The Death and Life of the Great American School System

by Diane Ravitch

  As it happened, the city’s policy of ending social promotion converged with the state’s unannounced decision to make it easier for students to reach level 2 on state tests between 2006 and 2009. The city used the results of the state tests to determine which students should be held back; any student scoring at level 1, the very bottom, was supposed to be retained. The state began annual testing of grades three through eight in 2006 (previously it had tested only grades four and eight).

  In 2006, significant numbers of New York City students scored at level 1 and were subject to retention. By 2009, very few students were at level 1. The number of students at level 1 dropped so low that level 1 could hardly be considered a performance level. In 2006, 70,090 students in grades three through eight were at level 1 in mathematics; by 2009, that number had fallen to 14,305. In reading, the number of level 1 students fell from 46,085 to 11,755. In seventh-grade math, 18.8 percent were at level 1 in 2006, but by 2009, only 2.1 percent were. In sixth-grade reading, 10.1 percent were at level 1 in 2006, but by 2009, only 0.2 percent were.19

  Why did the number of students at level 1 plummet? Because the state lowered the bar and made it easier for students to reach level 2. On the sixth-grade reading test in 2006, students needed to earn 41 percent of the points to attain level 2; by 2009, students in that grade needed only 17.9 percent. In seventh-grade math, students needed to earn 36.2 percent of the points on the test to advance to level 2 in 2006, but by 2009, they needed to earn only 22 percent. The standards to advance from level 1 to level 2 dropped so low that many students could get enough correct answers to pass to level 2 by randomly guessing.20

  So, while public declarations about ending social promotion sounded good in theory, in practice there was no change from before. Thanks to the state’s lowering of standards on its tests, it became easier for students to earn the score necessary to escape level 1. In the meantime, parents grew angry because their concerns were ignored. The “Monday Night Massacre”—when social promotion was allegedly ended—spurred a parent rebellion against the mayor and the chancellor. Parents realized that there was no public forum in which their views would be heard or heeded.

  Parent activists regularly expressed their frustration on the New York City Public School Parents’blog.21 There, parents complained about overcrowding, large classes, the expansion of charter schools into public school facilities, the excessive time devoted to testing, profligate spending by Tweed, no-bid contracts, and changes in the policies governing the admission of children to kindergarten, gifted programs, middle schools, and high schools. Parent groups such as Class Size Matters, the Chancellor’s Parent Advisory Council, the Coalition for Educational Justice, the Campaign for Better Schools, and community education councils (which were composed of parent leaders) wanted a greater voice in how the schools were run. But no one was listening.

  When mayoral control of the schools was set to expire in 2009, it was parent groups that were most vociferous in seeking limits on the mayor’s power to control the schools. But the mayor lined up overwhelming political support for continuing his control of the public schools, financed in part by millions of dollars from the Gates Foundation and the Broad Foundation.22 The only group that might have stymied his goal was the United Federation of Teachers. More than 80 percent of its membership expressed strong disapproval of the mayor’s and chancellor’s approach in a poll taken in June 2008. But the union leadership was grateful to the mayor, because he had awarded the teachers a 43 percent salary increase and a generous boost to their pensions. Randi Weingarten, the union’s president, endorsed continuation of mayoral control. Despite the protests of parent groups and objections by state senators largely from minority communities, the state legislature renewed the mayor’s grant of power in 2009.23

  THE ORIGINAL ANNOUNCEMENT of the Children First agenda made only a passing reference to charter schools, but they emerged as one of the administration’s signature initiatives. Charter schools are privately managed but receive public funding. Previous leaders of the school system had opposed charter schools, believing that they would drain away students and money from the regular public schools. The city had only a few of them when Klein took office. He energetically authorized new charter schools, and within a few years, the DOE reached the state-legislated cap of fifty charter schools. In 2007, Mayor Bloomberg persuaded the legislature and newly elected Governor Eliot Spitzer to permit New York City to open an additional fifty charter schools. During his reelection campaign in 2009, he promised to open another one hundred new charter schools, so that by 2013, 100,000 students would be in charters.

  Once Tweed embraced charter schools, they received priority treatment. The chancellor placed many charter schools into regular public school buildings, taking classrooms and facilities away from the host schools and igniting bitter fights with the regular schools’ parent associations. In 2006, when Courtney Sale Ross, widow of Steve Ross, chairman of Time Warner, proposed to open a charter school, the DOE offered her space in a successful public school for gifted children on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, called NEST+M (New Explorations in Science, Technology, and Mathematics). However, the school’s parent association led a noisy public fight against inserting the Ross Global Charter Academy into its building. Eventually Chancellor Klein abandoned his efforts to put the charter school into the NEST+M building. Instead, he ousted the celebrated City Hall Academy from the basement of Tweed, relocated it to Harlem, and gave the coveted space to Courtney Sale Ross’s charter school. City Hall Academy was quietly closed in 2007, and the Ross Global Charter Academy eventually moved to larger quarters.24

  Klein frequently celebrated the successes of charter schools, appeared at their celebrations to praise them, and hailed them as superior to the regular public schools over which he presided. In announcing the authorization of additional charter schools in 2009, Klein said, “Charter school students’ achievements are proof that all students can succeed given the right opportunity. I am thrilled that these additional charter schools will enable even more families to choose the rigorous education that these schools provide.”25 He did not consider his comments to be a negative reflection on his stewardship of the regular public schools, whose test scores did not match those of the charters. Compared to regular public schools, the charter schools typically had smaller classes and more resources, especially if they had philanthropic sponsors.

  Most charter schools were located in low-income neighborhoods, and their students were chosen by lottery. Critics complained that they were “enrolling only the best students and ignoring disadvantaged populations,” since only the most motivated students were likely to apply for admission to a charter school. A state-funded group that advocates for the rights of homeless students complained that homeless families were shut out of charter schools, because they had difficulty meeting the deadlines and following through with the application process. Of 51,316 public school students in the city who were homeless, only 111 were enrolled in charter schools. In one impoverished neighborhood, where there were nine homeless shelters, the Achievement First East New York Charter School did not enroll a single homeless student.26

  Another strategy the DOE enthusiastically embraced was small high schools. When the DOE was established, the system had about one hundred large high schools, some with enrollments as large as 3,000 to 5,000 students. It also had about seventy-five small high schools that had been created during the 1990s as part of the progressive small-school movement led by innovative educator Deborah Meier. Many of the large high schools boasted historic traditions as portals for immigrant children. They enrolled significant numbers of students who spoke little or no English and came from impoverished circumstances. Many of these high schools were extremely low-functioning, and in the era of high expectations, they were notable mainly for overcrowding, large class sizes, poor attendance rates, and low graduation rates, as well as their deteriorated physical condition. It was not clear whether their low performance was due to the
ir size, the learning problems of their students, the extreme poverty of the families they served, their instructional programs, their leadership, or neglect by central authorities.

  Within the space of a few years, Chancellor Klein had closed nearly two dozen of the city’s large high schools and opened two hundred new small high schools, funded by hundreds of millions of dollars from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation, and the Open Society Institute. By 2009, these schools enrolled about 25 percent of the city’s high school pupils. The DOE reported that graduation rates and attendance rates were higher in these schools than in the large high schools they replaced. However, the new small high schools were permitted in their first two years to admit smaller proportions of special education students and English-language learners, as compared to large high schools; this contributed to their improved outcomes.27

  The Department of Education clearly favored the small high schools it had created, and looked on the large high schools as relics. As small schools multiplied, the large high schools became more overcrowded and enrolled disproportionate shares of students with high needs. The more the large high schools struggled, the more they became candidates for closure. In 2009, the study by Hemphill and Nauer found that the small high schools eventually enrolled “roughly the same proportion of students” who were at risk of dropping out as other high schools; after a few years of operation, as their student population came to resemble those in other schools, their initially stellar attendance rates and graduation rates declined. The small schools, the authors said, experienced high teacher turnover and principal turnover—in some schools, nearly half the teachers quit in a one-year period, as did nearly half the 124 principals hired for the first group of small high schools. As compared to students in the large high schools, students in the small high schools were far more likely to receive a local diploma (which represents the bare minimum of state requirements) than a Regents diploma (which requires the student to pass five state examinations).

  The small high schools, said Hemphill and Nauer, have strengths but also “significant limitations,” including their inability to provide special education services, support for English-language learners, an array of courses in music and the arts, extracurricular and sports programs, advanced courses, and vocational programs. Nor did choice serve all children well. The authors noted that many thirteen-year-olds might lack the “good judgment or activist parents” to make wise decisions, and school officials routinely rejected requests to transfer once a choice was made. Hemphill and Nauer pointed out that “the gains for students at the small schools came at the expense of other students, some of whom were even needier than those who attended the new small schools.” The authors concluded that “the small high schools are no panacea,” and “school choice, by itself, won’t improve schools.”28

  A typical student entering ninth grade could choose from about one hundred high schools in his or her borough. Citywide, he could choose from more than four hundred high schools. Most of the new small schools were theme schools, centered on a specific profession or specialty. This produced some offbeat results, such as a high school for future firefighters; a school for the hospitality industry; a school for urban planners; a school for architecture; a school for the business of sports; a school for the violin; several schools for social justice, peace, and diversity; and other schools for the health professions, writers, leaders, the arts, law, technology, communications, journalism, and media. Adults like the idea of themes, but few children starting ninth grade are prepared to select a profession or career specialty.

  As it elevated the concept of school choice, the Department of Education destroyed the concept of neighborhood high schools. Getting into the high school of one’s choice became as stressful as getting into the college of one’s choice. Should students apply to the school for peace and justice or the school for law or the school for stagecraft? Students were expected to list their top twelve preferences. Most got into one of the twelve, but thousands got into none at all. Neighborhoods were once knitted together by a familiar local high school that served all the children of the community, a school with distinctive traditions and teams and history. After the neighborhood high school closed, children scattered across the city in response to the lure of new, unknown small schools with catchy names or were assigned to schools far from home. Hemphill and Nauer found that some students traveled up to ninety minutes to get to school each day. At Harry S. Truman High School, which is part of the nation’s largest residential development—Co-op City in the Bronx—with 55,000 residents, only 5 percent of its students live in Co-op City; 45 percent of its freshmen commute more than forty-five minutes to get there.29

  Meanwhile, a sad story was acted out in one high school after another. As a high school for 3,000 students was closed down, it would be replaced by four or five small schools for 500 students. What happened to the missing students? Invariably, they were the lowest-performing, least motivated students, who were somehow passed over by the new schools, who did not want kids like them to depress the school’s all-important scores. These troublesome students were relegated to another large high school, where their enrollment instigated a spiral of failure, dissolution, and closing. The DOE set into motion a process that acted like a computer virus in the large high schools. As each one closed, its least desirable students were shunted off into yet another large high school, starting a death watch for the receiving school.30

  After the DOE turned to autonomy and choice as its main initiatives, it lost interest in the instructional reforms of 2003. The unifying idea of the new reform agenda was accountability. The DOE introduced a program of rating and evaluating every school. It surveyed parents, teachers, and students about their satisfaction with their school and their principal. The surveys usually revealed high levels of satisfaction because everyone knew the ratings would affect their school’s grade, its status, its potential bonuses, even its survival. The DOE hired a group of British educators to perform quality reviews of every school, but these reviews did not count in the school’s grade. Soon, everyone was rating and grading and evaluating everyone else, but little attention was given to helping schools do a better job. The bottom line of accountability was rewards (for higher scores) and sanctions (for not getting higher scores). The DOE offered incentives to improve test scores: There were bonuses for principals and teachers if their school’s scores went up, and there was even a pilot program to pay students to raise their test scores.

  In 2007, the mayor negotiated an agreement with the United Federation of Teachers to award schoolwide bonuses to teachers in about two hundred schools if their school’s scores went up; he called it “merit pay,” but the union insisted it was not. Merit pay, said the union, set teacher against teacher in a competition for dollars. In a merit pay school, Ms. Smith might earn more than Mr. Jones in the classroom next door. But in the schoolwide bonus plan, a committee at each school decided how to divide the bonus among all union members on the staff, including non-teaching personnel, and all might receive exactly the same stipend, if the school committee so chose. Or the committee might award bonuses to all the teachers or only to those teachers whose test scores were higher. The schoolwide bonus plan was not quite merit pay, but it was a significant step in that direction. It ensured that teachers would concentrate their attention on those all-important scores in reading and mathematics. In exchange for agreeing to the bonus plan, the union won a generous enhancement of teacher pensions, allowing teachers to retire five years earlier than before, at the age of fifty-five with twenty-five years of service. Prior to this agreement, teachers hired after 1973 had to work thirty years or wait until they were sixty-two to retire with full pension.31

  The accountability movement entered a new phase in the fall of 2007, when the DOE revealed what it called progress reports for each school. Each school received a single letter grade, from A to F. This approach mirrored the grading system introduced in Florida by then-governor Jeb
Bush a few years earlier. Most of each school’s grade was based on year-to-year changes in standardized test scores (its “progress”), as compared to a group of schools that were demographically similar; if a school’s scores went up, it was likely to win an A or B. If they remained flat or slipped, the school was almost certain to get a C, D, or F.

  Some excellent schools, known for their sense of community and consistently high scores, received an F because their scores dipped a few points. Some very low-performing schools, even some schools the State Education Department ranked as persistently dangerous, received an A because they showed some improvement.

  To add to the confusion, the city’s grades were inconsistent with the ratings issued by the State Education Department in accordance with No Child Left Behind. If schools failed to meet their adequate yearly progress goals under the federal NCLB law, they were called SINI schools, or “schools in need of improvement.” If schools consistently performed poorly, the state called them SURR schools, or “schools under registration review.” In the first year that school grades were issued, the city awarded an A or B to about half of the 350 schools the state said were SINI or SURR. More than half of the fifty schools that received an F from the city were in good standing with the state and the federal law. The next year, 89 percent of the F schools were in good standing according to NCLB standards, as were 48 percent of D schools.32