The Death and Life of the Great American School System

by Diane Ravitch

  A few weeks after he gained control, Mayor Bloomberg offered the top education job in the nation’s largest city to Joel Klein, a lawyer who had served as assistant attorney general in the Justice Department during the Clinton administration. During his time as head of the antitrust division, Klein won national attention for his efforts to break up the software giant Microsoft. A brilliant and accomplished lawyer and prosecutor, he had little experience in education.

  Soon after being appointed, Klein visited Alan Bersin, the school superintendent in San Diego, who had come to the job with the same background as lawyer, prosecutor, and former official in the Clinton administration.5 Like Bersin, Klein adopted a “left-right” strategy: He selected instructional programs that pleased the pedagogical left, awarded large contracts to vendors of these programs, and created large numbers of jobs for consultants and coaches who were knowledgeable about progressive approaches. And he satisfied the business community by vigorously promoting choice and accountability.

  Klein spent the winter of 2002 fashioning his reform agenda. He first brought in the management consulting firm McKinsey & Company, then turned to investment banker Ron Beller, a former partner at Goldman Sachs. BusinessWeek admiringly described how Mayor Bloomberg had “terrorized New York’s educational establishment” by recruiting leaders from corporate America, such as controversial business legend Jack Welch, former chairman of General Electric, to spearhead the effort to apply business principles to public education.6

  In January 2003, on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, the mayor announced his reform program, which he called Children First. It consisted of several parts:

  First, the administration declared that in fall 2003, it would install a uniform reading and mathematics program in almost every school (235 of the city’s 1,200 schools were exempt because they were relatively high-performing schools). His new Department of Education mandated Balanced Literacy, the same method that was pioneered in District 2 and later implemented in San Diego. The math program consisted of two McGraw-Hill products, Everyday Mathematics and Impact Mathematics, which are nontraditional, constructivist programs. Each school was assigned literacy coaches and mathematics coaches to monitor and enforce strict implementation of the new mandates. In addition, the DOE mandated citywide use of the Teachers College “workshop model” and imposed it in a highly prescriptive manner, with group work required in all lessons and each day’s activities defined in precise order and detail.7

  Second, the mayor and chancellor declared their intention to eliminate the city’s thirty-two community school districts (although these districts were continued in the law) and to replace them with ten large regions, each headed by a regional superintendent. Local instructional superintendents (known as “LISes”) would each oversee ten to twelve schools and report to the regional superintendent. In addition, there would be regional instructional specialists and community school district superintendents (even though the districts now existed only on paper), all of whom would report to the regional superintendents. Financial matters were to be separated entirely from instruction and handed over to six regional operating centers (or “ROCs”). The city’s educators and parents had to learn a new vocabulary of acronyms and a new system of governance.

  Third, the Bloomberg administration announced the creation of a privately funded Leadership Academy to mentor new principals and train people from various fields who wanted to become principals. The mayor raised $75 million in private philanthropic funds for a three-year program to train ninety people each year. To head this academy, Klein hired a business executive with no previous experience in education and put together a board whose star member was Jack Welch.8 In its initial three years, the academy produced about 150 principals. After the first three years, the DOE assumed responsibility for the academy.

  Fourth, the mayor promised there would be greater parental involvement in the schools, but the new structure actually reduced parental involvement. With the elimination of local school boards and the central board, where each of the city’s five boroughs had a representative, parents found it difficult to contact anyone in authority about issues that affected their children. Local community education councils made up of parents replaced the community school boards in each district, but they were seldom, if ever, consulted about decisions that affected schools in their communities. Many parents became frustrated by their inability to influence decisions that affected their children or their school. Klein directed principals to hire a parent coordinator, but the coordinators worked for the principal, not for parents.

  The reorganization was a corporate model of tightly centralized, hierarchical, top-down control, with all decisions made at Tweed and strict supervision of every classroom to make sure the orders flowing from headquarters were precisely implemented. The general perception was that the mayor planned to run the school system like a business, with standard operating procedures across the system. Klein surrounded himself with noneducators, most of whom were lawyers, management consultants, and business school graduates. Many of the young aides to the chancellor were only a few years out of college or graduate school and had no experience in education but received six-figure salaries.9

  The Children First reforms were introduced into the public schools in the fall of 2003. The mandated pedagogy was soon immersed in controversy. Many teachers complained of micromanagement, since they had to follow the new directives about how to teach even if they had been successful with different methods. They resented their supervisors’ close scrutiny of bulletin boards in classrooms and hallways, as well as the requirement that elementary classrooms be equipped with a rug and a rocking chair, which were aspects of the Balanced Literacy approach.10

  Despite frequent references by the mayor and the chancellor to a citywide uniform curriculum, there was no uniform curriculum, except in mathematics. Minimal attention was paid to science, history, literature, geography, civics, the arts, or other subjects. Instead, Tweed mandated a citywide pedagogy, which imposed a rigid orthodoxy about how to teach. Eventually, in response to complaints from parents and civic groups about the lack of attention to non-tested subjects, the DOE developed a curriculum in science and in the arts, but the schools were held accountable only for test scores in reading and math.

  The first major controversy for the Bloomberg administration occurred because of its choice of reading program. When the DOE mandated Balanced Literacy as its single method of teaching reading, seven prominent reading researchers from local universities wrote a private letter to Klein, warning that he had made a mistake. They counseled that this method was unproven and unlikely to succeed, especially with the neediest children. He replied a week later by releasing a letter in support of his choice, signed by one hundred education professors; the lead signatory to the letter was Lucy Calkins, a professor at Teachers College who would later receive large contracts from the DOE to train thousands of teachers in her reading methods and the Teachers College “workshop model.”11

  At the mayor’s insistence, a school was opened on the ground floor of the Tweed Courthouse, the headquarters of the Department of Education. The mayor believed that having children in their midst would remind the administrators why they were there. The DOE spent $7.5 million to create classrooms in its building. Called City Hall Academy, the school was not large enough to be a real school. Instead, groups of about one hundred students rotated in for a two-week period to study the city and then return to their regular school.

  In the spring of 2006, the chancellor decided to reshuffle the school system yet again. The initial reorganization—with its ten tightly managed regions—included a pilot program for twenty-six schools (mostly small high schools)—called the “autonomy zone,” where the schools agreed to meet performance goals in exchange for a modicum of freedom from the system’s mandates. Now Klein invited additional principals to escape the micromanagement of the ten regions he had established and join this autonomy zone, which he renamed the “empowerment zone.�
� About a quarter, or 350, of the city’s schools applied, and 331 were admitted. This was a prelude to even bigger changes.

  A year later, in 2007, Klein launched another reorganization of the school system, the third in four years. He declared his earlier program of tight centralization a success, abolished the regions, and eliminated all direct supervision of the schools. Superintendents retained their titles but were not expected to visit schools unless directed to do so by the chancellor or in response to falling test scores. There was no public discussion or review of the sweeping changes in school governance. It was announced and done. To accomplish this reorganization, Klein relied on outside consultants, including Sir Michael Barber of England and the corporate restructuring firm of Alvarez & Marsal. Barber, who had been a key adviser to the government of Tony Blair in Britain, urged a strategy of top-down accountability, plus market reforms that included choice, competition, school autonomy, and incentives. Alvarez & Marsal had previously managed the troubled St. Louis public school system, collected a $5 million fee, and decamped not long before the system was declared a failure and taken over by the state of Missouri.

  In the new order, all principals would be “empowered” to take responsibility for their schools, which were part of a community district in name only. Every school would be “autonomous.” The principals were directed either to affiliate with an internal or external “support organization,” which would provide services to schools but not supervise them, or to join the empowerment zone, where no one would supervise them. Most principals chose to join support organizations led by experienced educators, while others joined with private agencies like New Visions for Public Schools or the City University of New York. Of course, the schools were not really autonomous, because Tweed still determined the examination schedule, still administered interim assessments, still controlled personnel policy, still issued detailed rules and regulations, still controlled admissions procedures, and still imposed mandates that affected daily life in every school. Moreover, after three intensive years of professional development devoted to the compulsory reading and mathematics programs of the first reorganization, few schools were willing or able to exercise autonomy on matters of curriculum and instruction.

  The major decisions of the school system that affected children’s lives were made at headquarters. For example, the DOE gave a $15.8 million no-bid contract for eighteen months to Alvarez & Marsal to devise cost-cutting measures. A&M executives rearranged the school system’s bus routes in January 2007, with disastrous consequences. Thousands of children were stranded without transportation to school during the coldest days of the year. Children as young as five were suddenly ineligible for school bus service and told to take a public bus; siblings were sent to different bus stops. The resulting confusion was not only a major embarrassment for the DOE, but one of the rare occasions when Tweed was criticized by the city’s tabloid press.12

  After the 2007 reorganization of the school system, no school-level supervision was needed, because the Department of Education intended to judge every school solely by its results—that is, whether it raised test scores. In 2003, Tweed thought it could get higher scores by micromanaging the schools. By 2007, administration officials decided they could get better results by replacing supervision with a tightly aligned accountability program of incentives and sanctions. At headquarters, new job titles proliferated, mimicking titles in the corporate sector. Instead of superintendents and deputy superintendents, there was a “chief accountability officer,” a “chief knowledge officer,” a “chief talent officer,” a “chief portfolio officer,” “senior achievement facilitators,” and other corporate-sounding titles; most high-level officials at the DOE were noneducators.13

  Large contracts were awarded to companies that specialized in test-preparation activities, such as Princeton Review and Kaplan Learning. Beginning in September each year, the elementary and middle schools dedicated large blocks of time to practice for the state tests that were administered in January and March. Once the tests were finished, there was time for other subjects, but it was difficult to maintain the same level of student motivation, because teachers and students knew the tests were the primary measures of their success or failure.

  Test scores in reading and mathematics became the be-all and end-all of public education in grades three through eight. Reading and mathematics were the only subjects that mattered, because they were the only subjects that counted for city, state, and federal accountability. In 2005, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) survey of science found that two-thirds of New York City’s eighth-grade students were “below basic,” the lowest possible ranking. Arts education suffered too. When the system was reorganized in 2007, Tweed eliminated a program that earmarked $67.5 million specifically for arts education, and the funds were released to the schools as discretionary. An official DOE survey of the arts in the schools in 2008 revealed that only 4 percent of the city’s elementary schools met the state’s requirements for arts education. By 2009, nearly a third of the schools had no arts teachers.14 Because accountability was restricted only to reading and mathematics, there was little reason for elementary and middle schools to pay much attention to subjects that did not count, such as the arts, physical education, science, history, and civics.

  The Bloomberg-Klein reforms were part of the national zeitgeist. They embodied the same ideas as the federal No Child Left Behind legislation. The principles behind them—test-based accountability and choice—were exactly the same. Children First was the New York City version of No Child Left Behind, in spirit and in practice. The basic idea shared by Mayor Bloomberg in New York City and the George W. Bush administration and Congress was that a relentless focus on testing and accountability would improve the schools. Schools that failed to produce higher scores would suffer increasingly severe sanctions, their principals might be fired, and the schools might be closed. After the passage of No Child Left Behind, President Bush saw the modest score gains on national tests as a major element in his legacy. Similarly, Mayor Bloomberg wanted to prove that his stewardship of the schools had produced dramatic results.

  Although I initially supported the mayor’s takeover of the schools, I was increasingly disturbed by the lack of any public forum to question executive decisions and by the elimination of all checks and balances on executive power. In the spring of 2004, I joined with Randi Weingarten, president of the New York City United Federation of Teachers, to write an opinion piece in the New York Times decrying the autocratic nature of the school system. We said that under this new system, the public had been left out of public education.15

  It is true that decisions can be made more quickly when only one person is in charge of the schools. The mayor and chancellor staunchly maintained that any attempt by the state legislature to erode the mayor’s total authority over the schools or to reestablish an independent board—especially one where members had fixed terms—would destroy mayoral control. Chancellor Klein told a legislative hearing, “If you have divided authority, what you have is no one in charge. An independent board would return this city to the politics of paralysis.”16 However, school reform without public oversight or review is contrary to basic democratic principles. In a democracy, every public agency is subject to scrutiny. Removing all checks and balances may promote speed, but it undermines the credibility and legitimacy of decisions, and it eliminates the kind of review that catches major mistakes before it is too late. While Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein are men of integrity, unchecked power in the wrong hands can facilitate corruption and malfeasance. Even officials of the highest integrity must be subject to checks and balances to ensure that they listen to those they serve.

  The need for checks and balances surely occurred to the state legislature when it changed the legislation in 2002, because it preserved a board of education in the law, giving the mayor the power to appoint eight of its thirteen members, while the borough presidents appointed the other five. Mayor Bloombe
rg treated the board as an advisory group whose advice he never sought. The old Board of Education had been a powerful body, with the power to hire the chancellor, to veto his decisions, and to fire him. But the new Panel for Educational Policy was a rubber stamp for the mayor and chancellor.

  Only on one occasion, in March 2004, did the panel presume to disagree with the mayor, over the issue of social promotion, the practice of promoting children to the next grade even if they have not mastered the skills and knowledge that they need to succeed in the next grade. When the mayor wanted to end social promotion in third grade, some members of the panel expressed their concern about the hasty adoption of this policy and the lack of planning to help children who were retained; on the day of the vote, the mayor fired two of his appointees and engineered the dismissal of a third, guaranteeing passage of his proposal. The media called that evening the “Monday Night Massacre.” After the meeting, Bloomberg defended his actions. He said, “Mayoral control means mayoral control, thank you very much. They are my representatives, and they are going to vote for things that I believe in.” The members of the panel appointed by the mayor never again objected to any mayoral priority.17

  Over the next few years, the DOE ended social promotion not only in grade three, but also in grades five, seven, and eight, and eventually in all grades. However, the number of children actually left back under the new retention policy didn’t change from what was customary in the past. Surprisingly, even fewer students were retained than in the past. A 2009 study of the city’s small high schools by Clara Hemphill and Kim Nauer reported that “a huge proportion of students arrive in ninth grade with the skills that are two, three or even four years below grade level,” an observation that raises questions about whether social promotion ever really ended.18