It was a curious fact that when billionaire Michael Bloomberg was mayor of New York City for 12 years, he had complete control of the public schools yet did not have any fresh ideas about how to improve them.
This should not be surprising, because he was never an educator. He hired another non-educator–Joel Klein–to be his chancellor. The two of them relied heavily on McKinsey and other consultants to guide them. They hired lots of MBAs to staff top positions. They hoped to adopt a corporate style of organization, which made sense because they had low regard for actual educators.
He adopted every aspect of No Child Left Behind: high-stakes testing, closing schools, firing teachers and principals. He loved opening small schools, and when they failed, he reopened them with a new name so they could start over.
New York City was a faithful replication of NCLB, with punishments and rewards leading the way.
His main idea was to hand schools over to private charter operators, assuming that they would have better ideas about how to run schools than he did.
Some of the charter operators made a point of excluding low-performing students, which artificially boosted their test scores.
Some closed their enrollments in the fourth grade, so they would not have to take in new students after that point.
Some kicked out kids who were in need of special services.
Bloomberg’s favorite charter chain was Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academy, which used all of these tricks to get astonishingly high test scores.
Bloomberg was obsessed with data and test scores. He even adopted Jeb Bush’s policy of letter grades for schools (which his successor Bill DeBlasio abolished).
The New York City charter industry practiced all the tricks of raising test scores by manipulating the student population.
In addition, the charter sector mastered the ability to organize mass rallies, flooding legislative halls with students and parents, pleading for more funding for new charters (which they could not attend since they were already enrolled in charters).
So pleased was Bloomberg with his charter policy that it is now the centerpiece of his national education agenda.
He doesn’t care about the nearly 90% of kids who are enrolled in public schools.
He believes in privatization.
If elected, he could retain Betsy DeVos as his Secretary of Education and maintain continuity with Trump’s education agenda.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Bloomberg is a fraud and a stealth tyrant mastering a benevolent smile and level tone of voice. His 12 yrs as Mayor of NYC proved him a clear and present danger to democracy, racial justice, and economic equality. The rich grew richer during his terms and public schools suffered as did communities of color brutalized by Bloomberg’s private army of 38,000 police(stop-and-friskers with guns). Bloomberg positions himself as a smiling avuncular alternative to the wrath and wildness of Trump, so his pose as a benevolent tyrant may sell, especially if he proposes Elizabeth Warren as his running mate. Bloomberg’s magazine empire praises Warren for being “a capitalist to my(her) bones.” He sprinkles phrases about “the middle class getting its fair share” as his take on econ inequality ravaging the nation. Dem Party insiders fearing Biden”s vulnerabilities and Buttigieg’s youthful gayness, may change the rules of admission to debates after the Jan 14 upcoming to allow Bloomberg in despite his lack of base support(now set at 225,000 individual contributions).
Ugh, we just can’t win. Vote for Bernie or anybody but Bloomberg in the PRIMARY. Bloomberg would probably appoint Eva Moskowitz for secretary of Edumaction (sic, sick). Sadly, if it turned out Trump v. Bloomberg, I would have to vote for Bloomberg (as I voted twice for Obama who was also horrible on education). Don’t even start with Jill Stein or Green, I’d sooner slit my wrists than vote for her.
Fact is all democrats were for charter schools, testing, and a national curriculum. President Obama instituted Race to the Top, a Leave No Child Behind on steroids. If Bloomberg is a fraud so is Obama, Clinton, Patrick, et.al.
Not all Democrats were for charters, but certainly Obama, Duncan, and Clinton made it appear so. It was only this year that Democrats stood up and said, NO, I SUPPORT PUBLIC SCHOOLS, NOT CHARTER SCHOOLS.
That has been a huge change.
This is great because his huge loss will be another blow to charters.
MAY THIS be so.
In respect to Bloomberg’s impacts on NYC schools, I’d recommend folks flesh out their understanding via Andrea Gabor’s analysis in “After the Education Wars”. Alongside some criticism, she also acknowledged the benefits of his “giving principals increased power over budgets and teaching methods in exchange for more accountability”. And noted that, for all its flaws, the city’s school-grading formula “was heavily weighted toward measuring test-score improvement, favored relatively low-performing schools that succeed in improving over schools that were already doing well.” And she recognized extraordinarily excellent results achieved by various of his appointees, e.g., Tony Alvarado, Eric Nadelstern.
Stephen,
You don’t live in NYC. The system was reorganized four times. Chaos ruled. The school grading system was a disaster. My neighborhood school got an A one year. Bloomberg and Klein came to the school to celebrate. The very next year the school got an F. Same principal, same teachers, same students. It was insane. Great for charters, though. And the introduction of dozens of new selective schools increased segregation. NYC is now most segregated city system in nation. Selective schools and charters contributed.
Diane A book:
Title: Privatization of America’s Public Institutions: The Story of the American Sellout
Beginning paragraph of review:
“The nomination and appointment of Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos in 2017 signified, perhaps, the triumphal merger of America’s neo-liberal privatization movement and America’s neo-conservative consensus. Devos’ family fortunes have supported a variety of privatization schemes including school vouchers, the privatization of public charter schools, and a curriculum diffused with Christianity for the purposes of “advance[ing] God’s Kingdom” (Stewart, 2016). In other words, this merger represents a decades-long attempt to use public policies and public institutions to advance the symbiotic interests of corporate and Evangelical America.”
Author(s): Lawrence Baines
Publisher: Peter Lang Publishing, New York
ISBN: 1433164329, Pages: 172, Year: 2019
Search for book at Amazon.com
https://www.tcrecord.org/Content.asp?ContentID=23166
Thank you!
Diane: You’re welcome. I’m glad to help get the word out.
And now, Trump is dragging us into another war. I think, along with all of the other descriptions, I think Trump is a crisis junkie. CBK
CBK,
Trump is the master of chaos. He needs chaos to keep e erroneous focused on him and watching and listening. He is terrified of being insignificant. He is terrified of being ignored.
Fifty. Eight. Billion. He could spend out of his own funds as much as all the candidates in the past five presidential elections combined ($8.7 billion) and barely put a dent in his fortune.
Bloomberg’s hate, ignorance, and hubris are astounding. He is part of a small group of Billionaire Boys who are the arch enemies of public education. He is just as low as the Kochs, Waltons, Gates, DeVos, and Broad. He is going to spend $10 million on one campaign ad to run during the Super Bowl. Yes, during the event when people get together to eat finger food and watch sport interspersed with ads that usually tend toward the lightheartedly entertaining side, the whole country will roll its eyes in synchronization as an out of touch billionaire puts on a pedantic show of vanity. During his advertising, Bloomberg will not mention how much he has to gain financially by preventing a progressive presidency. Of course, he will not mention all of his prior attacks on the civil rights and even human rights of people over whom he has ruled with his money and the power it bought.
He won’t be the Democratic candidate who runs against Trump, and that’s just as well by me because I would never vote for him for anything, not for mayor, not for president, not for school board, not for junior high school student body secretary, not for America’s Funniest Home Videos. Never. Michael Bloomberg is not allowed to wash my socks because he would turn it into a profit-making venture and destroy the socks. If I ever meet Michael Bloomberg, I will tell him in no uncertain terms exactly what he can stop and frisk.
“Pedantic show of vanity” is a great turn of a phrase for Bloomberg, who entered the race late, when Biden appeared to be faltering. Bloomberg figured that he should be the savior of the billionaire class if he couldn’t count on Biden to carry the torch.
Lavish funding and support of charters but nothing for kids or families in public schools.
Business as usual for an ed reformer. Public school students excluded.
They simply prefer charter schools. It’s an ideological preference for privatized schools.
You can tell because they offer absolutely nothing to public school students. If it was about “public education” they would offer something positive to both sets of students and schools, but they never do.
The last thing we need is another anti-public school President.
Three in a row are enough.
Bloomberg’s pro-charter policy is consistent with his pro-stop and frisk policy. Never underestimate the strong connection between those who insisted that the only way to keep NYC safe was to target African-Americans via stop and frisk policies and those who insist that the only way to have “good” public schools is to target African-American Kindergarten and first graders for frequent out of school suspensions.
In both cases, supporters of those policies like Bloomberg made it clear that they believed that stop and frisk and targeting 5 and 6 year old children in charters for punishment and humiliation was absolutely “necessary” for safety reasons. Bloomberg was wrong about stop and frisk but it wasn’t until Bill de Blasio actually stood up and said “we are ending stop and frisk” and saw crime rates stay at historic lows that those promoting racist stop and frisk policies were shown have no facts on their side.
The same is true for charters, and I hope enough brave politicians point out that many of the policies that charters insist are “necessary” are really just racist, and the likelihood of a school of white students being treated that way is as likely as a white teenage private school student being stopped and frisked.
BTW, nycpsp, on yr frequently-mentioned Eva SA incidence of declaring 5yo K students guilty of “violence,” I finally put that together w/Obama-era fed policy forbidding K-2 suspensions/ expulsions… except in those [presumably rare] cases where actual violence threatens harm to self or others… so for Eva, it was just another machination to shed the unwanted students whowould not be contributing to high teat scores…
The thing is that charter advocates are too sneaky to actually say that they believe that large numbers of African-American 5 year old children are so inherently violent that they must be frequently suspended. They know that white education reporters rarely care about suspension rates as long as the children being suspended aren’t middle class white 5 year olds (when I assume the white reporters might ask questions.)
Some of Eva Moskowitz schools with virtually no white students would suspend up to 18% or more of their Kindergarten and first graders in their early years (it’s hard to get data but easier when the school only has two grades – K and 1st – and their suspension rate is 18%!)
Most white reporters like Eliza Shapiro never even think to question that since she clearly doesn’t think it odd that so many African-American Kindergarten students would need suspending. (Would she simply accept that as necessary if they were white 5 year olds like the ones she knows?) But on the one or two occasions over 12 years of promoting the “need” for suspending kids when Eva Moskowitz is asked, Moskowitz implies that she only suspends because kids need it and she just can’t condone violence in her schools.
John Merrow did a good job of asking some follow up questions during an interview (leading to some crazy sputtering by Eva Moskowitz who had never before in her life had to defend any of the outrageous claims she makes and could simply not understand it). But certainly Eliza Shapiro at the NY Times and other education reporters simply accept high suspension rates of African-American 5 year olds and the racist explanations that they all deserved it.
I believe that if white education reporters like Shapiro and others actually followed up instead of simply reporting that all those 5 year olds “deserved it” (with the implication that they were clearly acting out violently and a danger to the classroom), they could have done some good. Instead, they – wittingly or not – helped push the narrative that some kids — those who aren’t white — are disproportionately likely to be dangerously violent even at age 5.
This post is the reason we will have The President we currently have for 4 more years. I was in Urban School environments. I can go into any 3rd grade class and pick 25% of the students who can be on the path to Algebra 1 in 8th grade. The problem is the inability of the system to give these students the opportunity to really succeed. Math is the answer. Teachers can only be taught how to teach an algorithm and how to dissect a math problem. However, teachers have math anxiety which hinders the student’s ability to really understand the question. That in itself is the problem. Math determines almost everything later on in life. Business goals are to keep people stupid about math so people will make bad math decisions. Bloomberg is the only one who can fix this if we really want to fix income opportunity. MATH is the starting point. He gets it. He cares. Everyone else wants to keep students ignorant in order to raise dollars spent. And talk about prejudice in the classroom. My daughter used to come home with stories in elementary school. Depending what you look like you have prove you’re worthy or not worthy.
Income inequality is caused by math instruction in schools? I don’t mean to laugh. I just can’t help it.
I can’t imagine why you believe anything in Bloomberg’s mayoral history of school policy promoted better math prep of elem teachers: do you have a cite for that?
I am willing to entertain the idea that math could be taught better/ more consistently at the elem level– tho it was anecdotally my experience [w/ my own kids] that some were better at that, & some were better at teaching reading/ writing, & the rare bird good at both. It was only the very rarest bird–at elem or midsch or hisch level– that could help those w/o inborn affinity to math to achieve well in the field– & vice versa for those w/o natural aptitude for literary/ writing pursuits. Teachers can only aim to establish a rough balance between these two disparate fields.
I think you have a valid point about some teachers’ math anxiety– but that only pertains at the elem level, after which math istaught separately by math-types. What convinces you it’s all about math? Is it concern re: IT jobs? Many w/strong grasp of humanities/ logic do well in coding.
The problem with what “Usually Right” says is that people are who exceptionally good at math are often the WORST teachers for children who are struggling at math.
The very worst teachers are those who believe “I understand how to do is and so does little Tommy over there and so does little Jane over there, so that means this curriculum should work and i will keep repeating the same thing over and over again to little Susie because if it works for Tommy and Jane and me, then if I just keep saying it over and over again and Susie “tries hard enough”, she will learn it.
Sometimes the most gifted math teachers in elementary school are those who struggled themselves and understand that there are lots of different ways that students learn math and no one way works for all kids.
The same goes for reading, and those who just don’t understand why phonics doesn’t work for every single child, or whole language does not work for every single child, because it worked for them and these students over here, so therefore it must be the perfect system and all failures are due to the child.
Come to think of it, that IS what many high performing charters train their inexperienced teachers to believe. If they understand a system and some kids learn with it, that means the kids who don’t learn should be punished and humiliated because they just aren’t trying hard enough.
“WASHINGTON — Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s massive campaign apparatus and an army of some 500 staffers will march on through the general election in November even if he loses the Democratic nomination, campaign officials tell NBC News, shifting their efforts toward working to elect whomever the party selects to face President Donald Trump.
“Bloomberg’s vast tech operation will also be redirected to help the eventual nominee, as Democrats struggle to compete with the vaunted digital operation built by Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale. Hawkfish, a digital company started by Bloomberg that’s carrying out his $100 million online ad campaign, will be retained through Election Day to help defeat Trump, the officials said.”
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2020-election/bloomberg-fund-sizable-campaign-effort-through-november-even-if-he-n1113421