score (with a top rating earning them a substantial bonus) or not to have their evaluation tied to a test score (and have no chance at the bonus). When all was said and done, most of the teachers who opted out were the ones who had the highest evaluations (and who would have earned the bonus) while very few of the ones who opted in received bonuses. I will try and find where that happened. I do not believe most teachers are in it for the pay, at all costs.
That sounds like Newark, NJ. The state forced a merit pay contract on them but to sweeten the deal and get the teachers to vote yes, they also gave them a large retroactive payment with donated Facebook money and allowed those that wanted to stay with the traditional pay steps if they were more experienced. That was the reason they voted yes. Very few of the older teachers chose the merit pay option. Most chose to stay on the traditional scale for much smaller raises. When the merit pay awards were announced, few teachers qualified. Most of the teachers that qualified for merit pay were on the traditional contract scale. Newark didn’t have to give many raises this year.
Now that they have merit pay in Newark, they are trying to force it on other state controlled districts such as Paterson. Only this time around, they are not offering the option to keep the traditional pay scale.
Who will save the Bluberries?
Who will Save the Blueberries? Sorry
I thought it was BooBerries-gettin to be that time of year!