When Jan Resseger writes, she does so with authority and clarity.
In this essay, she explains why she will not vote for Michael Bloomberg, based on his record of disrespecting educators in New York City when he was mayor. Bloomberg as mayor employed all the same principles as No Child Left Behind: testing, accountability, school closings, charter schools, school choice, all based on “the business model.”
She writes:
Michael Bloomberg does have a long education record. Bloomberg served as New York City’s mayor from January of 2002 until December of 2013. In 2002, to accommodate his education agenda, Bloomberg got the state legislature to create mayoral governance of NYC’s public schools. In this role, Michael Bloomberg and his appointed schools chancellor, Joel Klein were among the fathers of what has become a national wave of corporate, accountability-based school reform. Bloomberg is a businessman, and Joel Klein was a very successful attorney. Neither had any experience as an educator. They took aggressive steps to run the NYC school district, with 1.1 million students, like a business. Their innovations included district-wide school choice, rapid expansion of charter schools, co-location of a bunch of small charter and traditional schools into what used to be comprehensive high schools, the phase out and closure of low-scoring schools, evaluation of schools by high stakes standardized test scores, the assignment of letter grades to schools based on their test scores, and a sort of merit pay bonus plan for teachers.
In her 2018 book, After the Education Wars, Andrea Gabor, the New York business journalist and journalism professor, comments on Bloomberg’s educational experiment: “The Bloomberg administration embraced the full panoply of education-reform remedies. It worshiped at the altar of standardized tests and all manner of quantitative analysis. The Bloomberg administration also had a penchant for reorganizations that seemed to create more disruption than continuous improvement among its 1.1 million students and 1,800 schools.” ( After the Education Wars, p. 75)
Gabor describes Bloomberg’s expansion of charter schools: “Harlem, in particular, has become the center of an unintentional educational experiment—one that has been replicated in neighborhoods and cities around the country. During the Bloomberg years, when close to a quarter of students in the area were enrolled in charter schools, segregation increased, as did sizable across-the-board demographic disparities among the students who attended each type of school. An analysis of Bloomberg-era education department data revealed that public open-enrollment elementary and middle schools have double—and several have triple—the proportion of special needs kids of nearby charter schools. The children in New York’s traditional public schools are much poorer than their counterparts in charter schools. And public schools have far higher numbers of English language learners… In backing charter schools Bloomberg and other advocates pointed to one clear benefit: charters, it was widely accepted, would increase standardized test scores. However, years of studies showed little difference between the test-score performance of students in charter schools and those in public schools.” After the Education Wars, p. 95)
And there is more. Open the link and read it to understand why the “business model” did not work.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This is excellent.
It is so true that Bloomberg and Klein operated the NYC DOE with marketing and PR being more important than what happens to children. And that was because they were not educators and saw it as a business instead of an institution that provided services to all children.
This view of children having value only if they perform in a way that brings value (i.e. public praise) back to you personally is the driving force behind many people promoting education reform.
Bloomberg/Klein operated like this: take one large struggling school, create 3 very small schools for the 25% students who do well and give them extra resources, and abandon the other 75% of students into a large, under resourced school that has a difficult time finding teachers. Then spend money to promote yourself as creating 3 “successful” schools because of your own brilliance. Meanwhile, pretend that the large number of students who you have abandoned are invisible, because to Bloomberg, those kids are invisible and totally without any value to him. I think that is the way that Bloomberg — and his favorite educator Eva Moskowitz — are very similar to Trump. All three of them see children only in how they have some value to them. Children who can do well on exams and give you bragging rights have value. Those who don’t do not and therefore they don’t matter.
And this Bloomberg view of people — including children — is why Bloomberg stuck to the stop and frisk policies and increased them rapidly during his term. It is why years after his term was over Bloomberg still insisted his stop and frisk were needed. That is because the people who were affected were less than nothing to Bloomberg. They did not have any value to him in getting him the public regard that is one of the few things of value to a man who has enough money to buy anything. As long as those people continued to have no value to Bloomberg, their suffering meant as much as the suffering off the students he and his best pal Eva Moskowitz abandoned into underfunded public schools. Absolutely nothing.
It is telling that Bloomberg just recently noted that stop and frisk was wrong. It is telling that he did so ONLY when the people who were affected by it suddenly had value to him. They were voters and African-Americans in other states had heard him defend this as necessary and Bloomberg suddenly needed their vote.
Bloomberg has no integrity. He sees children as having value only if they provide value to him by performing in a way that gives him the bragging rights and accolades. If a child does not, they are worthless. In that way, Bloomberg is the perfect representation of the ed reform movement that embraces Eva Moskowitz and Robert Pondiscio. A child’s worthiness is measured by the value that child brings to the CEOs running their charter schools and the politicians who enable them.
NYCPSP,
When Gates claims that his “small schools” succeeded in NYC, he is referring to the process you describe. Break up a school for 3,000 into 5 schools for 500. Get rid of the remaining 500. Allow the small schools to exclude kids with disabilities and others they don’t want. Claim victory when they get higher scores than the schools that receiving the abandoned 500.
The other thing that happened on Klein’s watch was that the DOE’s PR department went from 3 to more than 20. Tells you all you need to know about what mattered.
Thank you, Jan. So many reasons (not to)…so little votes* (hope so!)
*& %age points, as well!
Good luck with another 4-years of Trump and/ Betsy. Sometimes it’s best to stay quiet if you want change.
Silence does not produce change.
Silence is acquiescence.
Paraphrase of Burke: All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is the silence of good people.
I will most likely be voting against a candadite rather than for a candadite. I have not been excited about a presidential canadate in the general election since Carter ran and I was very young.
If the republican primary last year was any indication, any primary with a multitude of candidates is likely to produce a person far from the mean of party opinion. Given the president’s power of the party when that president inhabits the White House, the once minority opinion leader is magnified as party members get in line behind their only hope for four years. Right now, republicans who find trump distasteful are unwilling to support the opposition at all. Republicans who spent the last four decades excited about their choices for president now know what it is like to have to vote against rather than for.
So we have finally come to a place where the country looks very good to some people, but the vision for the future is lacking. Time for a vision for change based on old-time values. What are those values? It is rather simple. We live in the world, so we should be concerned about the world. We live with each other, so we should be concerned about each other. It is each of our responsibilities to use our ability for the good of our world.
Roy,
You are describing a world in which people feel a responsibility for one another, for the common good. That spirit is being undermined every day by appeals to me-first, me-only. Consumerism, not civic duty.