A little late in the day, with only six weeks left in the Bloomberg administration, the two key figures in designing New York City’s school accountability measures have declared that it is time for a change. Now they have decided that they leaned too much on test scores. Now they tell us!
Please read the comments that follow the article. They remind us how many schools were closed based on the approach that the architects now say was not quite right.
As philanthropists and civic leaders hail Mayor Bloomberg’s role in “reforming” the New York City public schools, here is the story of a teacher who describes the past dozen years from a different perspective. When the mayor closed schools, experienced teachers lost their jobs and joined the ATR [absent teacher reserve] pool, a large number of floating substitutes without permanent assignments. Their relatively high salaries made them undesirable as permanent hires.
The teacher writes:
“I have seen my 20 year career as a High School Art teacher (yes I consider myself extremely lucky to still have a teaching job and not be an ATR) go from teaching a wide range of classes in a High School with a thriving Art Major program that allowed my students to take the NYC Comprehensive Visual Arts Exam and use it to help obtain an Advanced Regents Diploma (my school was intentionally and methodically destroyed by Mayor Bloomberg’s selective policies of allowing only special education and ELL students to attend so that he could phase it out, pour millions of dollars into a complete interior and exterior make-over, and fill it with small High Schools that are all failing) to teaching only Required Art at another school. My students are smart enough to know that our futures as teachers and the future of our school depend on their progress and often tell me and my colleagues that “we cant fail them because we will lose our jobs”.
“To further my humiliation, my current school has been identified as failing because again only special education and ESL students are admitted and held to the same standards as general ed students, and my evaluation will be based on how students who I do not even teach score on the NYC ELA Regents, a subject I don’t even teach. This past week was probably my worst as a teacher in my entire career, consisting of incredible amounts of stress and disrespect from students, who I refer to Dean’s and Guidance for intervention, to no avail. They are returned to my class the following day after cursing me out and leave my hands tied as to how to teach the students in my class who want to learn and succeed.
“The reform movement has taken a job I loved and enjoyed and turned it into a complete horror, to the point where I wake up in the morning and dread going to work. My thanks to Mayor Bloomberg, and State Ed Commissioner John King for abusing (yes, abusing) both my students and myself. Thanks also to the author of the Common Core and Ms. Charlette Danielson, who are both rolling in money meant to improve students lives. Their work has done untold damage to students and teachers across the city, state and country. Ms. Danielson’s “Framework”, which consists of a rehash of all the things good teachers have been doing from the beginning, and which was intended to help teachers hone their craft, is being used as a weapon against teachers as part of the evaluation process (I have heard rumors that she is suing the DOE. I hope they are true).
“I am confident that at some point soon my school’s budget will no longer be able to support me and I will be excessed and replaced with a teacher fresh out of college with none of the experience that I bring to the classroom on a daily basis, but with half the salary (or less).
“I will end my career as an ATR, my life made intentionally so difficult that they assume I will retire. I have news for them. I WILL NOT be bullied and have been paying into the 25/55 plan so I can get away as soon as possible from a job and career that I loved and that never failed to be fulfilling on a daily basis. Teachers are strong and we will survive (except for the one that replaces me, who will quickly become disillusioned and leave the profession completely for a job where she will earn more money and be respected for the work she does).”
During his three terms as mayor –12 years–Mayor Bloomberg developed a data-driven strategy for school reform that relied heavily on high-stakes testing to close schools and replace them with small schools or charter schools. He eliminated neighborhood high schools and even neighborhood middle schools. “Choice” and test-based accountability were the central themes of his reforms.
The school closings were an annual ritual. Thousands of parents and teachers protested the closings but were routinely ignored by the mayor’s Board of Education, whose majority served at his pleasure, knowing the mayor would fire them if they bucked his wishes.
He closed scores of schools and opened hundreds of new schools. Some of the schools he closed were “new” schools that he had opened.
By the end of his tenure, polls showed that no more than 22-26% of voters approved of his education policies.
Many, it seemed, wanted a good neighborhood school, not a cornucopia of choices.
Yet at a recent discussion of the Bloomberg reforms, a report was released hailing this era of “reform” that the voters rejected. What was strange was that the report praised the Bloomberg era for what it did not demonstrate.
“Perhaps the mayor’s greatest education legacy is the belief that good public schools for all are possible,” the researchers, from the Center for New York City Affairs at The New School, write in an introduction. ”Yet the challenges, including resource challenges, remain huge.”
Not many teachers or public school parents are likely to endorse that statement.
Sadly, Bloomberg did not create a system of good public schools for all, nor did he encourage the belief “that good public schools for all are possible.” Instead, he promoted the idea that those who wanted a good school should leave the public school system for a privately managed charter school.
That heroic task is now on Bill de Blasio’s to-do list.
Leonie Haimson created a list of the promises that Mayor-Elect Bill de Blasio made about education while campaigning. She draws upon various public statements, including his answers to a survey sent to all candidates.
Here is another source. This was the forum held by Parent Voices NY at PS 29 in Brooklyn. Mr. De Blasio pledged to eliminate the A-F grading system borrowed fro Jeb Bush. The subject of the forum was education, and all the Democratic candidates except Chris Quinn participated.
Paul Tudor Jones was featured in an article in Forbes magazine.
Raised in Tennessee, he is now worth $3+ billion and has decided that his new mission in life is to save the public schools.
He has decided to start his mission in New York City.
He has so many misconceptions about public education that I hardly know where to begin.
Please, dear readers, is there one of you who will send Mr. Jones a copy of Reign of Error?
He doesn’t seem to know that New York City’s public school system has just gone through a decade of “creative disruption” at the hands of a far bigger billionaire, Michael Bloomberg, than Mr. Jones.
He doesn’t seem to know that the U.S. is the greatest nation in the world, and that our public schools are not failing.
He thinks that charter schools have demonstrated that they can close the achievement gap between the poorest kids and the richest kids.
His foundation–the Robin Hood Foundation–raised $81 million in one night, much of it for charter schools.
He doesn’t seem to know that charter schools on average do not outperform public schools unless they exclude low-performing students.
He thinks that the Common Core “was our Sputnik moment,” because it showed we don’t measure up to other developed countries. He seriously doesn’t know what he is talking about.
He doesn’t seem to know that Common Core was not our Sputnik moment, because it is only now being implemented and proves nothing except that state officials can set the passing mark wherever they want.
He doesn’t seem to know that we are #1 among the advanced nations of the world in child poverty.
He doesn’t seem to know that income inequality is at its highest point since the days of the robber barons.
Please help this man.
I am sure he means well.
William Stroud was the founding Principal of the Baccalaureate School for Global Education and is now Assistant Director for the Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE) at Teachers College–Columbia University. He sent me this explanation of what he saw during this time as principal of a small school in New York City.
Given the results of the recent mayoral election, and the arrival of a new administration under the new Mayor Bill de Blasio, this is a good time to review the condition of public education.
Just weeks ago, Mayor Bloomberg and Department of Education administrators celebrated the success of twenty-two high performing schools with a “victory lap” (NYT, 9/16/13). As the founding principal of one of these schools, the Baccalaureate School for Global Education, I would like to offer a more tempered, alternative perspective on the current state of education in the city and suggest different priorities as a way forward for the Department.
Mayor Bloomberg was quoted in the article, “Our administration’s core philosophy, when it comes to education, has always been, if we raise our expectations, our kids will meet them.” This is not an effective improvement strategy. Of course there are some high performing schools in New York City. Evidence indicates that student achievement closely correlates with in-school factors (the quality of teaching and learning in classrooms and school leadership) and out-of-school factors (family income and educational attainment of parents, stability of housing and employment, nutrition and health care).
On closer scrutiny, it is clear that these high performing schools cream the top students through the student admission process, or exist in consistently high performing neighborhoods. No news there. That the administration celebrates a testing initiative where 20% of Black and Latino students are proficient is a travesty. These are the officials responsible for looking out for all communities of New York City. Cause for celebration would be a tour of previously low performing schools in disenfranchised communities where high quality schooling is part of the fabric of the community. Perhaps they exist too. Which ones are they?
Raising expectations has been a critical catalyst in a high stakes accountability system that prioritizes investing in a new regimen of standardized tests (the Common Core assessments), establishing school report cards and teacher evaluations, and closing consistently low performing schools. This is fundamentally rooted in a free market strategy that purports to offer more, and better, opportunities for students and families. Several years ago in a public forum with Sir Michael Barber, one of the early consultants for the Department, I asked if there were any examples in history where a free market strategy had successfully addressed social inequality. He responded that we must get the controls right. We have not succeeded in this, and, I believe, the free market strategy is proving to be a failure.
Department of Education officials have claimed that the public doesn’t understand what the new Common Core assessment numbers mean. DOE officials either don’t understand what the numbers mean or are disingenuous with the public, because at this point there are too many uncertainties and inconsistencies in the testing and accountability processes to inspire confidence in the initiatives.
How do high schools with a graduating cohort of 40% of their incoming students deserve an “A” on their progress reports? How is it that in states where teacher evaluation systems are used, error rates are high and significant percentages of top-tier teachers one year can be in the bottom tiers the next year? When the new assessment exam items are written at a level of text difficulty two years above grade level, what are they really measuring? Student cut scores for performance levels are arbitrary, and new baselines are established with each new exam. And, if we are to take the most recent student assessment data at face value, the performance gap of Black and Latino students relative to White and Asian students has widened. Although we would not know this from a casual reading of the media, this would belie some general performance improvements on the National Assessment of Educational Progress over the last decades.
Although I have not recently been involved in the reform work in New York City, I can say that the impact of the policies on one school, the Baccalaureate School for Global Education appears to be harmful. In 2002, we created the school to combat elitism and to use diversity, academic and social, as a tool for improving the achievement outcomes of all students and developing a community that is committed to understanding each other’s cultures, dreams, and hopes for building a better world than we are confronted with now. We joined a promising initiative, the Empowerment Zone, where schools were required to admit at least 25% of students scoring below grade level on standardized tests. The more recent focus on testing and accountability, with its consequent rewards and sanctions, has resulted in the school becoming less diverse ethnically and academically, an ethnic cleansing of Black and Latino students in favor of already high-performing White and Asian students – more or less like the specialized high schools.
High stakes accountability has narrowed the opportunities for students who were not already achieving at high levels. This is the antithesis of the original mission.
The DOE measures, intended or unintended, are driving schools to this defensive strategy – seeking already high performing students as a way to avoid the draconian consequences for schools comprised of lower achieving students. Research would indicate that students of color benefit enormously from attending integrated schools. New York City, along with Chicago and Dallas, resides in the upper echelons of school segregation. We don’t need policies that encourage greater segregation rather than greater diversity. We need policies that result in less segregated schools, more long-term attention to the development of instructional capacity and school leadership, and does not mistake high stakes testing for educational progress.
An insider at the NYC Department of Education defends Mayor-Elect Bill de Blasio’s plan to support schools instead of closing them.
For nearly the past dozen years, Mayor Bloomberg has followed an agenda of closing schools and opening schools.
This insider, anonymous for obvious reasons, says de Blasio is right:
“The New York Post has already begun its propaganda campaign against Mayor-elect de Blasio’s plans to improve New York City’s schools. An honest assessment of the data demonstrates that under Mike Bloomberg’s 12 years of leadership student outcomes in New York City remained flat. Of course, the DOE has run an intense PR campaign designed to conceal this fact, but the data are clear. The NY Post wants those failed policies to continue. De Blasio has promised a new approach.
Today’s NY Post has an article claiming that PS 114, a “school de Blasio saved is back on the fail list.” The NY Post regrets that while under Bloomberg’s policies the school “would normally face the threat of closing” under de Blasio the school will now be supported on a path to improvement. Which approach makes sense?
Let’s begin with the evidence used to claim the school is failing. The solitary data point mentioned by the NY Post is the report card grade of “C” the school received this week. 85% of this grade is based on test scores. The report cards compare student performance across years in a manner the tests were not designed to do. The reports cards also do not account for the statistical noise in test results, meaning that schools whose test scores are statistically indistinguishable nonetheless receive very different grades. The very premise the report card grade is based on is false.
PS 114 has a “peer index” in the lowest 4% of all city schools. Peer indexes are supposed to compare only similar schools to each other, as everyone agrees it would be unfair to compare schools that work with disadvantaged and struggling students to schools that work with only selected students. But the data show that the report cards fail to make fair comparisons. Schools with lower peer indexes receive lower average grades. Schools that receive “F” grades have a peer index 24% lower on average than schools that receive “A” grades. Peer indexes lump together very dissimilar schools and peer indexes do not really control for incoming student characteristics. The grades are bogus and penalize schools that work with disadvantaged students.
Test scores are a very narrow part of what makes a great school. Other data show that this school has many strengths. The students who graduate PS 114 are more successful than the average in passing core courses in middle school. A review of the school by educational experts conducted less than a year ago noted that:
the school’s focus on citywide instructional expectations is evident in literacy, math, teacher effectiveness, and parental involvement action plans…This purposeful drive toward improvement leads to relevant modifications that elevate learning for all students such as embedding specific literacy skills in instructional tasks and prolonged units of study to build confidence and capacity for overcoming the challenge of solving complex math problems… The entire school community contributes to the direction of the school and supports the principal’s vision for improved student outcomes…Parents interviewed expressed knowledge of the school’s annual goals and espouse, “The school is empowering”. Hence, parents state that they work alongside teachers as dedicated volunteers and help set policy for school improvement… The school engages parents in a variety of activities and informational meetings therefore, parents have a good understanding of school-level data and are highly informed as to their role in supporting the academic as well as social-emotional well-being of their children. Ongoing dialogue and established partnerships among stakeholders center on student learning and individual success. Concerted efforts to engage parents in the educational process lead to parents viewing themselves as important partners in the progress of the school as such they perpetuate high academic and social-emotional learning expectations for their children.
Despite attempts by the New York Post and the DOE to obfuscate reality, it is evident that the letter grade is a poor measure of school success. Thankfully, Mr. de Balsio has said he will stop the practice of assigning meaningless letter grades to schools and would create a “war room” of experienced educators to work collaboratively with schools on improvements. Happily for the student and parents of PS 114, there is a bright future for the school community.
We now have the opportunity to discard failed policies and to implement better ones, ones that will help schools improve. How should we go about doing this?
We must do a better job of sharing information about school with parents and students. Stop giving schools meaningless letter grades and made-up report cards. Share a broad array of information about schools transparently and clearly. This should include, in addition to how students do on tests as compared to similarly situated students, such information as arts offerings, clubs, years of teacher experience, suspension rates, % of students leaving the school prior to natural transition point, and videos of classes for parents and students to view. Develop a website and apps that allow parents and students to weigh this information at the level of priority important to them. Websites like this already exist, such as this one that allows the user to rank graduate programs based on individual priorities. Publish test score data using ranges to account for levels of statistical significance and include multiple years of data to account for meaningless year-to-year fluctuations. Create a system so that parents and students can write reviews of schools and publish that information on the website after a peer vetting and review process.
We must do a better job of analyzing school data and working to improve New York City schools. Instead of using data for political and ideological ends let’s start using data, only the statistically significant and meaningful data that is, to support and improve schools.
Analyze the data to see if some schools have large gaps between course pass rates and Regents exam performance (including students who took a course but did not sit for the Regents exam).
Support such schools in clarifying grading practices. Analyze the data to see if some schools have large gaps between graduation rate and student persistence in college.
Support such schools in increasing the rigor of their academics and in building life-skills of students. Analyze the data to see if some schools lose, perhaps as a deliberate strategy to make their numbers look good, a large proportion of their students from each cohort.
Support such schools in working with the every student who enters their doors and in lowering their attrition rate. Provide every school community with a data narrative identifying the long-term, multi-year trends and support each school in working to shift practices if necessary.
Analyze the data on student characteristics to ensure that each school has a student body representative of the diversity of New York City. The Office of Student Enrollment should be held accountable for preventing the clustering of specific sorts of students in specific schools.
Provide schools with continuous feedback on how they are doing throughout the course of the year. Do not grade schools with a single letter, months after the school year ends. No teacher would ever use such a grading practice in the classroom. Use data in positive ways to identify specific teachers and departments that have outstanding results year after year. Use technology platforms to have those teachers and departments share their practices and lessons across the city. Advocate with the State Department of Education to allow students flexible options, in addition to standardized exams, to meet graduation requirements. This should include portfolios, demonstrations, and presentations. Let’s leave behind the zero-sum competitive game that has characterized the last dozen years in the DOE. We need to leverage the outstanding professionals and phenomenal practices that exist in every school in the city to collaboratively provide every student with a great education.
Marc Epstein, a career educator in the New York City school system, wrote an earlier post on Mayor de Blasio’s task of “cleaning the stables.” He refers to the Herculean task of cleaning the Augean stables. This was a dirty job, thought to be impossible, but Hercules succeeded. We hope that Mayor de Blasio will as well.
Marc Epstein writes:
Cleaning The Stables – Part II
Now you tell us?
After 12 years of subjecting the nation’s largest school system to a series of extreme makeovers, Merryl Tisch, Chancellor of the Board of Regents, the body charged with oversight of the public schools, informed us that the third major reorganization of the New York City public schools engineered by Mayor Bloomberg was an abject failure. “Me, if I were going to take over the school system, I would look heavily to change the networks,” she opined.
That her remarks received scant coverage from the vaunted New York press should come as no surprise to those of us who have lived through this nightmare. That’s because in the eyes of New York’s power elite, Michael Bloomberg was simply “too big to fail.”
Just what are those “Networks” Tisch referred to? For New Yorkers who exited the public school system long ago to educate their children in private and parochial schools, or to the new immigrants who find this discussion indecipherable, here is an explanation.
When the state legislature gave the mayor control over the schools over a decade ago, it was unconditional. There was no oversight from Albany, no strings attached to his powers. There was still a board of education, but he appointed the majority, who served at his pleasure and renamed “the Panel on Education Policy,” to signal its strictly advisory nature. If any of his appointees dared to disagree with his orders, he fired them immediately. When he doubled the operating budget and instituted a series of radical reorganizations, those on the sidelines either cheered or remained silent. As far as New York’s political class was concerned, when it came to the nation’s largest school system, it was a case of “I don’t want her, you can have her, she’s too fat for me,”
Bloomberg entered office as one of the wealthiest men in America. So, cloaked with an aura of invincibility unparalleled for a mayor, he crafted a “teachers and their union vs. our kids” narrative that was part of a nationwide campaign instigated by a handful of philanthropists with very, very, deep pockets and the desire to turn public education on its head.
He could proceed with his agenda with the knowledge that there’s nothing more soporific than stories recounting administrative failures and the destruction of a bureaucracy, especially when the bureaucracy had been twisted into a pretzel by five decades of political manipulation.
He began his assault on public education by cleverly disarming the teachers union with a seemingly exorbitant pay raise that increased entry-level salaries dramatically. It ensured a bumper crop of young teacher recruits, while granting a modest raise for senior teachers.
The dismantling of the school system rested on a few simple principles. First, declare as many schools, especially high schools, as failed institutions and posit that it was the fault of the faculty and administration.
An incessant drumbeat aided by his own news media company and the tabloids owned by his fellow billionaires Rupert Murdoch and Mortimer Zuckerman hammered away at the teachers as a parasitic class who needed to be held responsible for the failure of inner city minorities, and at their union for protecting them from deserved termination by manipulating convoluted contracts and obsolete civil service law.
Second, he refused to place those allegedly “failed” employees who numbered in the thousands, in his reconstituted “new” schools, or in other schools with vacancies. He supposedly “empowered ” principals to manage their operating budgets by changing the formula for hiring faculty, so the practice of charging a principal the average salary price for a teacher regardless of seniority was eliminated.
The result has been a cohort of headless horsemen teachers roaming the system as they rotate schools week to week collecting full salaries and acting as substitutes in order to make their lives as demeaning as possible.
My school has been without a librarian for 6 years because the principal can’t “afford” to hire a librarian. So a well-appointed library can’t circulate books or be open for students to do research or study, while well-qualified librarians from “failed” closed schools wander the system as substitutes!
Instead of covering classes with substitutes who cost the city $150 per day, he opted for regular teachers without permanent assignments who cost the city about $500 per day, while continuing to hire new teachers!
This “business” practice was extended to include guidance counselors and assistant principals as well. It may well be the first time the largest city bureaucracy in the 50 states was staffed like a satrap in the Medo-Persian style of the 5th century BCE.
Don’t go looking for editorials of outrage or news stories documenting this madness. After all, it’s impossible that Bloomberg accumulated close to $30 billion dollars by being an inept administrator or a particularly malevolent individual, is it?
The editorialists would rather condone this policy than scrutinize it. After all, if Bloomberg ran his business in this manner, why shouldn’t he be allowed to fire whomever he wants whenever he wants to?
The third leg of the strategy was to create a new managerial class of principals and assistant principals who had as little classroom experience as possible and no attachment to the school “culture.” Marketed as the “best and the brightest,” many of them were little more than hatchet men who were given orders to bring back as many teacher scalps as possible. Mayor De Blasio will find that they represent one of the many “poison pills” Mayor Bloomberg has bequeathed him.
Traditionally, the principal was the principal educator in the schoolhouse. Today, the new principal charged with weeding out as many teachers as possible simply had to be a bully. I spent over a month in a small school that experienced a staff turnover of 90% in just four years under this kind of management.
If you work in the system and have been around schools run with this sort of thuggishness, you’re not surprised when you encounter supervisors with little more than a 6th grade reading and writing level. I recall a heavily tattooed female assistant principal who was crude beyond measure and the last person you would want overseeing the education of your child. I doubt that she could compose a cogent essay of 500 words.
The new managerial class, purportedly trained in the best of Jack Welch’s managerial strategies, is suffused with uneducated barbarians who were elevated to positions of great responsibility. But incapable of educating, they simply pillage the teacher cohort.
Part four called for decoupling the neighborhood school from the community. He used the bait and switch tactic. Parental “choice” was the marketing technique to give parents the illusion that they had hundreds of choices instead of the stale neighborhood school for their child’s education.
With hundred of new small schools with the name “preparatory” or “academy” attached to it, how was a parent to know one from the other? To call these schools by the names we associate with fancy private prep schools was nothing but a cruel joke. To further add to the illusion that they were being heard, a new paid position of parent coordinator was added to the school system.
While there are parent coordinators who put in a full day’s work, their purpose was to make the PTA irrelevant and allow the coordinator to act as the flak-catcher for an unhappy parent. With 250,000 kids now traveling all over the city in the name of “school choice,” what are the odds that a PTA will have a real voice in the average school far from home?
The fifth and final tactic was to create parallel institutions that obfuscated and duplicated duties in order to hide responsibility for administrative actions.
State law requires superintendants run schools, but it’s the Networks that Chancellor Tisch alluded to that have been telling principals how to run their schools, which is really quite odd because the Networks were supposed to be providers of educational services to the schools, not direct them. In fact the schools were given the choice to pick the Network they wanted to work with.
Opaque, parallel institutions are not the hallmark of a democracy. But as any student of history knows, they define the worst sorts of totalitarian enterprises. So there you have it, the destruction of what was once one of the finest education systems in the country in five easy pieces, pulled off with the assent or abdication of duty by the movers and shakers of New York.
The most popular guessing game in New York City these days is Who Will The New Mayor Choose as Chancellor?
Many names have been floated, including some who currently work in the Bloomberg DOE. Seems unlikely.
Some have suggested J.C. Brizard, who was disliked by teachers in Rochester and booted out by Rahm Emanuel in Chicago. Unlikely.
Another name floated is former Baltimore superintendent Andres Alonso. Here the New York City Parent blog reviews the good and the bad about his record. He seems too close to the Klein ideology to survive scrutiny.
The guessing game goes on.
Steve Koss is a New Yorker, a math teacher, and an active contributor to the groups battling corporate reform for the past decade.
He has some ideas to add to those I suggested to the Mayor-elect:
Diane,
Agree with your first five recommendations/mandates. Here’s five more of mine.
Sixth, Mayor-elect deBlasio must oversee radical revision if not elimination of the school-grading system which has confused parents and badly skewed administrators’ behaviors regarding test results, parent surveys, graduation rates, etc. There is nothing inherently wrong with measuring, but the results should guide efforts at improvement, not serve as bonus-triggering carrots or job-threatening sticks.
Seventh, the new Mayor should work to radically overhaul the Panel for Education Policy so that it no longer acts as a pointless rubber stamp of a single official’s educational whims. With that overhaul must come either substantial upgrading of CEC’s or new vehicles for ensuring that parent/community input becomes part of the education policy-making and decision process, just as it is for every suburb in the NYC area. [Steve: Mayor Bloomberg made up the name Panel on Educational Policy to underscore its powerlessness. I believe the law still calls it the NYC Board of Education. Changing the law so that appointees serve for a set term, not at the pleasure of the appointing authority, would enhance its independence. The mayor now has a working majority of eight compliant individuals. This mayor needs a real board with the ability to ask questions and vote no.]
Eighth, the Mayor must select a schools chancellor who is (a) an educator, (b) a communicator, (c ) open-minded, (d) sympathetic to the needs of local parent communities, (e) genuinely concerned about the education of the whole child, not just the parts of the child measured by NYSED, and (f) more desirous of helping struggling school succeed than shutting them down.
Ninth, de Blasio should mandate a policy goal to provide adequate classroom space (including gyms, art/music rooms, libraries, etc.) for all students in all schools and reduce class sizes to more educationally beneficial levels.
Tenth, the Mayor and his new Chancellor must bring back into the school system educational commitment to physical education, the arts, and civics, thereby returning schools to the joyful, rounded, multi-cultured (and multi-cultural) learning environments they used to be before Bloomberg turned them into joyless test factories.
Diane Ravitch's blog 