Mayor Bloomberg plans to start four charter high schools that will open after his term of office ends.
This constitutes an admission that his own efforts to reform the public schools have failed.
The mayor has had 11 years of total control of the public school system. Every year, he closes more schools. Some of the schools he closes are schools that his own administration opened..
Less than 5% of the city’s 1.1 million students attend charters.
The other 95% have been forgotten, adrift in a system that has been reorganized four times, with all regional and district supervision eliminated, with the loss of large numbers of excellent principals and the hiring of large numbers of ill-prepared principals, left on their own and judged by test scores.
What have the 95% gotten? Tests, pre-tests, test prep. School closings. Overcrowded classes.
The major legacy of the Bloomberg administration is the creation of a test-based accountability system that few believe in, but that has the power to close schools and wreck careers and reputations.
“Tweed,” as the central bureaucracy is called, operates with slavish devotion to “data,” but cold indifference to human beings. The young MBAs at Tweed have spent a decade wiping out institutional memory and attempting to create a bureaucratic, efficient, computer-driven system that churns out higher test scores.
The latest public opinion poll (January) showed that only 18% of the city’s voters want the next mayor to have the control that Bloomberg wielded.
The Bloomberg example reveals the shortcomings of corporate reform. It sets parent against parent in battles for choice and space. It destroys neighborhood schools. It gives preference to schools under private management. It shatters communities so they will be unable to organize and fight back. It lacks any vision of what education is or should be. It has neither reformed the public schools nor provided better education for all students.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The “reforms” only “failed” if you assume that better education was the goal.
Bullseye!
🙂
…and this just on the news this morning-homelessness in NYC continues to climb. Perhaps instead of concentrating on closing schools, the mayor should concentrate on giving children places to live. Maybe if we can convince him that the all mighty test scores may dip if the child doesn’t have a place to sleep, he’ll look in to the problem. Oh, I forgot – not having a place to sleep at night is not a factor
Where will Bloomberg’s failures on education take him next? Who will the next partner be in the Lemon Dance of this failed corporate reformer who flits from disaster to disaster with no accountability?
“The young MBAs at Tweed have spent a decade wiping out institutional memory and attempting to create a bureaucratic, efficient, computer-driven system that churns out higher test scores.”
Sounds like how they tried to run the Vietnam War
Diane, I have a lot of reasons to be skeptical of the test driven nonsense that goes as a driver of educational reform and for the MBA barbarians who lack educational knowledge, experience or training and yet who have taken over urban education in the USA. Bloombergs reforms (actually Klein´s reforms) do have some positive elements: most notably the much needed decentralization of decision making, the greater fiscal autonomy given to principals, the agilization of the purchasing systems, and improvement in student data systems. A lot of this was meaningful progress for NYCDOE. The tests based accountability is also only part of the accountability structures which, to be fair, also included teacher, student and parent perception surveys. I think the biggest criticism is that sensitivity, validity and comparability analysis was not done properly in many of these accountability constructs. As the research starts showing problems with VAM and other fundamental issues of the testing and teacher-school-principal grading systems, the serious flaws of much of it is being borne out. Had they piloted this stuff for meaninguful periods of time before wholesale implementation, we would have avoided the bandwagoning effect and the fiascos that we are all now seeing, and that we will soon all be regretting as an incredible waste of resources.
Gabriel, a large system of any kind needs supervision. Decentralization with no supervision, coupled with the infusion of large numbers of inexperienced principals, is a recipe for disaster or chaos or falsified data.
I’m with Dienne: from his perspective, he has not failed, but unfortunately has been all too successful in destroying the neighborhood public school, neutralizing the UFT, and instituting a regime where teacher’s careers are intended to be nasty, brutish and short.
The so-called reformer’s euphemism for this social vandalism and looting is disruptive innovation, or in TFA-ese, Transformational Change. In reality it’s destroying the village – and profiteering from that destruction – while falsely claiming to want to save it.
Exactly so.