Marc Epstein is a veteran New York City teacher who holds a Ph.D. in Japanese naval history. He was dean of students at Jamaica High School, now closed and replaced by multiple small schools. Epstein has written extensively for Huffington Post and other outlets. Here he shares his reflections on the past dozen years of changes under Mayor Bloomberg and the changes that face the new Mayor Bill de Blasio.
Epstein writes:
Cleaning The Stables: Why New York’s Next Mayor Faces A Herculean Task
During the first years of Bloomberg’s mayoralty I recall a conversation I had with Andrew Wolf about the direction the public schools had taken under Joel Klein’s stewardship, and voiced my deep misgivings about the future of public education in New York City.
Wolf, whose regular column in the New York Sun, provided the most trenchant reporting on the schools, replied, “Look, If Bloomberg were Frederick The Great we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
So an enlightened mayor politically beholden to nobody owing to his great personal wealth acquired through his business expertise seemed like the perfect fit for exercising the enormous powers granted to him by the state legislature in order to turn things around in much the same way Frederick the Great reformed Prussia.
The idea of mayoral control had widespread bi-partisan support because after decades of reconfigurations of the school system that were impelled by political pressures and the exigencies of the turbulent 60s and 70s, the time seemed ripe for a radical reorganization of the schools.
But instead, a series of substantive public policy blunders, many of which lie below the surface and hence out of the public’s consciousness, will be the legacy Mayor Bloomberg bequeaths to the new mayor.
Should the new mayor do nothing, a million plus children will attend school each day, and a bureaucracy staffed by over 100,000 will show up for work. Yet there is more to just having the store filled with customers. If the city is to thrive, an accountable, rational bureaucracy most be restored.
That’s because after 12 years of multiple reorganizations and increased expenditures that run to over $100 billion dollars, Bloomberg has nothing to show for it but a decline in academic progress, a thoroughly demoralized workforce, and a massive bureaucratic structure that no longer has its indispensible institutional memory.
As American democracy and public participation in everyday affairs expanded, the schoolhouse emerged as one of the cornerstones of American society.
The expansion of free compulsory education was one component, but some might argue that democratic governance of the schools was equally important. There are 700 school boards In New York State alone with over 5,000 members serving on those boards. Their communities elect these boards annually.
The elimination of the Board of Education in favor of total mayoral control allowed Mayor Bloomberg to cleanse all vestiges of democratic parental input into the running of the schools. Instead, a rump committee known as the Panel For Educational Policy and controlled by the mayor’s appointees, voted according to his wishes in lockstep, making the opposition of non-Bloomberg appointees an exercise in futility.
If the next mayor contents himself with some minor repairs to the tattered relationship between city hall and the badly demoralized teaching cohort and support staff, the death spiral of the New York City public school system will continue until it is completely unsalvageable.
A Modest Proposal: Restore the neighborhood high school and end Academic Apartheid
The systematic policy of closing “failed” schools is unsustainable and hurts the students it ostensibly claims the reforms were designed to help. For the past decade Bloomberg has seen to it that over a hundred schools have closed.
When, as Governor Cuomo recently said, “If the school fails it deserves to die,” what exactly did he have in mind? Unless a schoolhouse is infected with mold or needs asbestos abatement what does closing a school entail?
The ‘School Closers’ assumption is that the school failed because the faculty has failed. The students’ socio-economic or psychological background have no relevance for them. Market forces will solve their problems since they are free to choose the school they attend and only the good schools will survive as the bad ones die off, at least according to the reformers.
But, usually, low performing children in the worst schools are the most disadvantaged and have personal domestic problems that often interfere with or makes learning an insurmountable task for them.
Instead of providing a combination of alternative educational paths and necessary social services the Department of Education cynically steers these kids to “failing” schools that they want to close as part of their agenda.
City Hall claims that since hundreds of new choices are available to parents shopping for schools, market forces results in the survival of fittest schools and the need to improve “failing” schools evaporates.
The reality is something quite different. The parents of these children, many of whom are single parents or new arrivals with limited English language facility, are the least likely to overcome the barriers the Department of Education has erected for them when it comes to choosing a school or being involved with their child’s education.
They are the working poor of New York, and now have to travel long distances on public transportation to attend their child’s school or address their educational needs. Not only isn’t this a consideration for those running our schools, it actually achieves the atomization of the parent body that they long for.
A recent Annenberg Foundation study documented the practice of funneling the lowest performers into the worst schools, as a perpetual motion school failure-closing machine is cynically stocked to justify school closings and openings ad infinitum.
The result is the triumph of Academic Apartheid with the strivers and middle class navigating the system to ensure acceptance in the boutique schools that either screen students or administer entrance exams. These apartheid schools have proliferated during the Bloomberg years for good reason. By providing the most articulate and economically advantaged safe havens for their children, you silence them.
Mayor Bloomberg boasts that hundreds of small schools with names like “preparatory” and “academy” were created under his stewardship, but at what cost? They are mostly located in the defunct high schools on a hunch by Bill Gates that low achieving students wouldn’t fall through the cracks in a more intimate setting.
While Gates admitted the idea hasn’t worked, and abandoned his philanthropic support of small schools, New York has stubbornly clung to this misguided “experiment.” That’s because killing off the neighborhood school is a central component of Bloomberg’s “creative destruction,” and the small school initiative was the perfect device for carrying out the task.
As a parting gesture the Department of Education announced that it wanted to eliminate all geographically zoned schools.
What are the fruits of this misguided exercise in social engineering?
1. Since most classes are at capacity, the desired intimacy of the small school has never been achieved. I attended large schools and I also attended a small private school, and can vouch for the benefits of the small school.
But my classes never had more than 15 students. We were located in our own building instead of sharing the gym, the auditorium and the athletic fields with three other schools. If Bloomberg truly wanted small schools to succeed he would have built small schools.
2. Administrative costs have exploded since a building that was once run by one principal and one administrative staff has quadrupled to 4 principals and their individual staffs.
3. After-school student participation involving the arts and athletics has suffered too. The once great Jamaica High School was renamed Jamaica Campus, and the varsity coaches are faced with the task of putting their teams together by recruiting from the four small schools in the building, and the running of the teams must be in sync with the four schools. It’s much more difficult to get those students who have a long commute to stay after school.
4. Discipline problems have increased since it’s impossible to have a handle on the entire student body when four schools of about 500 each share one space.
5. In the name of open enrollment and choice, hundreds of thousands of students now use mass transportation to get to school placing even more of a burden and costs on the transit system. The result is increased tardiness and absences whenever the weather or transit glitches occur.
For a mayor who was obsessively concerned about the environment and personal health, it’s ironic that a “have your child walk to school” initiative was never part of his agenda.
“There are eight million stories in the naked city,” and it’s the mayor’s job to make the vast humanity feel that they are somehow part of a living community and civil society. The schools are a central component in this equation. When you destroy their role in the life of the community you do it at great peril.
Diane mentioned the fact that the small schools have a student population of about 500. What isn’t made clear is how breaking down big high schools with a population of 2000 or more and replacing those with 7 small schools with 500 students allowed for massive overcrowding as happened in my school. Building designed for 1500 now houses over 3000 students. Since each school is separate it’s harder to determine if a building is overcrowded since a parent would have to get each school’s name and check each school’s enrollment. But this is in keeping with Bloomberg’s real educational goal – cut cost at any price!
Great article, but I think the main reasons ” … providing the most articulate and economically advantaged safe havens for their children, you silence them” happens is because neighborhood schools-particularly the elementary schools were forced to abandon the practice of tracking students by achievement levels. No competent parent I know- of any racial or ethnic group, no matter how committed to public education he or she may be is going to allow their child to attend a class of 30+ students with reading level spans of of up to four years, significant amounts of children who do not speak a word of English, several special needs children who should probably be medicated and/or be in a more appropriate setting, kids traipsing into class up to 10AM, disrupting lessons…these are the conditions imposed on NYC DOE teachers who do not teach in one of the “boutique” schools- minus most grade level kids who have been cherry picked by those boutique schools.
When I came through the school system in the 60’s and 70’s, parents had more confidence that their neighborhood schools would educate their children at their appropriate instructional level, and by the time they were in high school, there were several different tracks available (including vocational) for students to prepare them for either college or a job. Many working class families in poor neighborhoods where the neighborhood schools were plagued by problems associated with poverty scraped together enough to send their kids to parochial schools-which were free to admit kids as they pleased as well as kick them out.
If we are going to have successful, integrated, neighborhood schools, parents need to be confident that there are classes that are appropriate for their children’s needs-whatever they may be-high achievement, ELL, special needs, or just “average” kids.
So Margie and MIchael, are you in favor of eliminating the elite high schools that use admissions tests to determine which students get to enter? Those pre-dated Bloomburg but don’t seem to get much criticism from many who post here.
Not sure if you are responding to Michael Brocoum or another Michael. Not in favor of eliminating selective schools. But I’ll respond anyway. Am in favor of restoring the larger comprehensive high schools. I witnessed the limitation on course offerings that results from creating small schools. Severe lack of flexibility in providing non-requirement, optional courses tailored to student interests.
Michael – not sure why you are ok with allowing some “public” schools in NYC to screen out the vast majority of students.
As to small schools – there are some great examples of small schools, such as those in the Julia Richman complex.
I think families should have large high schools as options, along with small public schools.
Joe- the specialized schools that require admissions tests are schools with basically one track-college (and competitive colleges, at that). There are always kids who belong in that track that won’t make it in because there are not enough seats in those schools for all eligible kids. The question is, will those kids get an appropriate high school education elsewhere? Do their zoned schools offer AP classes in the subjects they could be taking AP classes in? Music, dance, and art programs for those with the talent? A wide variety of sports? Believe it or not, many parents (and students themselves) would prefer a community high school that offered all the classes and activities appropriate for their child over the highly competitive, stressful atmosphere of a school like Stuyvesant where there was a cheating scandal recently or Bronx Science where elite track stars were found guilty of horrendous hazing incidents.
The question is – is every student in NYC getting the education they need? It would take much more extensive and careful evaluation than I am capable of to see if schools that screen or require admission tests help or hurt this cause.
P.S. -I attended Bronx Science in the 70’s. I am convinced if I would have gone to the zoned school, JFK, I would have been tracked appropriately and gotten just as good an education. That school was gradually abandoned by the middle class and broken up into several small schools. Both my children went to our zoned schools- K-5 and then the 6-12 school. One is already out of college and the other is in college.
Margie, I am certainly not defending Sty and Bronx High School of Science. I think those admissions tests should be eliminated.
Yes, I know many parents prefer to send their youngsters to schools in the community. I think that should be an option, just like the small schools available at the Julia Richman complex should be an option.
I am a graduate of one of NYC’s specialized high schools (Bronx Science, Stuyvesant, Brooklyn Tech, and I think a few others added since my day? I wonder if they are considered examples of “apartheid” to Epstein and, perhaps, other readers of this blog.
The trraditional exam schools were expanded and make up close to 10% of the high school population. I don’t consider the traditional specialized high schools that required entrance examinations to be apartheid schools.
Neighborhood comprehensive high schools used to provide a wide range of program that ran the gamut from commercial, vocational, to advanced honors programs. There are literally hundreds of students that take private bus transportation from Queens to Bronx Science because these programs that were once available in Queens comprehensive high schools have been mostly gutted.
My issue with the specialized high schools which require a test is that a significant number of kids who take the test don’t get accepted not because they haven’t achieved some pre-determined score of eligibility, but because the limited number of seats were taken by those who scored higher; cut-offs are determined by the # of available seats. So, two kids who are capable of doing high school work at the same level can end up in two very different environments with very different opportunities. I believe every student should be given the opportunity to take the classes and participate in the extra-curricular activities that are right for them.
We agree on the opportunities that should be available to every high school youngster to be encouraged, challenged, and assisted to reach her/his potential.
Here’s the main issue- until the priority becomes ensuring that all kids arrive in pre-k with the skills necessary to learn, curriculum that is developmentally appropriate and aligned with standards sanctioned by child development and educational psychology experts (which CCSS are NOT), our high school menu won’t really matter. The CCSS/high-stakes testing debacle will drive the remaining middle class families from the public school system (and perhaps NYC and NYS altogether) and every high school will have one goal- get the kids a diploma any way they can by age 21.It is time for Obama to look at the results of RTTT on public education, dump his education policy quac…er, I mean gurus, and for NYS to follow suit. It’s time to let the professionals take over. Let the “reformers” feed the hungry or dabble in oil painting.
YES
Very interesting – since the city is itself segregated, won’t neighborhood schools result in segregated schools? I think we need to provide a good neighborhood school for every child. If we don’t, then we’re just shuffling kids from one bad school to another. Even if a school in a Bronx neighborhood is not integrated, it should still be excellent for the kids who live in that neighborhood. I live in Hell’s Kitchen and I can tell you, our neighborhood is a great example of what happens when you have a choice school in your midst. There are three elementary schools in the neighborhood, Midtown West, P.S. 51, and P.S. 111. P.S. 51 and P.S. 111 are zoned schools. Midtown West is an application school. You must tour MTW to get the application, which at the time I toured was only provided in English. So you have to take time off from your job, and tour the school. Already you’ve screened out parents who cannot take a morning off from work. Then you have to complete a two-page application. Again, you’ve screened out parents who don’t speak English. In fact when you go to the DOE website and look at the statistics for these three schools, MTW has a third the ELL students that 51 and 111 have. Also MTW says it’s admittance process is a lottery, yet they seem to magically choose parents who are well-educated, well-connected and can raise about 100K each year in an on-line auction. Clearly, the parents in the know in our neighborhood use MTW to create a country-club, private school atmosphere within the public school system. They leave the other two schools with the less economically viable parents. They leave the other two schools with the largest number of poor kids. These parents, in my opinion, simply don’t want their children to go to school with poor minority children and MTW allows this to occur. School choice is a way to segregate kids economically pure and simple.
Roma, school choice can be used in a variety of ways. It does not require that some schools get to use admissions tests, and others don’t. T
hat’s a very unfortunate way to use choice…one that has existed for some years in NYC (long before Mayor Bloomberg).
Roma- in 1999 the zoned middle school in my neighborhood was changed to a 6-12 school. The three feeder schools remained the same- two in Riverdale, one in Kingsbridge. The idea was to limit the number of kids who were coming from out of the zone to attend the school due to underutilization by the community-hopefully stopping the exodus of families to the suburbs because they didn’t consider the middle school or zoned high school (JFK) viable options for their kids. The only requirement for admittance to the high school portion was attending the middle school. Other kids could apply, and if there were vacancies, applicants were screened. Many families still opted to send their kids to middle schools in Manhattan that screened the kids. There are probably more kids from Riverdale at Manhattan East than the neighborhood of East Harlem in which it is situated. Then, if their kid didn’t get into one of the specialized high schools, they came back asking for a seat in the high school. Since there were usually some vacancies due to kids moving or going to specialized high schools, they usually got a seat because they were at least at grade level and lived in the community.
So kids who don’t have a parent to shop around for the “best” school for them, or get turned down by screened schools because they are looked at as undesirable, end up in the only school that has to take them…the local zoned school…along with all the kids in the same boat, and then get punished because their schools test scores are low…by having the school “closed” and their teachers excesses…
Small schools are poison. lets bring back the large comprehensive high schools and get rid of these bogus academy and prep box schools claiming to be the high school for law and education, or high school for sports professions – the students and the parents “think” they are going to a sports school or a law school but guess what the graduation requirements are the same at these schools as any other nyc high school. Diblasio, please get all the ATR teachers and guidance counselors back into the classrooms and schools so to rid the stench from bloomberg and his bogus small school experiment.