In November, New Yorkers will elect a new mayor.
It matters a lot for the future of public education in the city.
The mayor has complete control of the city school system.
The mayor appoints 8 of 13 members of the city school board, who serve at his pleasure. If one of his appointees dares to disagree with him, the mayor may fire him or her on the spot.
Mayor Bloomberg has closed more than 100 schools and opened hundreds more. He has closed some of the schools that he opened. What matters most to the mayor is test scores. He grades students, schools, teachers, and principals by test scores.
The scores went up and up until 2010, when the State Education Department admitted the tests got easier every year. Overnight the “Néw York City miracle” disappeared.
Recently, the mayor embraced the Common Core standards. When the test results came out, the scores of 2012 collapsed, the achievement gaps grew larger, and the mayor said all this was “very good news.”
The mayor is devoted to charter schools. Although he is responsible for the public schools, he prefers privately managed charters and plans to open four of his own, as soon as he leaves office. His DOE is already setting aside the free space for these schools that will be created by billionaires Bloomberg and George Soros.
The results of Bloomberg’s “reforms” are unimpressive. Despite boasts to the contrary, he did not close the achievement gaps.
A recent study by the Economic Policy Institute found that the three “market-reform” districts–NYC, DC, and Chicago–got worse results than other urban districts.
The public is fed up with the Bloomberg era of imperial, autocratic “reform.” The latest polls show that only 22% want the next mayor to continue Bloomberg’s school reforms.
What’s next?
I fear that most of the candidates are trapped in Bloomberg’s cramped data-driven vision of schooling.
I want the next mayor to think about how to improve education, not how to raise test scores.
I want the next mayor to stop closing public schools. I want him or her to abandon Bloomberg’s obsession with testing and measurement. I want the mayor to stop giving absurd letter grades to schools. We learned from the Tony Bennett scandal just how malleable and how meaningless the A-F letter grades are.
I want the next mayor to take responsibility for the 95% of the students in the city’s public schools, not act as a cheerleader for the charter sector that enrolls 5% and kicks out or excludes low-scoring students.
I want a mayor who has a different vision.
I want a mayor who believes that it is his or her responsibility to provide a good school in every neighborhood. I want a mayor who is devoted to strengthening the schools, not closing them or privatizing them. I want a mayor who understands that improving the lives of children, families, and communities will improve schools. I want a mayor committed to early childhood education, to class size reduction, and to the arts in every school.
I want a mayor determined to make sure that every school has a full curriculum, experienced teachers, daily physical education, foreign languages, and adequate resources to help children who are learning English and children with disabilities.
I have an even more radical idea: Here is an interview I did recently on NY1, the local news station. Watch to hear what I propose. If the mayor acted on my proposal, he or she would become a national figure and an instant hero to millions of parents, students, and teachers.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Has anyone bothered to find out if Bloomberg’s proclivity for Charter Schools led to the appearance of impropriety, or even worse criminal activity, against the students of the NYC public school system? Has anyone thought of doing an investigation?
Dan Leopold, I don’t think there is criminal activity but the mayor’s favoritism for charters and small schools has created inequities between those he likes and those he doesn’t
The next mayor would be wise to follow Diane’s modest proposals. Unfortunately, none of the NYC mayoral candidates seem to have a clue about how to run a good school system. This is the problem with mayoral control. We need experienced educator voices making policy decisions, not politicians.
Is there a way to view the video without being a Time Warner Cable subscriber?
Allison, I don’t know. I will tell you the punch line: I called on the next mayor to opt the entire public school system out of the state testing to force change.
Excellent!
Diane, what do you think of Bloomberg’s move to close big high schools and replace them with smaller, specialized ones?
There is no evidence that high schools must be large or small. Each has advantages and disadvantages.
Diane:
I can see the argument at the HS level, but is this really the case in K-8?
The small size of the majority of high schools in my state (a large rural one in the middle of the country) limits the abilities of the schools to offer students outside the mainstream with appropriate courses.
How large are your High Schools? In principle, I guess I can see that – though I would be interested in understanding what those courses are. I think the bigger question is as I mentioned around the K-8 students.
The median size high school in my state is about 250 students.
High school sports divisions might give you a sense of the distribution of schools
The largest category is 2308-1289 students, 32 schools
The next category is 1281-720 students, 32 schools
The next category is 717-258 students, 64 schools
The next category is 254-162 students, 64 schools
The next category is 158-99 students, 64 schools
The smallest category is 99-14 students, 97 schools.
These are enrollment figures from 2011-2012.
teachingeconomist:
That data looks solid – given how sports leagues are run and the competitiveness of coaches By my estimation only about 30% are in what I would call student friendly sized schools – 160 to 720.
I can see your point about small schools. Have you or others looked at the educational outcome data by size in your State? Obviously there will be confounding factors, but it could be informative.
Comparing outcomes by school size would be difficult in my state. Small schools are generally rural, have households with lower income and less education. It would be difficult to isolate the influence of school size from those other factors. In any case school size for these small schools is not really a policy choice: many of these schools will be the county high school.
I think your ideal high school size is a little small unless you have students with similar interests and ability levels. Even my children’s high school, one of the largest in the state at about 1,500 students, does not offer the full range of courses that students are capable of taking. To be fair, it is a college town, and some students take some of their courses at the university every year, so there is less pressure on the public system here to offer advanced courses.
teaching economist:
I guess I would want to know what the courses are. If it is a course that builds advanced skills that is one thing, but if they are “college light courses” or personal interest courses like photography that could be pursued after hours, why?
In looking for analyses of US curricula, I found this interesting article: http://www.ode.state.or.us/teachlearn/subjects/science/curriculum/coherencearticlejcs375.pdf
What I had in mind was the full range of AP classes or the more advanced courses offered by limited admission public high schools like Thomas Jefferson High in Northern Virginia.
My local high school, for example, teaches AP physics without calculus, so students wishing to take the C exams have to prepare independently. The school also does not teach AP computer science among other AP classes.
Students wishing a more intensive academic experience have the option (if they can work out transportation and can pay tuition) of taking classes at the university. Most commonly high school juniors enroll in the ten credit hour calculus sequence for science and engineering majors, move on to vector calculus linear algebra and differential equations in their senior year of high school. Every three years or so there is a high school student taking a graduate math class. I have no doubt that there are a number of high school students who would be capable of this if they had the opportunity, but opportunities of this sort are very limited, especially in rural areas.
teachingeconomist:
Yes, I recognize the limitations. However, for those students there are some truly outstanding on-line courses. I took one from MIT to refresh my Linear Algebra after 40 years. It was very, very good and easily manageable by a motivated HS student. The emergence of such resources presents a huge opportunity to more efficiently allocate some teaching resources within the schools, IMO.
I agree that virtual courses have great potential in many areas of education, but ours is a distinctly minority opinion among posters on this blog.
teachingeconomist:
That is a shame, but I can live with it. The future will decide who is backing the right horse..
I worked at a “small” 5 to 12 school with about 75 to 100 kids at each grade level. The advantage is that we got to really know the kids and would discuss ways to motivate, assist, or improve their grades. We had a unique opportunity to provide a nurturing environment which lead to success for the majority of students. I also had the rare opportunity of being with them in the primary grades (as the librarian). When the first set of students graduated from this program 2 years ago, I had been with most of them throughout their childhood. One was my student from the time he was three – I didn’t remember, but he did. Some of them are on my Facebook page so I can encourage them through college.
Large schools usually divide up into smaller “schools” or teams to make the school more manageable.
While our budget (and faculty) wasn’t as large as the bigger schools, we used technology to offer additional courses – such as a skyped AP English class with a teacher from another school and a Saturday college statistics class at a local university. Many of our seniors had completed most of the required coursework, so we found worthwhile internships which matched their abilities and interests. I always thought every student should have an IEP (individual educational plan), but this program was the next best thing.
Of course, this is all pre-core standards.
Richard:
Interesting question. I thought I had already written this but it seemed to have disappeared.
Triggered by Diane’s laudatory review I read Pasi Sahlberg’s book, Finnish Lessons. It is very interesting. It motivated me to do some research.
Sahlberg pays little attention to the potential impact of the size of Finnish schools on educational processes and outcomes. While it is true there are no longer single classroom schools in Finland, their schools are dramatically smaller than US schools at each level. According to Statistics Finland (personal communication) the average size of the 2836 comprehensive schools covering 526556 students aged 7 to 16 is 186! By comparison in the US the average size of Elementary Schools (typically Grades 1 through 5) is 473 students, Middle Schools is 595 and High Schools is 752. Another way of looking at these numbers is that in Finland a student will be in a group of 20 or 21 students through the first 9 years of his or her education, while in the US they will be part of a group of between 90 and 200! The pedagogical consequences are likely very significant. It is not hard to see how, given the high caliber of teachers in Finland, that a student can expect considerably more individual attention over his or her first 9 years of education than could be reasonably expected in a typical US school.
Obviously changing from large to small schools may be very disruptive to students – but the differential benefits of smaller schools, public or private, certainly merits continued and closer study.
Bloomberg’s idea of small schools is a sham though. He’s closed schools and plugged 2, 3, 4, 5 (probably more) into buildings.
Then you open up the buildings with the schools co-located and you are now paying that many more principals (all who are employees highest on the ladder compared to teachers). Each school has less money, and they have to share facilities, which can also go underfunded (the libraries for instance may get funding from one school but not the other 3).
The only positive benefit is that each principal has a physically smaller space and a “more manageable” number of students to enact “their vision” for the school which parents will buy or ignore.
However, when you’re hiring principals with extremely little to no classroom experience, then what kind of leader can they be in either developing or enacting any vision? You now have someone that is essentially a marketer to try to get “good students” for their school.
It’s also damaging for students when the see the brand new shiny smaller school (as opposed to the now smaller large school) and they see that school get new books, new computers, new everything. They get the message about who is important and where they sit in the building’s power structure.
I can go into the benefits of larger schools and better pooled resources, but I don’t think I need to. Students need to feel like they’re part of a community. Frequently in smaller schools you end up with a resentful community that lost or is losing its school. Students there can’t feel like they’re part of a community or a tradition.
What I think Bloomberg has really done, is to try to create so many small schools not so that they provide a better education, but to make it so schools are not “too big to fail” – that the closure of one will have much less of an impact than closing the large schools now.
M:
If that is what Bloomberg is countenancing then it makes little sense. My understanding is that the small size also leads to greater connection between the teachers and the parents. Breaking a large school into smaller units is not going to create that sense of intimacy for parents. It is no different than wars in a big hospital. It remains a big hospital.
I am a great believer in the importance of leadership. Having Principals who do not have the respect and trust of their teachers is no way to run an organization and is certainly no way to implement significant changes. They may not have to be classroom teachers, but if they are not then they are going to have to be very special people.
I assure you that my description is accurate. More principal time with teachers would be good if the principal knows how to teach – but if you’re still relegating 34-40 students to a classroom because of poor funding – that’s a problem.
According to Bloomberg, leaders just need to be good managers even though these managers might not have enough experience to really know what’s working in their schools and what’s not – how does a 27 year old principal with 1 year of teaching experience coach someone that’s been teaching for 25 years with any degree of credibility.
Sticking 200 kids on a floor and calling it a school does not achieve that. The way Bloomberg is using smaller schools as a way to churn bad performers ensures communities are always under threat and that students are individuals who are isolated.
M:
I think we are in basic agreement. However, I do not understand your last paragraph.
The way Bloomberg’s DOE usually allocates space, is, depending on the building, either allocate floors (let’s say you have a 5 story school) or to allocate wings (if the school is more spread out).
You now call the 3rd floor school something and the school on the second floor something else and so on.
So you come up with a school that’s about the size of Finland’s without separate buildings (hence the 200 students on a floor).
The schools because they are so small, can be easily churned and closed down. The schools, since they are largely measured on faulty percentages (and each student counts for more with a smaller school), push more students around and have less continuity. Because schools are competitive, parents have so many more schools to investigate. It would be hard for a student to go to one school and then for their younger brothers, sisters, or cousins to go to the same school with the same teachers.
I had the experience in suburbia of having the same teachers my cousins had and comparing notes with them. It built a sense of family and of community.
When schools are invested in churning students to improve % numbers, and other schools are closed down, all schools are competitive, and the quality of the school based on all the factors of being a sham “one floor” schoolhouse, you make parents focus on their individual child and not on committing to or developing a community in any longer term sense of the word. Students need that adult cultivated community.
This is how you end up with students being treated as individuals rather than part of a larger community.
Now, in terms of the peer group, even though students might have a smaller peer group at their school, there’s no continuity in them from elementary to middle, or from middle to high school. So they have far more than 200 social contacts by the time they graduate (I am fairly sure Finland is not sending students all over like we do in the urban system).
In larger schools, to solve the problem of students being “isolated” in a building of 1500 people which is the counter argument to small schools, many adopt the “house” system which makes it so that you don’t have wildly differing groups pursuing similar subject areas. It has the drawback of not maximally filling out every single classroom (so it’s an ineffective use of resources). Charters do the same thing except they need a whole new principal.
In that system, you basically say “this group of Grade X students will have this cluster of teachers” and “another group of Grade Y students will this other cluster of teachers”. Even if they don’t have the house system, you still generally remain with your cohort which is smaller than the entire school.
Do they say anything about the curriculum offered? It also sounds like they divide their schools a little differently with comprehensive schools covering students from 7-16.
I believe Bill Gates pushed a small school model at the high school level which he abandoned. As TE has mentioned, it is difficult to offer as full a range of courses at smaller schools. I suspect that it is far too simplistic to focus on school size as a critical factor in Finnish education.
Of course you are absolutely correct. School size can hardly be determinative of much. I do recommend reading Sahlberg’s book. It is a quick read. Alas it is outrageously expensive. I borrowed mine from the local library.
My understanding is that there is a standard curriculum in Finland, e.g., there are multiple language requirements including English and Swedish or Saami, but it allows for considerable autonomy in the schools. But then with a small school and highly qualified teachers who are trained and encouraged to collect data and research teaching issues,
this makes perfect sense.
I would encourage you to find some young Finns, their parents or Finnish teachers and pursue the topic.
I am not suggesting that class size is the end-all be-all – but there is no such thing in education. There are a lot of factors to consider. In terms of the size of the school, I was simply pointing out how the peer group in Finland does help but that their peer group is much smaller and more continuous.
There is no silver bullet – there is increasing the prestige of teachers, of giving students a wide range of activities to participate in as well as the arts, there is class size.
These are all concrete things that can be done. Ultimately though, we ignore poverty the most and that is the factor schools have the least control over and is the thing that is still spiraling massively out of control.
Schools are touted as the solution – it should be a part of it – but society needs a more comprehensive strategy. We are beyond quick fixes – we need a long term plan – I’m not seeing it – and what is being done to schools makes the work that will need to be done to repair the damage take a lot longer and harder for generations to come.
As I have posted before, I met Sahlberg when he spoke at the Finnish Ambassador’s residence last year. He graciously gave each attendee his book. What happens in Finland is vastly different than the US, especially in our large cities such at LA, NY, Chicago. In Finnish schools there is no language barrier…everyone speaks Finnish, unlike US schools which have ELL speaking over 100 different languages.
This is a prime difference that makes our challenge so much greater.
The second fact is that the Finns feel their teachers are professionals with the same status as doctors and lawyers, and they pay them in that range. Every teacher in Finland is a union member.
To continue to hold the Finnish model up as the exemplar of the best situation for us to follow is wearing blinders as to how America functions.
M, thank you for all the information.
Ellen:
I certainly do not want to hold the Finnish system up as the model for the US. For starters it has a population smaller than the majority of the States at 5.4 million.
It is true that in some large city schools there will be children who speak many different languages at home. This is an issue that can and should be addressed. However, we need to size this problem According USDOE, in the US as a whole 11.3% of all school children are identified as having Limited English Proficiency. At the Secondary Level – I assume this includes MS and HS – the number drops to 6.5%. Given that many of these children are in a handful of States the issue you raise is (a) localized when severe and (b) limited most school districts. I am not saying it is not a serious and difficult issue but it is very different from the one that you characterize. In addition, in Finland 10% of the population’s first language is Swedish or Saami. My understanding is that the schools are required to teach Finnish, English and either Swedish or Saami. Linguistically it is not as homogenous as you might think.
As to teachers, the Finns have a far more rigorous entry process into teaching than does the US. Sahlberg notes that those going into teaching come from the top quintile of the applicants to Universities. It is, therefore, not surprising that teachers are highly regarded in Finland. As to salaries, Finnish teachers are certainly not paid the same as doctors. They are paid on a par with others with bachelor degrees, i.e., accountants – but that is not surprising given their level of capability.
To reiterate, Finland has some lessons for the US but there are special conditions in Finland that may be impossible to duplicate in the US. Small schools and highly selected prospective teachers could, however, be models for one or more States.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but NCLB requires every state to assess all children in grades 3-8 annually in ELA/math in order for eligible districts to receive federal funding. New York City receives a substantial amount of direct federal aid (in the neighborhood of $1.5 billion, or roughly 8% of the operating budget), with the majority of those funds set aside for children who are most at risk (Title I).
This probably makes a boycott a non-starter, unless you’re assuming that the Feds wouldn’t enforce the law, that Bloomberg would pick up the tab personally, and/or that the $1.5 billion would be made up elsewhere (a temporary reduction in salary, staffing levels, benefits, etc.). Beyond the funding, I’m sure that having about 45% of the students in New York State not take the tests would jeopardize its NCLB waiver.
(I can’t view the video to learn if you went into any of this in greater detail.)
Has any district ever boycotted the state testing and lived to tell about it? I suspect that if it were to happen, it would have to be in an affluent district that doesn’t receive Federal funding or can scrape by without it.
It hasn’t been tested. California’s request for a waiver from NCLB was rejected at the end of last year (http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/12/26/16171331-us-turns-down-no-child-left-behind-waiver-for-california?lite)
Since NCLB requires 100% proficiency by next year, it is untested what happens when a school does not meet that goal. NCLB works at the school level though not the district or state level.
That being the case – the government could theoretically impose massive closures/turn around strategies for most of the schools in California – they could effectively demolish public education overnight in theory. It sounds like a tin-foil hat theory – but it would fit well with creative disruption.
My prediction is that the government will take control of the system and put in the changes that California rejected through manipulation of their control over failing school outcomes. They can do it by destroying the system through NCLB.
It really is a horrible system – either California gets to be the puppet and gets told what to do, or the puppet masters take control and put in the changes their puppets wouldn’t.
What will happen though – we don’t know yet. We do know that the government gets a lot more power at that point. NCLB never allowed the possibility that we could get through next year without reaching 100% proficiency without dire consequences.
Edit: I’ve been rambling today….to more succinctly answer your question – cities don’t have an opt-out option. Since no one can opt-out of NCLB which is mandated and measured according to tests. The reason for my whole rant and ramble is that I’m fairly sure any district that took that kind of stand would be subject to every mean-spirited consequence NCLB has to offer to make them come into compliance.
Diane did make the point that the federal government has never withheld funding which is true (though NY’s state government withheld aid because of teacher evaluation – an argument now making its way through the courts).
How extreme will the federal government be if large cities take control back? I don’t know and I can be fairly certain others don’t either except for educated guesses.
M…recently a number of California cities, including LA, did get waivers…but already the naysayers are complaining about that. Actually Deasy and other Supts. spoke out for the waivers.
Getting waivers means drinking the kool aid. My concern is that the system is now set up so it’s a “heads we win, tails you lose” situation.
Even if local systems are giving into the reforms, that’s a win for the reformers (and I usually don’t like us vs. them simplifications but I think it’s warranted as I view this as class warfare with sides).
If districts don’t give in, NCLB will come and bash their schools in the head with a shovel, put in place people to put in the stuff they asked for in the first place and then some.
Anyone who thinks there isn’t federal control of education would do well to see what happens to local control to those who reject the common core and tying teacher assessments to tests.
I think we can get a pretty good idea of what Duncan has planned for recalcitrant districts:
http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2013/08/16/01corewaiver.h33.html?tkn=UOXFoI3amfnMZ98o7NWr2JDJDkM50QTbFXSj&cmp=clp-edweek
Essentially, it’s an end run around local control.
More on CORE and its Broad connections:
http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/living-in-dialogue/2013/08/alice_mercer_california_distri.html
Mayoral control is BAD. Anyone who thinks Mayors know what their doing re: education and truly need mental health assessments.
Diane, that video you posted about education in Chile was extremely informative and should be taken as a cautionary tale for us here in NYC. Two decades of democracy was not sufficient to dismantle the system of privatization wrought by the dictator Pinochet. Their education system was constructed to reinforce and perpetuate an unequal class based society. If we don’t turn this around NOW, not only this generation of children will be robbed of equal opportunity, but also generations to come.
We already have a two or even three tier system. You have the urban schools with a high poverty rate, the rural schools with another set of issues, and the suburban schools. The tests are written for the suburban students, especially those with professional parents. Some of the reading passages are so out of the realm of urban experience – I’ve even heard them called anti-urban,(I was thinking about one year’s article about bee keeping) – that it’s criminal. Can’t they ever find a compelling article of interest? It reminds me of the old SRA program. I was an avid reader, but those subjects were excruciatingly boring. Same sort of thing for the ELA.
Arts education needs to be protected in this climate of high stakes testing . Every child in every NYC public school is entitled to quality arts education as specified by NYS arts standards, and the NYCDOE Blueprint for the Arts. That means full time licensed arts educators in every school.