If you ask leading privatizers where are the examples of success for their theories, they will surely point to New York City.
Surely you heard about the “New York City miracle.” Australia is redesigning its national system because of the success of the alleged miracle.
But what about New York City? More than 100 schools closed, and hundreds of new schools opened. More than 100 new charters. School report cards. Testing and accountability. Constant evaluation and data-based-decision-making.
As New Yorkers know, the claims of a “New York City miracle” collapsed in 2010 when the State Education Department acknowledged that it had lowered the passing mark on state tests. When the scores were recalibrated, the miracle went up in smoke.
Now the people of New York City weigh in. A new Marist poll finds that 49% of New Yorkers say that the public schools are worse now than 20 years ago; only 23% say they are better. The rest are undecided.
Why so much public discontent? Budget cuts. Overcrowded classrooms. Charter co-locations pitting parents against parents.
After a decade of privatization and high-stakes testing in NYC, the public is fed up. And the miracle is gone.
PS: Would someone let the Australian government know?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“After a decade of privatization and high-stakes testing in NYC, the public is fed up. And the miracle is gone.”….. but the drum beat continues… and no politician at any level is willing to say they support public schools as they are now because everyone “knows” schools are failing… money speaks louder than facts
Its time that we really make the presidential candidates speak on the issue of education. Both are not saying much.
I am no defender of much of what goes for school reform these days, many charter schools included. While not all metrics of accountability are up in NYC, the single most important contribution of this last decade of reform in NYC is giving the principal more autonomy to run their schools and manage their budgets. Stifling bureaucracies to buy a box of paper or that required principals to buy certain desks and tables have been largely dismantled – and a NYC principal can buy most of his supplies quickly and effortlessly. Similar arguments can be made for curricular innovations, book purchases, and most importantly hiring faculty and staff. The capacity to build your own team and manage school finances makes a huge difference in what can happen in public schools. This is a major advance – putting the principal as the CEO. Making her responsible for most of the key decision making, has done more to improve school operations than the all the testing craze and accountability metrics put together (which most of us see as a major unnecessary distraction). Similar arguments also apply to charter schools who have even more autonomy.
You don’t seem to have read the information Diane posted, and are either deluding yourself or trying to deceive the readers of this blog. To re-iterate: New Yorkers see through the hype of the Bloomberg administration, and can see the schools being destroyed before their eyes. The tinkering you refer to amounts to letting Principals set the table for the barbarians in three-piece suits, who are coming to smash and grab everything in sight.
Corporate education reform propaganda may wish to make Principals think they are CEOs, but in reality they are still closer to operations-level middle management, despite their newly-granted budgetary powers.
Beyond their ability to shuffle the school budget, a Principal’s authority is defined and limited by (mandates for ever-rising) test scores. Curriculum (now defined and imposed by the privately-developed Common Core Standards) and hiring are all defined in terms of testing and cheap, compliant labor.
It’s like Henry ZFord said about the Model T: you can have it in any color you like, as long as it’s black. Principals have the authority to raise test scores, and little else.
So much for your “major advance.”
Actually 16% say the schools are about the same as a generation ago. So it’s 49% say worse, 16% say they’re the same. After the seismic changes wrought by Kleinberg and 65% say that things are either the same or worse.
Australia has a sad history of taking on US policies and practices about ten years on – usually around the time the US is discovering they didn’t work. It drives me to distraction. Why on earth would we want to keep changing a system that was one of the best in the world in order to make it more like one that can barely make it to the OECD average on PISA assessments? The blind leading the blind?
NYC can also “brag” about placing kindergarten children on wait lists for their zoned public schools. My child was placed on a wait list for 5 months and it caused tremendous stress for my family. The DOE’s response was that I should have prepped my 4 year old child for a gifted and talented program since it was apparently unreasonable to assume that I could send my child to the school of MY CHOICE. Oh, I also had the “choice” to place my child in a charter school since we were shut out of our public school.
GERM is not about improving schools; it’s about implementing a privatizing ideology that is more about creating a vibrant marketplace.It’s not a means to an end; it is the end. Schools will improve as a byproduct of aligning them with market natural law, so to say. The adherents of this ideology would argue that the problems NYC is experiencing are transitional–the price you have to pay for years of being out of sync with the natural order of things. But stay the course–it will all work out for the best. Why? Because it’s the dogma that follows from their market theology. For these ideologues to defy the laws of markets is akin to defying the laws of gravity.
It was a “miracle” that never “was.”
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