This year the city of New York will pick a new Mayor, after 12 years of Michael Bloomberg.
There were only supposed to be 8 years of Bloomberg, as the voters of New York City had twice endorsed term limits of only 2 terms. But Bloomberg decided he wanted a third term, refused to call for a referendum, and got his faithful friend City Council President Christine Quinn to twist a few arms, promise that the members of the City Council would also get a third term, and voila!, our mayor had the chance to drop another $100 million into winning a third term.
For some reason, he thinks that his legacy will be his education “reforms,” but the voters don’t agree. The last Quinnipiac poll showed that only 22% of voters want his autocratic style of governing the schools to continue. The rest want some form of shared governance, where other elected officials have a voice in choosing the city’s school board, and the school board treats parents and the public with a modicum of respect.
Despite the constant trumpeting of the Bloomberg PR machine, voters understand that the city school system has not improved and that it is highly inequitable. Leonie Haimson and I wrote an article in The Nation recently describing the elitist tone and consequences of the Mayor and his policies. The proportion of black and Hispanic students admitted to the city’s exam schools (Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, Brooklyn Tech, etc.) has dropped precipitously during the Bloomberg years. The numbers are in the linked article. Brooklyn Tech, for example, which had an enrollment about 23% black and Hispanic, now has only 10%. The admission of black and Hispanic children to the city’s coveted gifted and talented programs has plummeted since the Bloomberg administration decided that it would be determined only by a single test score, even for the youngest children. The city’s state test scores, once the mayor’s greatest boast, collapsed in 2010 when the state education department admitted that it had made the tests too predictable and lowered the passing score each year. The Bloomberg administration boasts about the rising graduation rate, but never pairs it with the fact that some 80% of the graduates who enter community college require remediation in basic skills. The mayor boasts about reducing the black-white and Hispanic-white achievement gaps, but the federal tests (NAEP) show the gaps unchanged over the past decade.
And so the mayoral election is underway, and the Democratic candidates have loudly criticized the mayor’s policies. I moderated a parent forum at PS 29 in Cobble Hill (every Democratic candidate showed up except Christine Quinn, who was attending a fundraiser, and none of the Republican candidates accepted the invitation). The entire event was videotaped and it is here on the website of Parent Voices New York.
The questions I asked were written by parents. They wanted to know (I am paraphrasing, you can watch and see the original):
1) what will you do to reduce class size to not more than 20 children in the early grades (class size in New York City is the highest in 14 years)?
2) what will you do to end high-stakes testing?
3) will you end Bloomberg’s policy of assigning letter grades to schools, which no one understands and which are highly misleading?
4) what will you do to make the governance system more democratic, so that parents have a voice?
5) will you end Bloomberg’s policy of closing schools based on low test scores?
Every candidate–Bill Thompson, Sal Albanese, Bill DiBlasio, John Liu–disagreed with the Bloomberg administration’s policies.
All promised to dismantle the heavy-handed reforms of the past dozen years. All agreed that schools should be helped, not closed; that class sizes, especially in the early grades, should be reduced; that the school-grading policy should be abandoned; and all promised a more democratic and more open form of governance when the mayoral control law expires in 2015.
The Bloomberg administration won’t let the critics go unanswered. They have nothing left to boast about, so they fall back on weary platitudes about “we can’t go back to the bad old days.” The mayor sent out Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott to defend the Mayor’s sterling record. Walcott is the third non-educator appointed by Bloomberg to be chancellor. He was preceded by litigator Joel Klein and publisher Cathie Black. The mayor thinks that educators don’t know anything about education.
Dennis Walcott was once a civil rights leader. He was head of the New York Urban League before he went to work for Bloomberg as deputy mayor, largely as an ambassador to the black community. I don’t envy him. He has to defend an administration that has privatized the public schools across large swaths of black and Hispanic neighborhoods. He has to defend an administration that has made testing its major strategy. He has to defend an administration that cares not a whit that only 9 black students were admitted to Stuyvesant High School this year, in an entering class of 1,000. He has to defend an administration that has whitened the enrollment of gifted programs by making admission dependent on a single test score. He has to defend an administration that oversaw the gutting of arts in the schools.
The mayor called his program “Children First” when he announced it on Martin Luther King Jr. Day back in 2003. We now know that the children who come first are the ones whose parents are knowledgeable enough and have time enough to navigate a complex system of choices and testing. We know which children don’t come first.
Poor Dennis.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“All agreed that . . . class sizes, especially in the early grades, should be reduced”
Wow, such bold and courageous positions.
I’ll watch the video when I have a chance. But did any candidate actually answer the question “what will you do to reduce class size to not more than 20 children in the early grades”? Because that’s a COMPLETELY different question than “should class sizes be reduced”?
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Having looked at the video of the parent forum at PS 29, I continue to despair about the future of class sizes and classroom funding in NYC. Among all the candidates, there were three ideas for how to reduce class sizes.
De Blasio’s idea was to ask Albany to send more money to NYC. I can’t believe nobody’s thought of that before!
Liu said he could lower class sizes without costing the taxpayers anything by “accelerating borrowing.” He didn’t say how much he could lower class sizes or how much it would cost, so there’s no indication he’s given this much thought. I assume this is something Liu rolls out at every campaign stop when he has to promise something for nothing.
Thompson’s said we can find the money if we stop outsourcing city work to third-party contractors. No mention of how much money is being paid to contractors for work that City employees could do, what work these contractors are doing, whether existing City employees have the capability or time to do that work, how much money could be saved, how much Thompson intends to reduce class sizes, or how much money it would cost.
Obviously this isn’t the kind of event at which a candidate would be expected to present all the details behind their proposals. But you don’t have to be Spiderman to sense that none of these candidates are very serious about this issue.
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Even if Thompson had presented a viable plan, why would I trust him when he is backed by Tish?? He is a reformer in every sense of the word!!! The outside city contracts have been huge. Bloomberg has hired more out consultants on DoE dollars. Will it help class size, probably not. But it should go to something that isn’t associated with test prep.
I liked Liu, but he does have a way of making lots of promises.
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And if you read the NYTimes article on this “event”, principals were not thrilled. Nor did they give Bloomberg a standing ovation–unless they were from Leadership. The whole event was a dud!!
But today Hell must have froze over, because the NYTime’s editorial is finally calling out Bloomberg’s education policy including how charters are being shoved down a community’s throat. I think the Walcott event finally pushed them over the edge.
I wish they also reversed their support of VAM as well, but that would take an act of God.
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Derek Walcott has never been a civil rights leader, but rather a shill for the NYC power elite of FIRE (Finance, Insurance, Real Estate). He has made a career out of being the the Black face rolled in front of the cameras to deflect protests and defend the indefensible, whether it be school closings, stop-and-frisk, police brutality and killing of civilians, and whatever else further entrenches the neoliberal regime (which began in NYC with the Banker’s Coup of 1975) in the city.
Though he is certain to be handsomely paid to continue his life’s work after Bloomberg leaves office, the man deserves nothing but contempt and shunning by New Yorkers.
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Amen!
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I attended this event. I think that they all clearly knew what the parents want to hear right now. They all said the right things, but how can we know who will actually follow through on their vague promises. I would like to know more about who is financially backing each candidate. Liu claims he is the only one without a rich billionaire backer but my husband thinks he is terribly corrupt.
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Why doesn’t Wolcott get a real job instead of helping to destroy youth in N.Y.? N.Y. has over $21,000/student. What are they doing with all that money? Certainly cannot be in the classroom. Who is getting “Porked” there? Has anyone gone into their budgets? Doesn’t look like it to me by the comments. I know that the last audit by Deloitte and Touche showed a yearly budget of $23.9 billion not the $3.9 billion they told the parents. $3.9 billion equals about $3,700/year/student not $21,000. When people thing this kind of disparity is correct they do not have a clue to what is going on. D.C. has $29,145/student and it is also a mess run by the same “Wrecking Crew.”
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