The New York Daily News (owned by billionaire Mort Zuckerman, who also owns U.S. News & World Report) often runs editorials applauding the “reforms” of the Bloomberg administration. Its editorials are anti-union, anti-teacher, and consistently supportive of the policy of closing schools that have low test scores.
But the New York Daily News has excellent reporters who don’t follow the editorial line. They just report the news. And the story today is stunning.
The headline summarizes the story: “Bloomberg’s New Schools Have Failed Thousands of City Students: Did More Poorly on State Reading Tests than Older Schools with Similar Poverty Rates.”
This analysis shows the abject failure of the policy that has been the centerpiece of the Bloomberg reforms for the past decade.
Closing schools and replacing them with new schools is also the centerpiece of the Obama-Duncan “turnaround” strategy.
Here is an excerpt from the news story. Note that the grandmother of a student in Brooklyn makes more sense than the six-figure bureaucrats who run the New York City Department of Education. Tanya King of Brooklyn for Chancellor!
…When The News examined 2012 state reading test scores for 154 public elementary and middle schools that have opened since Mayor Bloomberg took office, nearly 60% had passing rates that were lower than older schools with similar poverty rates.
The new schools also showed poor results in the city’s letter-grade rating system, which uses a complicated formula to compare schools with those that have similar demographics.
Of 133 new elementary and middle schools that got letter grades last year, 15% received D’s and F’s — far more than the city average, where just 10% of schools got the rock-bottom grades.
“It’s crazy,” said Tanya King, who helped wage a losing battle to save Brooklyn’s Academy of Business and Community Development, where her grandson was a student.
The school opened in 2005, then closed in 2012.
Instead of closing struggling schools and replacing them with something else that doesn’t work, King says, the city should help with extra resources to save the existing schools.
“You have the same children in the school,” she said. “What’s going to be the difference? Put in the services that are going to make the school better.”
Her grandson Donnovan Hicks, 11, will be transferred next fall for the seventh-grade into another Bloomberg-created school, Brooklyn’s Peace Academy, where just 13% passed the state reading exams this spring.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
So how will Bloomberg spin this? It is time to turnaround his office and the DOE. What letter grade should he receive?
the usual response to bad news is silence, followed quickly by a press release about the triumph of something else, or a new bought and paid for study saying the opposite
These schools were from the beginning intended to 1) be part of the Gates plan to destabilize the public school system and destroy neighborhood comprehensive high schools, so they could eventually be replaced by privatized entities, and 2) combine with attacks on tenure and seniority to remove veteran teachers and replace them with new teachers who would either bail out voluntarily or systemstically be denied tenure (as is happening citywide).
Vicious, socially destructive actions based on greed and the will to dominate: the Bloomberg/ Neoliberal legacy.
from that perspective, the new schools approach has been a great success. But not for the students.
Those of us who taught in nYc knew this was going to fail fromn the beginning. We also knew the “score”. Why was so much and so many sacrificed for so long? Where were our protests? Where was our courage to fight back?
They say “Discretion is the better part of valor”. Maybe that’s where your courage was.
I hate to say this but the fact is many, if not almost all, teachers have willingly gone along with these “reforms” figuring they would be just like all the others in the past, that the reform would come and go. They didn’t realize, as some of us were trying to tell them, that this time the stakes had changed, that the deformers’ rhetoric and methods were that much more sophisticated and needed to be forcefully resisted. No, just more of the go along to get along.
When Missouri’s Dept of Sec & Elem Ed (MODESE) started talking about “data driven dialogue and decision making”, oh, in the late 90s or very early 00s I knew it was different. It was and is an attempt to “scientize” teaching and learning in order to give MODESE more legitimacy in the eyes of the public and politicians. And, consequently, it also produces a lot of bureaucratic hoops through which the districts, schools and teachers have to jump and therefore “justifies” their position and powers.
The underlying logical fallacy in all of this (and I wish all people but especially educators, would understand this fact but they don’t seem to be able to break out of their societal induced “soma coma”) is that IT IS LOGICALLY IMPOSSIBLE TO QUANTIFY, i.e., grades, standards, and standardized testing , A QUALITY, the process known as teaching and learning. Quantities and qualities are two separate logical categories and to confuse and conflate them is to commit a logical fallacy, an error in thinking/doing/being.
To point out the insanity of using that logical fallacy as a guiding principle in what we do on a daily basis in public education is to, according to most, slander, defame, incite and insurrect against, cause chaos and anarchy to reign supreme over the dominant ideology of “scientizing” teaching and learning. And I have felt the wrath of those hell bent on continuing that ideology (mainly because it enables them to continue in their higher than teacher paid positions). Yep, I wish I would have taken LSD when I was younger to have better prepared myself for times like these-apologies to L. Black.
It is not over. I predict there will be another study emanating from somewhere or other “proving” the success of the reforms.
Diane,
I am not sure that reporting on bad results out of Bloomberg’s DOE bad, heinous even, actions should be argued since the weapon of choice is test result data. That would seem to diminish the really valid argument that test data is not really valid especially when stakes are attached to them.
If the data is bad the data is bad and shouldn’t be used to make any kind of argument even one that would seem to make the most sense in the world, that the turnaround policy is worse than rearranging deck chairs.
I understand your argument, but Bloomberg has made test scores the be-all and end-all of his reforms. He has said for ten years that test scores are all that matters, and has staked his claim on them. We know why this is wrong, but there is a basic principle at issue here: Live by test scores, die by test scores.
After reading the whole article,I feel the grandmother, Tanya King, said it best—““You have the same children in the school,” she said. “What’s going to be the difference? Put in the services that are going to make the school better.” I have been preaching this for the past 14 years, but when are district leaders and politicians going to realize this? When are they also going to realize that constantly cutting away at the educational budget does not improve student achievement but decreases it. Remember, you get what you pay for—-so if we are paying little in funding for schools, we are reaping little benefits and success.
It’s a shame that people on both sides of the debate continue to cherry-pick only the facts that support their position – to the point where they are willing to mislead with their conclusions.
Here are the two most important quotes from the article that do not appear in the summary above:
1. “While there is still room to improve, these new schools’ proficiency rate is nearly double that of the schools they replaced in both math and English.”
That is the most important piece of data in the article. That’s the headline. The new schools are performing dramatically better than the old ones.
But this fact doesn’t fit the narrative some people want to hear. (By the way, if anyone here has data that shows statement # 1 to be wrong, please post it here).
Also:
2. “The News analysis – which looked just at traditional public schools, not at charters – was not the kind of throrough academic study that could be used to draw absolute conclusions on the success of school closures.”
Uh, yeah, but people who LIKE the results of the News’ analysis are using it to draw these kinds of conclusions. Even some people quoted in the article.
It’s too bad. When propaganda is used as the basis for making a point, it just leads to more polarization on the issues rather than helping citizens make informed decisions.
“When propaganda is used as. . . ”
I wish I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard that phrase come from the mouths of many of my very fiscally conservative friends when they can’t logically counteract my arguments after I’ve shown them the research, the facts and figures, etc. . . . You’re going to have to go the next step, as they do, and tell me to quit being communistic or socialistic.
Mr. Turley,
The reason you can not include charters in the study or analysis is that they are not resourced at the same rate. Charters are giving a greater percentage of resources and have a different set of rules, so why would you compare apples and oranges? Charters also deal with different groupings of kids. While some “public schools” get more say in who comes into their school than others, charters get a much greater say, allowing them to cherry pick their kids. So please, do not talk about “double standards”. I will not hold my breath waiting to see if the the principal arrested for Meth-amphetamines is suspended without pay, or even fired. Tweed never seems to fire or wants to fire them…only those stinkin’ greedy teachers.
Hi pfh64, I would not include charters. I only included the parenthetical, “which looked just at traditional public schools, not at charters” to show the whole quote.
I have posted here many times that I believe charter schools should be held to a higher standard than public schools or there is little purpose in having charter schools.
My primary point in point 2 I wrote is that the analysis done by the NY Daily News is not a source to draw any conclusions from and is certainly a poorer point of comparison than the schools which were replaced.