Marc Epstein, a career educator in the New York City school system, wrote an earlier post on Mayor de Blasio’s task of “cleaning the stables.” He refers to the Herculean task of cleaning the Augean stables. This was a dirty job, thought to be impossible, but Hercules succeeded. We hope that Mayor de Blasio will as well.
Marc Epstein writes:
Cleaning The Stables – Part II
Now you tell us?
After 12 years of subjecting the nation’s largest school system to a series of extreme makeovers, Merryl Tisch, Chancellor of the Board of Regents, the body charged with oversight of the public schools, informed us that the third major reorganization of the New York City public schools engineered by Mayor Bloomberg was an abject failure. “Me, if I were going to take over the school system, I would look heavily to change the networks,” she opined.
That her remarks received scant coverage from the vaunted New York press should come as no surprise to those of us who have lived through this nightmare. That’s because in the eyes of New York’s power elite, Michael Bloomberg was simply “too big to fail.”
Just what are those “Networks” Tisch referred to? For New Yorkers who exited the public school system long ago to educate their children in private and parochial schools, or to the new immigrants who find this discussion indecipherable, here is an explanation.
When the state legislature gave the mayor control over the schools over a decade ago, it was unconditional. There was no oversight from Albany, no strings attached to his powers. There was still a board of education, but he appointed the majority, who served at his pleasure and renamed “the Panel on Education Policy,” to signal its strictly advisory nature. If any of his appointees dared to disagree with his orders, he fired them immediately. When he doubled the operating budget and instituted a series of radical reorganizations, those on the sidelines either cheered or remained silent. As far as New York’s political class was concerned, when it came to the nation’s largest school system, it was a case of “I don’t want her, you can have her, she’s too fat for me,”
Bloomberg entered office as one of the wealthiest men in America. So, cloaked with an aura of invincibility unparalleled for a mayor, he crafted a “teachers and their union vs. our kids” narrative that was part of a nationwide campaign instigated by a handful of philanthropists with very, very, deep pockets and the desire to turn public education on its head.
He could proceed with his agenda with the knowledge that there’s nothing more soporific than stories recounting administrative failures and the destruction of a bureaucracy, especially when the bureaucracy had been twisted into a pretzel by five decades of political manipulation.
He began his assault on public education by cleverly disarming the teachers union with a seemingly exorbitant pay raise that increased entry-level salaries dramatically. It ensured a bumper crop of young teacher recruits, while granting a modest raise for senior teachers.
The dismantling of the school system rested on a few simple principles. First, declare as many schools, especially high schools, as failed institutions and posit that it was the fault of the faculty and administration.
An incessant drumbeat aided by his own news media company and the tabloids owned by his fellow billionaires Rupert Murdoch and Mortimer Zuckerman hammered away at the teachers as a parasitic class who needed to be held responsible for the failure of inner city minorities, and at their union for protecting them from deserved termination by manipulating convoluted contracts and obsolete civil service law.
Second, he refused to place those allegedly “failed” employees who numbered in the thousands, in his reconstituted “new” schools, or in other schools with vacancies. He supposedly “empowered ” principals to manage their operating budgets by changing the formula for hiring faculty, so the practice of charging a principal the average salary price for a teacher regardless of seniority was eliminated.
The result has been a cohort of headless horsemen teachers roaming the system as they rotate schools week to week collecting full salaries and acting as substitutes in order to make their lives as demeaning as possible.
My school has been without a librarian for 6 years because the principal can’t “afford” to hire a librarian. So a well-appointed library can’t circulate books or be open for students to do research or study, while well-qualified librarians from “failed” closed schools wander the system as substitutes!
Instead of covering classes with substitutes who cost the city $150 per day, he opted for regular teachers without permanent assignments who cost the city about $500 per day, while continuing to hire new teachers!
This “business” practice was extended to include guidance counselors and assistant principals as well. It may well be the first time the largest city bureaucracy in the 50 states was staffed like a satrap in the Medo-Persian style of the 5th century BCE.
Don’t go looking for editorials of outrage or news stories documenting this madness. After all, it’s impossible that Bloomberg accumulated close to $30 billion dollars by being an inept administrator or a particularly malevolent individual, is it?
The editorialists would rather condone this policy than scrutinize it. After all, if Bloomberg ran his business in this manner, why shouldn’t he be allowed to fire whomever he wants whenever he wants to?
The third leg of the strategy was to create a new managerial class of principals and assistant principals who had as little classroom experience as possible and no attachment to the school “culture.” Marketed as the “best and the brightest,” many of them were little more than hatchet men who were given orders to bring back as many teacher scalps as possible. Mayor De Blasio will find that they represent one of the many “poison pills” Mayor Bloomberg has bequeathed him.
Traditionally, the principal was the principal educator in the schoolhouse. Today, the new principal charged with weeding out as many teachers as possible simply had to be a bully. I spent over a month in a small school that experienced a staff turnover of 90% in just four years under this kind of management.
If you work in the system and have been around schools run with this sort of thuggishness, you’re not surprised when you encounter supervisors with little more than a 6th grade reading and writing level. I recall a heavily tattooed female assistant principal who was crude beyond measure and the last person you would want overseeing the education of your child. I doubt that she could compose a cogent essay of 500 words.
The new managerial class, purportedly trained in the best of Jack Welch’s managerial strategies, is suffused with uneducated barbarians who were elevated to positions of great responsibility. But incapable of educating, they simply pillage the teacher cohort.
Part four called for decoupling the neighborhood school from the community. He used the bait and switch tactic. Parental “choice” was the marketing technique to give parents the illusion that they had hundreds of choices instead of the stale neighborhood school for their child’s education.
With hundred of new small schools with the name “preparatory” or “academy” attached to it, how was a parent to know one from the other? To call these schools by the names we associate with fancy private prep schools was nothing but a cruel joke. To further add to the illusion that they were being heard, a new paid position of parent coordinator was added to the school system.
While there are parent coordinators who put in a full day’s work, their purpose was to make the PTA irrelevant and allow the coordinator to act as the flak-catcher for an unhappy parent. With 250,000 kids now traveling all over the city in the name of “school choice,” what are the odds that a PTA will have a real voice in the average school far from home?
The fifth and final tactic was to create parallel institutions that obfuscated and duplicated duties in order to hide responsibility for administrative actions.
State law requires superintendants run schools, but it’s the Networks that Chancellor Tisch alluded to that have been telling principals how to run their schools, which is really quite odd because the Networks were supposed to be providers of educational services to the schools, not direct them. In fact the schools were given the choice to pick the Network they wanted to work with.
Opaque, parallel institutions are not the hallmark of a democracy. But as any student of history knows, they define the worst sorts of totalitarian enterprises. So there you have it, the destruction of what was once one of the finest education systems in the country in five easy pieces, pulled off with the assent or abdication of duty by the movers and shakers of New York.
“Opaque, parallel institutions are not the hallmark of a democracy. But as any student of history knows, they define the worst sorts of totalitarian enterprises.”
This is a powerful summation and everyone’s take-a-way is this last set of sentences. It is where we are, nationwide. A power relationship we refuse to accept.
I don’t know how far you want to go with that parallel. Hercules succeeded at cleaning out the stables by automating the job, installing a couple of nearby rivers to run through the king’s cattle barns.
Educational technology has had its ups and downs since Ben Wood handed out those 4,000 IBM electric typewriters to schoolkids in Pennsylvania in 1937. He seemed to have great success, and his explanation, “kids’ creativity is too broad for the narrow bandwidth of a pencil point,” was attractive to the technically minded.
The war ended things, and after it was over Wood was off being one of the founders of Educational Testing Service, another of those controversial modern innovations.
When Don Cook tried to update Wood’s vision his initial runs with the Talking Typewriter were “promising,” and all those god adjectives. Cook made a bundle by selling out to CBS’s educational technology company, and then the Talking Typewriter failed. I forget whether it was Jerome Wiesner or Heinz von Foerster who told me, sadly, “The Typewriter couldn’t take it when the kids stood up on the bench and pissed into the keyboard….”
In Japan, worried about my daughters’ education, I got myself elected to their Nishi Ogikubo, suburban Tokyo, School Board. Then within the school board the other members elected me “Curricurum Tanto-o,” or roughly “Board Visitor.” I was the one from the Board who got to actually go sit in the classrooms, talk to the teachers and principals, and see what was going on.
I did so, and came away pretty satisfied. Classrooms were typically full of junk made by the students, and junk equipment cobbled together by the teachers. These struck me as good signs. The teachers were alert, and ambitious. They universally knew what they were doing, right down to the atomic level of what they were teaching in the next half hour, and their aim was single-mindedly that they should teach it to every student. Very often this meant enrolling the smart kids to teach the stupid kids, again, I thought, a good sign.
People count.
Technology is great if you have good people using it.
At least that’s how it seems to me. I have no doubt that the excellent Tisch family are doing their best at their aetherial levels of policy. Sadly I note that Larry Tisch’s endowed chair at Harvard is occupied by Niall Ferguson.
-dlj.
And helped along by the 2005 contract presented – sold to – the union membership by Randi Weingarten during her thoroughly disastrous leadership of the UFT.
This is beautifully written. I plan to share this with folks who have no idea of the sequence followed in NY, and possibly desired to be emulated in other places. It should be a cautionary tale.
Wow.
Mayor Mike and his friends in the media have demonized teachers for twelve years, scapegoating them as the main problem in the system. As this essay makes clear THE ADMINISTRATORS ARE THE PROBLEM; not the educators. Numerous principals and assistant principals have NEVER TAUGHT A DAY IN THEIR LIVES and know less than nothing about education.
Bloomberg encouraged this nonsense by claiming there were super qualified educators out there who could turn this system around, but simply lacked a teaching background and/or credentials. Even Klein, Black and Wolcott had no experience in the classroom. In a bit of Kafaesque surrealism Mayor Mike sold the idea that the less time you had in a classroom the more qualified you were to come in and fix the system. (By this logic I should be able to run an inner city hospital; since I never worked in one and know nothing about medicine.)
If you had competent, pro-teacher administrators, educators might actually enjoy their jobs and better impart knowledge. If you had better administrators more qualified applicants might want to enter teaching to begin with.
Smash and grab, smash and grab…
An excellent summary of the history of the destruction of the NYC school system. I am going to forward this to everyone I know.
Dr. Epstein’s 2 part analysis, which I hope will continue to serialize, is a profound examination of a deteriorating education system, not just in NY but throughout the country. Parents must take heed and start being pro-active in their school communities, demanding investigation and truthful answers. Give the task of educating our children back to educators and rescue education from the hands of corruption and thuggishness before it becomes too late to right the ship.
Outstanding!
And wouldn’t he like to do that to the whole Nation! Disgusting!
I’m particularly tired of hearing about “rubber rooms” in NYC where “hundreds” of ” bad teachers” sit around “collecting paychecks.” The narrative that “everyone accused of wrongdoing is guilty if wrongdoing” is rampant among union dissenters.
Touched on in Dr. Epstein’s first post on this topic, but a very important point worth repeating- the complicity of parents of children who were on grade level or above to have their children compete with each other for seats in desirable schools that excluded high-needs children through their screening processes. Both of DiBlasio’s kids went/go to two of those schools, so in that way he is no different than any other concerned NYC parent of any socioeconomic group-seeking out the best setting for their child ( which in the case of his kids means very high white and Asian student populations compared to the student population as a whole).
Thank you so much for writing such a clear, concise, and powerful article. As a high school teacher who has lived through this horror show, and now will be fighting to protect my position, there is not enough gratitude that I can express to you for bringing the truth to light.
This article must make it to DeBlasio ASAP
Many in the school community are familiar with the details but few can present them with such insight and clarity. You have a great gift. The general public sorely needs to understand and internalize what happened to NYC schools. This article has to be passed along and I’ll certainly do my part.
The Bloomberg/Klein approach to “Education Reform” was doomed from the outset by three invalid fundamental assumptions:
1) They confused “Administrative Reform” with “Education Reform”. While many of the Community School Boards were full of corruption and inefficiency, changing the structure did little to improve education. The attempts at “education reform” that followed, driven by people who had no understanding of education, did more harm than good. As Dr. Epstein notes, they also tried to destroy any ties between the schools and their communities.
2) Instead of trying to enlist the support of the staff who would have to implement it – Principals, APs and teachers – they seemed to go out of their way to make the staff scapegoats for decades of failure.
3) Perhaps most destructive, they lost sight of the goal of the school -to produce educated children with a love of learning. They substituted test scores and statistics as a goal. Tests should exist to monitor the progress and effectiveness of teaching, not the other way around.
Its as I’ve always known that bloomberg is a snake in the grass. This type of leadership is called dictatorship and is rampant throughout the middle east and brought to new york via mikey bloomterd. What a snake and one could only hope that fate will come around and bite this snake and bite him good