TJC on Randi and Bloomie Term Limits

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Canarsie HS Teacher to NYC City Council

A copy of the letter Ms. Liebowitz sent to the City Council as written testimony. Doug

---------- Forwarded Message ----------
My name is Adele Leibowitz. I have been teaching for almost 31 years. I started my career at Tilden High School in 1973 , then Lafayette High School and now have been teaching at Canarsie High School since 1984. I started the Nurse Assistant Program at Canarsie High School in 1989. I feel that Mayor Bloomberg should not run for a third term and should not have total control of the NYC School System.

Mayoral control of the New York City School system has not allowed any teacher or parent input into the school system. This total control demonstrates that the teachers educational training and experience has no value or importance.As a teacher for so many years I find this unacceptable. The veteran teacher now is not respected by the school system. This manner of running the school system must be changed. There are no checks and balances to counter act any decisions made by the DOE.

I am teaching at Canarsie High School which has been directed by the DOE to phase out and close by 2011. Due to the mismanagement of the DOE the school has been under the leadership of many Principals sent to us by the DOE. Presently we have just been assigned a ninth principal. We the teachers have no say who will be the principal of the school. We have also been sent students who are ill prepared to enter because they are below level in reading , writing and mathematics. Yet the teachers are blamed for the poor regents grades and low graduation rates. We the teachers are also blamed for the poor school environment which is out of our control since we have no say in security agents assigned and the discipline code that is set up by the DOE.

I see a double edged sword that we the teachers have been given to deal with. The DOE takes no responsibility for students and principals sent to the school. Yet the teachers are blamed for all. The faculty of the school has no way to address these problems regarding how the school is run or receiving low level students. The principals we are sent just follow the directives of TWEED because they know if they do not to they will be removed form running the school.

There is no way the teachers can go through a chain of command through the DOE because since mayoral control there is no CHAIN OF COMMAND. What ever is deemed by Joel Klein that is what is expected to be done by principals and teachers. Superintendents today have not power any more. Superintendents cannot make any changes regarding student placement or staff. Even the parents have no one to go and complain if they are not satisfied with what is going on in a school when they feel the principal cannot resolve an issue at hand.

Joel Klein was chosen by the mayor to run this vast educational system in New York City. Joel Klein does not have the educational credentials/certification in education. He really does not have any classroom teaching experience yet he was given the job.It is as if an intern was sent in to perform brain surgery without any training or experience.

Joel Klein under the approval of the mayor has hired many high salaried consultants from other countries to evaluate our school. These consultants come in and spend a few days to determine if we the teachers are doing our jobs. They make decisions without even talking to the faculty or parents of the students. They do not understand the type of students that enter by evaluating their past academic performance before entering high school and how they progressed since attending high school. They do not evaluate the many problems the students have while attending high school. We have many students who do not live with their parents but relatives , or they live in group home or shelters.The quality review teams are not interested in what the faculty feels is needed to improve student performance. Instead of trying to help improve the school they are there to help dismantle the school.

The way the school is evaluated by a Report Card is vague at most. It stated in the Report Card that the following were used to grade the school: parents(who are these parents?), Learning Support Organizations( teachers never met any of the members or spoke to them in the school so how can they evaluate us?)and student parent questionnaire( few parents answered the questionnaire ) Yet under the leadership of Joel Klein and condoned by Mayor Bloomberg the school is given a Report Card grade. If this method was used to evaluate city hall I think they would fail also.

Yet all the money spent by the DOE and approved by Mayor Bloomberg continues and no one is allowed to say anything against the way the DOE is administered. To me this does not demonstrate accountability of one person, it displays tyrannical control by one person. One is not allowed to question orders in fear of retaliation or removal.

Now that Canarsie High School is phasing out many teachers have put into ATR status. These teachers have been excessed from their positions at Canarsie High School. Many of the teachers and guidance counselors who are in ATR status(Absent Teacher in Reserve) have not been able to find jobs in the open market hiring systems due to the fact that they are veteran teachers. Budgets issued principals cannot afford to hire a veteran teacher/guidance counselor. Now many of these teachers/guidance counselors with satisfactory records are now deemed unfit by Joel Klein. He feels if they are not hired no one wants to hire them. This is a set up by the DOE to force out veteran teachers/guidance counselors. The DOE prefers to hire new teachers who cost the city so much less on the salary scale. How does this leadership by the mayor help our students?

We at Canarsie High School have already experienced the unfairness of the mini schools versus the phasing out school. The mini schools at the Canarsie High School Campus have been given more money to set up their schools than Canarsie High School has seen in the last 15 years. The disparity of this has made not only the faculty upset but the students upset at Canarsie High School. We the students and teachers have no one to complain to, since the DOE has made its decision.

I will be in ATR status once Canarsie High School Closes. I am NYS Certified to Teach Nurse Assistant and have a NYC License to teach Nursing. I have been teaching and coordinating the Nurse Assistant Program at Canarsie High School since 1989. Due to the phasing out of schools the only schools that have a Nurse Assistant Program in Brooklyn are Clara Barton High School , Sheepshead Bay High School in Brooklyn. None of the mini schools now in NYC have a current active Nurse Assistant Program. The mini schools are theme schools and do not follow the CTE(Career and Technical Education Curriculum set by the NYS/SED. Now will I be considered to be an unfit teacher by Joel Klein if the principals of those schools with Nurse Assistant Programs cannot afford to hire a veteran teacher such as myself? I have an excellent record as a teacher and NYS Registered Professional Nurse that I am proud of.

Term limits was put into place to prevent one person from obtaining to much power. I am a citizen of NYC and feel that two terms are more than enough time for a person to be in office. Let the democratic process work and give other well qualified individuals a chance to campaign and be elected by the citizens of NYC. One person should not be continuously in power because then a democracy is replaced by tyranny and anarchy. Michael Bloomberg has had his time in the spot light, give others a chance to lead with fresher and better ideas.

Adele Leibowitz RN
Nurse Assistant Teacher
Canarsie High School

On a Third Term for Bloomberg

JW posted to ICE-mail:

LeRoy Barr's chapter leader's weekly said an email address has been set up for giving your opinions on NO THIRD TERM : myviews@uft.org.

Not that I believe for one minute that Weingarten and Co. care a fig about what the membership thinks, the whole thing is so disingenuous.

But since I recently had to answer my son's serious question about 3rd term (he's a freelancer, not a unionist), I had already researched and written up an answer for him, so sent more or less the same thing in to the MyViewssite.

Since I hate throwing research away, I'll post it here as well.

JW

PS: I seemed to have convinced him off his original position. Yeah!

==========================================================

My son asked me:

"Can you give me some reasons to not have Bloomberg in there again? You must have a litany of educational woes, but for the most part I've been happy with him...and now in the midst of this financial crisis he seems like an good person to have in there. I welcome the opportunity to be convinced, but at this point I don't have much of a problem with Bloomberg."


And I wrote back this answer:

1. The people voted 3-term limits out TWICE before, in two different referendums in the 1990s. He has been AGAINST extending til now:

In April 2008, quoted in the Daily News: "The mayor believes in term limits, and is going to leave office at the end of this term,"spokesman Stu Loeser said emphatically Sunday.
It has been reported that Bloomberg himself called extending term limits "disgusting."
According to Room Eight: "The present two-term limit law could be permanently abolished off the law books and constituents will have no say in this matter. "

2. Billionaires can buy segments of the public, and mostly these are voters. They have the hard cash to skew popularity, accountability, and data to make it "seem" as if they are doing good work. They hire firms to create this image, they can use hidden gifts even from their own pockets that we'll never know about it.

According to Room Eight: Ron Lauder, cosmetics mogul and billionaire is "a stark proponent for term limits in 1993 and founder of New Yorkers for Term Limits. He led his support to keep term limits in place but now he wants an exception for his fellow billionaire boys club member, Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Lauder feels the mayor has done an extraordinary job as mayor, so he wants to support a one-time extension that will keep the mayor at the helm of his City Hall seat."

And from an article in the Times:
"There was a palpable sense of resentment over the way Mr. Bloomberg negotiated his decision to run for a third term and the strategy he would employ to change the term limits law, which was twice affirmed by voters, in 1993 and 1996. Over the past few months, the mayor worked in private, reaching out to fellow billionaires and shoring up support for his bid among the publishers of the city's three largest newspapers, all of which ran editorials endorsing his decision.
"'The media and business elite in New York seem to not be willing to hear the voices of regular people,'" Mr. Cantor [Working Parties] said, accusing the publishers — Mortimer B. Zuckerman, of The DailyNews; Rupert Murdoch, of the New York Post; and Arthur Sulzberger Jr., of The New York Times – of trying to create "a 21st century Tammany Hall."
"Today we are saying no and encouraging all New Yorkers who believe that democracy belongs to them to log, to stand up and to be counted," Mr. Cantor said.


4. Many people think that Bloomberg has not been able to push through his entire corporate agenda yet, more than just education. They are asking for a one-time term limit extension: They want Bloomberg to have this chance to re-stack govt, then close the door so no one else can do the same thing after him.


5. THEY LIE. He doesn't have to do this through the City Council.

Fromwww.chron.com: "He has said voters should have the final say but that it is too late for a referendum this year. But it's not too late for other measures, as critics have pointed out, including a special election solely on this issue, which could be held early next year. .. . under the city's term limits law — which he had previously strongly defended — he is limited to two terms. He told reporters that handling the financial crisis facing the country and the city, while strengthening essential services, is "a challenge I want to take on for the people of New York."

IMPORTANTLY: " it should be noted that two-thirds of the ponderers [of the City Council who will vote on this] — 34 of the 51 total — will also be forced out next year under the existing law. Bloomberg's ambition to guide the city through another term puts them in an awkward situation: They too will stand to benefit, along with the mayor, from taking this momentous decision out of voters' hands."

From Working Families:
When asked what political party he would align himself with — upon the unveiling of his master plan to install himself for a third term — Bloomberg stated,"This is not about politics." Right. (It's very much about the politics of the Mayor's ego and believing he can operate outside the so-called rules. Don't ya think?)

Good quote from Dan Cantor, head of WFP: "This is not necessarily about where you stand on term limits or whether or not you think that Mike Bloomberg has been a good mayor. This about the rules of the game. And you don't get to change them at the end of the fourth quarter just because your team wants to keep playing."


I added this a few minutes later :

You have to look at this as a major effort in social engineering and "disaster capitalism".

Naomi Klein: SHOCK DOCTRINE. The neo-corporate agenda is to wait til major crisis (Katrina, Iraq War for the Iraqis, this financial crisis),then use large amounts of scare tactics -- real as well as fabricated and enhanced -- and go GREAT GUNS INTO it and scoop up whatever you can in the aftermath: real estate, banks, credit agencies. And change laws, change the way government does things.

So, the financial markets CRASH, and now this billionaire changes his long-standing position supporting 2-term limits. He's making a power grab and a financial grab. No bones about it. For himself and for his cronies and his whole class of rich people.


My son wrote back that what convinced him was the line:
"This is about the rules of the game. And you don't get to change them at the end of the fourth quarter just because your team wants to keep playing."

The Phony War by Andrew Wolf

The Phony War
By ANDREW WOLF
May 30, 2008
http://www.nysun.com/opinion/the-phoney-war/78937/

The specific issue in New York City's public schools that has caused the
most recent brouhaha is how much we spend on teaching our students. In this
dust-up, all parties manage to come out on the wrong side.
Expenditures for education already have risen to more than $20 billion a
year from $12.5 billion six years ago, without any objective indicator that
would suggest that we are on the path to success.
There was a time when the mayor himself would criticize the $12.5 billion
figure, asking not for more money, but questioning why such a huge
expenditure didn't yield satisfactory results. While campaigning to be given
control of the schools back in 2002, Mr. Bloomberg suggested that
business-like management combined with a "back-to-basics" curriculum would
tame the perceived chaos in our schools.
This is the kind of talk that drew many of us, myself included, to support
mayoral control. But once assuming control, Mr. Bloomberg's initial precepts
were abandoned, and the mayor joined in supporting the Campaign for Fiscal
Equity lawsuit, apparently convinced that with just a few billion more, all
would be right.
By that time, the lawsuit had morphed from one that questioned whether the
formula by which state money earmarked for schools was apportioned was fair
to the city to one that asked whether enough money was being spent to
provide a "sound, basic education," a phrase that means something different
to anyone you ask. Considering that the Empire State already boasted the
highest per capita spending in the nation, a new definition of just how much
is enough was sure to emerge.
The case concluded with agreements on future levels of spending, with the
mayor and chancellor willing participants in the process. That was before
the mortgage crisis, $4 gasoline, and the souring of the local economy. Now
the mayor is reaping what he sowed. He played the CFE money game, and is
still finding himself allegedly short of money.
The department of education has come up with a plan that proposes the
deepest cuts to the schools that do the best. These schools
disproportionately serve middle class and politically active segments of the
population, who, the mayor thought, would reliably line up behind him. It
didn't work out that way.
This came to a head on Tuesday when the chancellor appeared before the
Council's education committee, and was flayed for "breaking his word" on
school spending. With a well-orchestrated "Keep the Promises" press campaign
financed by the unions hitting the airwaves, and a membership eager to end
the headlines over their own spending scandals, the committee members
eagerly eviscerated the hapless chancellor.
Mr. Klein has a point in wanting to restore control over his own budget. But
he willingly participated in the process by which that control was
compromised. He is right in wanting to insulate successful schools serving
the middle class from disproportionate pain, but didn't seem so concerned
about these schools when he proposed his "fair school funding" plan that
calls for cuts in many of them far deeper than anything now on the table.
Fair school funding was deferred as part of an agreement with the United
Federation of Teachers last year, and the upcoming budget will be the last
one in which these besieged schools will be "held harmless" from the
Draconian cuts previously proposed. Is the chancellor now willing to back
off, permanently, from the ill-conceived fair school funding plan, or is the
newly found concern for the middle class schools nothing more than a short
term ploy to win political support for a larger agenda?
In Tuesday's hearing everyone offered different figures as to the extent of
the cuts and even the amount of the education budget itself. There is plenty
that can be cut in the city's education budget - too many high priced
administrators at the Tweed Courthouse, a bloated public relations operation
spending more than 10 times as much as the old Board of Education spent on
spin control, too many no-bid contracts, hiring pricey British evaluation
teams to "rate" schools (not to mention their hotel bills), and on and on.
What we need is full budgetary transparency, encourage competitive bidding
on contracts and public debate on the necessity of those contracts, and a
full understanding that merely throwing money at the education system does
not translate into results - the one thing that the experiment in mayoral
control has proven beyond any doubt.
awolf@nysun.awo

Sol Stern - Grading Mayoral Control

Commentary will follow on ednotesonline.

Grading Mayoral Control
Lauded in the press, Bloomberg’s education reforms are proving more spin than substance. Parents are losing patience.

Sol Stern
Summer 2007

http://www.city-journal.org/html/17_3_mayoral_control.html

Mayoral control, the hot new trend in urban school reform, began in Boston and Chicago in the 1990s. Now it’s the New York City school system, under the authority of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, that’s become the beacon for education-mayor wannabes like Adrian Fenty of Washington, D.C., and Antonio Villaraigosa of Los Angeles. Influential philanthropic foundations, such as the Los Angeles–based Broad Foundation (headed by Bloomberg friend and fellow billionaire Eli Broad) and the Gates Foundation, are investing in Bloomberg as the model big-city mayor who uses his new executive powers over the schools to advance a daring reform agenda. Meanwhile, the national media’s positive coverage of mayoral control in Gotham is adding to the luster of a possible Bloomberg presidential run.

For New Yorkers, though, the original appeal of mayoral control was entirely parochial. The old Board of Education—with seven members, appointed by six elected city officials—offered a case study of the paralysis that sets in when fragmented political authority tries to direct a dysfunctional bureaucracy. New Yorkers arrived at a consensus that there was not much hope of lifting student achievement substantially under such a regime. The newly elected Bloomberg made an offer that they couldn’t refuse: Give me the authority to improve the schools, and then hold me accountable for the results.

So on June 12, 2002, Bloomberg appeared at the mayoral-control bill-signing ceremony alongside Governor George Pataki. The bill would “give the school system the one thing it fundamentally needs: accountability,” said Bloomberg. The new governance system won enthusiastic support across the political spectrum, from conservative think tanks to the New York Times and the United Federation of Teachers (UFT), whose members got a huge pay raise.

Just five years later, that consensus has fractured. Some state legislators representing the city, including influential Assembly education-committee chair Catherine Nolan, promise a tough review process when reauthorization of mayoral control comes up in 2008. There’s also a significant demographic divide on the benefits of the reform. Business leaders, editorial boards, and many education experts remain enthusiastic. Constituents at the grass roots, however, feel increasingly frustrated. More than two dozen parent groups and district education councils have passed resolutions opposing Schools Chancellor Joel Klein’s latest school reorganization plans. According to the Quinnipiac poll of city residents, Klein’s favorability rating has fallen to just 37 percent, and a majority of New Yorkers want something like an independent board of education or a commission with oversight powers.

Stirring public unease is the realization that what Bloomberg really meant by accountability was one election, one time. If you didn’t like the way that mayoral control was working under Bloomberg, you could vote for Democrat Freddy Ferrer in the 2005 mayoral election (Bloomberg’s last, because of term limits). But what could you do after that election? Bloomberg’s suggestion: “Boo me at parades.”

The arrogance of that response demonstrates how little Bloomberg really seems to care about accountability. In fact, his Department of Education routinely undermines accountability with a public-relations juggernaut that deflects legitimate criticism of his education policies, dominates the mainstream press, uses the schools as campaign props, and, most ominously, distorts student test-score data. Without transparency, real accountability doesn’t exist.

Admittedly, any mayor taking over the city’s dysfunctional school system would need an effective information campaign to win public support for the wrenching changes necessary. But Bloomberg also wants to conquer new political frontiers. If he does run for president, it will be partly on his education record.

That ambition has driven the administration’s media operations on education. It’s why the Department of Education’s communications office is 29-strong, four times as many employees as worked in the press office under the old Board of Ed. And that doesn’t include the city hall press operation, which often joins in promoting new education initiatives, or the substantial public-relations and marketing services that the administration has received from companies, either pro bono or paid for by third-party private contributions.

Recently, for example, the Fund for Public Schools—ostensibly an independent, not-for-profit organization that raises private money for the schools—launched a two-month ad campaign bolstering administration claims that reading and math scores were rising and calling on New Yorkers to “help keep the progress going.” The full-page ad that ran in the New York Times on June 7 didn’t mention, though, that Klein was the fund’s chairman or that the mayor’s friends, including the Broad Foundation, had helped pay the $1 million cost of the ad campaign.

Such media spin has become so commonplace that it’s producing a backlash among New Yorkers who might otherwise be on the mayor’s side, such as David Bloomfield, president of the citywide education council for high schools and a Brooklyn College professor who trains future public school principals. (He’s also the author of a Manhattan Institute study advocating charter school legislation.) An early mayoral-control enthusiast, Bloomfield was recently asked by an education department official to make suggestions for redesigning the department’s website. His response: “The website should be transformed from a mayoral campaign vehicle to something really useful to parents and other members of the public. . . . Instead it’s all buttercups-and-roses, smoke and mirrors. Why is there never any bad news? Just press releases on the home page taking credit for the sun rising. . . . The website is a perfect example of what makes everyone so mad about the way the Mayor has handled the schools: data manipulation, grandiose claims, and almost no way to find out that a third (or is it more?) of our schools are failing under No Child Left Behind.”

The most notorious case of Bloomberg’s data manipulation occurred during the 2005 mayoral race. In May of that year, city hall bused education reporters to P.S. 33, a poor, predominantly minority school in the Bronx, where Bloomberg congratulated the children, their teachers, and Principal Elba Lopez on a miracle: 83 percent of the school’s fourth-graders scored at grade level on the 2005 reading test, compared with only 35.8 percent the previous year—an unheard-of one-year gain of close to 50 percentage points. The school’s score was just 4 percentage points below the average for the state’s richest suburban districts. Further, the mayor announced, the percentage of the city’s fourth-graders passing the state’s reading test had risen by a “record-breaking” 10 points in just one year.

If Bloomberg had really introduced accountability into the city’s education system, the implausible P.S. 33 scores would have raised red flags at the education department and perhaps even prompted a fraud referral to the city’s Special Commissioner of Investigations. Instead, the mayor got the political boost that he sought, with front-page headlines hailing the “historic” gains. Almost no commentary pointed out that fourth-grade reading scores rose by almost 10 percentage points in the rest of the state, too, suggesting that the 2005 test might have been easier than the previous year’s.

The “miracle” eventually unraveled, but only after Bloomberg’s reelection. When the 2006 scores arrived, they showed that the P.S. 33 fourth-graders, now fifth-graders, had plummeted back to a pass rate of 41 percent on their reading tests. Principal Lopez, meantime, had retired, with a pensionable $15,000 bonus for her school’s 2005 scores. After I published an article about the suspicious scores in the Autumn 2006 City Journal, and after Andrew Wolf published another one in the New York Sun, the DOE launched an internal investigation. Last December, Klein concluded that enough evidence of possible fraud existed to ask DOE counsel Michael Best to make a referral to the city’s Special Commissioner of Investigations. But the counsel’s office somehow forgot to do it, according to DOE press secretary David Cantor. The referral was finally made, but only after another inquiry by Wolf in early June.

Fred Smith, a former Board of Education statistical analyst, further discredited the 2005 reading scores in the Sun. Using information obtained from a Freedom of Information request, Smith concluded that 4 percentage points of the citywide 10-point test-score rise resulted from the DOE’s exclusion of 2,170 students who spoke another language at home, and of another 3,000 students with reading difficulties who had been held back in third grade because of the administration’s (salutary) new policy of ending social promotion. As Smith concluded, “Much of 2005’s publicized record-setting increases were a phantom—a case of addition by subtraction.”

But the DOE never looks back and never concedes error. In fact, Klein and his deputies now compound the previous distortions by boasting that on their watch, there has been an overall rise of 12 percentage points in the number of students passing the state’s fourth-grade reading test. Even if true, it would be only a modest breakthrough, an average yearly increase of 2.5 percentage points. But it isn’t true. The only way that the DOE can justify the claim is to borrow a 5.9-point reading-score increase that occurred between 2002 and 2003, credit for which ought to go to Klein’s predecessor, Harold O. Levy, or to no chancellor at all.

Consider: Bloomberg took office on January 1, 2002, but he didn’t win control of the schools until June 12 of that year. Klein wasn’t appointed until August, and then he spent the rest of the year studying the system and appointing task forces to advise the administration on how to restructure the schools. By the time the chancellor finished studying, students were taking the 2003 fourth-grade reading test. The system was, in effect, operating on autopilot during the year that the students recorded the healthy 5.9 percentage-point improvement.

At the time, Klein knew that he couldn’t convincingly claim credit for the 2003 test scores, and he didn’t even hold a press conference to celebrate them. Four years later, the fourth-grade reading scores have inched up by another 7 percentage points, only half the average yearly increase achieved under the tenures of Chancellors Levy and Rudy Crew. But to avoid that invidious comparison, the mayor and the chancellor simply take the 2003 result and add it to their own column.

The administration has dissembled even more egregiously on math scores. Granted, the 2007 math tests brought some good news, with the city’s fourth-graders improving by 3.2 percentage points—one point ahead of the state as a whole—and the city’s eighth-graders bumping up by 6 percentage points, compared with the state’s rise of 5 points. Once more, however, this modest gain wasn’t good enough for the potential presidential candidate who wants to be known as the “education mayor.” So the press release issued by city hall claimed that “since 2002, the first year of the Bloomberg administration,” elementary- and middle-school math scores went up by a total of 27.8 percentage points. The release didn’t mention that two-thirds of the fourth-grade gain was earned during the 2002–03 school year and, again, ought to have been credited to Levy or to no one. Further, the press release mixed up city and state test scores to arrive at its figure—a violation of every rule of psychometrics.

Education historian Diane Ravitch, author of the definitive history of the New York City public schools and a nationally recognized expert on testing and standards, finds this cooking of the books appalling. Says Ravitch: “Whenever new data appear about test scores or graduation rates, they are immediately massaged and packaged by the public-relations department at the Department of Education. With all its faults, the old Board of Education did have a research department, where conscientious, nonpartisan researchers tallied up the good news and the bad news and gave it straight to the public, without adding self-serving praise or toying with the interpretation of the numbers.”

The only education numbers that can’t be manipulated are those that tell how steeply education spending has increased under the Bloomberg-Klein regime. In the past four years, total expenditures on city schools from all sources—state, city, federal, and private—surged from $14 billion to $18 billion yearly, the greatest increase in history. The new funding allowed the system to hold the equivalent of 15 extra days of school per year and to hire thousands of extra teachers.

There’s no denying that there have been some improvements since Bloomberg and Klein announced the first set of mayoral reforms in 2003. In addition to the gains already mentioned, eighth-grade reading scores, flat for the past eight years, jumped by 5 percentage points in 2007 (though scores went up by even higher amounts throughout the state, again suggesting an easier test). Fourth-grade math scores are up by a total of 7.7 percentage points overall in four years, and eighth-grade math scores are up by about 12 points. But considering the extra $4 billion spent, plus the 15 additional days of school, that hardly deserves to be regarded as a major achievement for either the mayor or the institution of mayoral control.

Even if the administration’s claims about test scores were accurate, it would still be difficult to know which of its structural or instructional initiatives should get credit for the improvement. That’s partly because Klein’s Department of Education does no research on which programs work and which do not, and partly because within just three years, he and Bloomberg have flip-flopped on their plans for the school system’s structure. The first phase of mayoral control was all about top-down centralization; in the second phase, the rallying cry is market incentives and autonomy for the principals.

Bloomberg presented his first school reorganization plan in a dramatic Martin Luther King Day speech in 2003, seven months after taking control of the schools. The city’s 32 community school boards would be shut down, the mayor announced, and replaced with “one unified, focused, streamlined chain of command,” running directly from city hall to the chancellor’s office, then through ten powerful regional superintendents reporting directly to the chancellor, and finally down to each school’s principal. From now on, the mayor said, “the chancellor will dictate the curriculum and pedagogical methods” in all but 200 schools.

“Dictate” is exactly what Klein did for the next three years. The city’s principals were deemed so deficient in pedagogical understanding that Klein and his lieutenants would tell them how to arrange the chairs, the desks, the rugs, and even the bulletin boards in their classrooms. But Klein’s directions on more important matters did not inspire confidence: for example, he imposed a reading program that progressive educators favor called Balanced Literacy (a euphemism for the “whole language” instructional approach), despite the lack of evidence that it works for disadvantaged children.

Sometime after the mayor’s reelection, Bloomberg and Klein launched another radical restructuring of the system. The administration maintained its public posture that the first reorganization was working perfectly. But Klein’s planners at the Tweed Courthouse were quietly preparing the ground for a 180-degree change. Klein hired three new deputy chancellors with reputations as strategic thinkers and a bent for systems management; all were Ivy League law school graduates who, like Klein, had clerked at the Supreme Court, though they had little or no education background. Klein also brought in a host of management consultants, including Sir Michael Barber, a former education advisor to British prime minister Tony Blair and now a partner at the consulting firm McKinsey and Company, where he specializes in “performance management systems.” As one former DOE official put it, the new brain trust “stopped talking about education. It was all about systems and incentives.”

Klein soon become convinced that the best way to drive improvement in test scores was to create financial and other incentives for each of the important actors in the system—principals, teachers, even students—to work harder and more effectively. In fact, with the encouragement of Alvarez and Marsal, a high-priced consulting firm hired by the DOE, Klein created a new office in the Department of Education: the “Market Maker.” From operating like a regulated, command-and-control economy, the system would go almost overnight to something that, on paper at least, would work like Adam Smith’s invisible hand. It was all theoretical, of course. There were no precedents to consult and no research to back it up, because no one had ever tried to simulate a market system within a big-city school district—certainly not so swiftly.

But Sir Barber was telling Klein that the only way to make a radical transition in a big system like New York’s was to push through changes quickly before the special interests mobilized—somewhat like the “shock therapy” that some Western economists once advocated for former Soviet bloc countries transitioning from state socialism to free markets.

Bloomberg administered the first big shock in last January’s State of the City speech. Market-based accountability, he explained, would rest on four pillars. The city’s 1,450 principals would throw off the shackles of central bureaucracy and become independent CEOs, running their schools as small enterprises. Principals would be rewarded or fired based on a sophisticated new data system that tracked their students’ progress on test scores as they advanced through the grades. Tenure rules would be reformed, making it possible to apply market discipline to the teaching labor force. And school-funding formulas would be equalized: each student in the school system would be funded with the same base dollar amount, with schools getting higher funding levels for immigrants still learning English and for special-education students.

Each of these reform proposals contains considerable potential for good. Giving principals more autonomy is certainly preferable to dictatorship. More data on student performance are always welcome and will, if trustworthy, lead to more accurate performance evaluations of principals. Reforming tenure is worth exploring, since the rules for weeding out bad teachers are broken. Finally, equalizing funding for students, an idea first proposed by the Fordham Foundation last year, is not only a matter of elementary fairness; it can also provide needed aid for poorly performing schools, and it ensures that competition among schools takes place on a level playing field.

Unfortunately, the latest reorganization plan is already falling apart. The administration has applied reasonable-sounding reforms with little appreciation for the culture of the schools. One glaring example is the equitable-funding plan. The administration decided to count teacher salaries against each school’s new budget under the proposed funding formula. Since teacher salaries are based largely on seniority, this would penalize stable schools with long-serving staffs.

The Bloomberg administration must have known that the UFT would have to protect its senior teachers. Along with a coalition of activist groups that opposed the entire reorganization, the union began organizing a massive City Hall protest rally. The mayor initially hung tough: he called his own mini-rally, attended by 100 supporters, attacked the “special interests” blocking progress in the schools, and likened the UFT to the National Rifle Association.

But the next morning, the mayor was breakfasting with union president Randi Weingarten. After a weeklong negotiation, the administration took both the new funding proposal and the tenure initiative off the table for the next two years—by which time Bloomberg will be packing to leave City Hall. The mayor may have been right about the “special interests,” but his retreat had plenty to do with politics and his own interests. A big fight with the teachers would have damaged his reputation as the “education mayor” and threatened his potential White House run.

One of the two remaining parts of the second reorganization, the principals’ empowerment initiative, gives educators only an illusion of the free market that they would need to manage schools as businesses. This became clear on a recent spring afternoon at the Grand Hyatt New York. In an event organized by Klein’s Market Maker office, all the city’s principals were invited to the luxury hotel for a celebration of their impending liberation from central bureaucratic control. Ushered into the hotel’s huge ballroom to the beat of a live jazz band, the principals were treated to a video starring New York City public school alums Henry Kissinger, Spike Lee, and Joan Rivers, plus a half-dozen of the most adorable, well-spoken children presently attending city schools. The alums and the kids recounted charming stories about their schools’ dedicated principals, and Spike Lee narrated a separate segment explaining the principals’ new roles in the reorganization. After the video, Klein told the principals that they were about to become results-oriented CEOs with the managerial and pedagogical skills to drive the next phase of Bloomberg’s turnaround of the schools.

The soon-to-be-empowered principals then got to wander through the hotel’s exhibition halls, transformed into a supermarket of education service providers. The educators got a taste of the services that they would soon be able to buy for their schools to replace those currently supplied by the central bureaucracy. In turn, the 14 providers competed against one another to sign up the principals, now in control of their own budgets, as customers.

To his credit, Klein approved the inclusion of several providers with substantive academic programs. One of these was the Success for All Foundation, which features the scientifically tested reading program that Klein unwisely dumped from dozens of schools in his first year in office. But it soon became clear that the program didn’t have much of a chance to sell its goods in Klein’s new supermarket. When I visited the hall in which SFA staffers were making their presentation, it was practically empty. Nervous principals, shell-shocked by this latest reorganization, decided to play it safe and go with one of the providers that knew its way around the DOE headquarters, rather than with an out-of-town organization like Success for All. Several sources also confirmed that providers had offered jobs to some of the supervisors departing the school system—on condition that they sign up as customers the principals whom they used to supervise.

What’s left of the mayor’s new reorganization plan is the sophisticated data management system, developed by Columbia Law School professor James Liebman. It promises to go further in charting how much students in the city’s schools are learning than any tool available in any school system in the country. Kudos are certainly in order for Bloomberg, Klein, and Liebman. But after the past five years’ experience with the education department’s public-relations machine, there must be guarantees that all these data will be completely transparent, available to all, and free of manipulation.

When the state legislature begins debating the reauthorization of mayoral control next year, one question that it will surely have to consider is whether mayoral control can deliver true accountability. The only way to ensure this is to create an independent agency with the authority to mine all the education department’s data about test scores and graduation rates, to do research about which programs are working, and then to make all that information available to the public on a regular, timely basis. No sane person would want to go back to anything like the discredited Board of Ed. But without a guarantee that an independent research agency will be created and properly funded, extending mayoral control would be an invitation for the next politically ambitious mayor to keep undermining the credibility of the public education system that is so essential to our democracy.

The Mystery of Michael Bloomberg: Why does a popular but mediocre mayor think he should run for president?

Posted by Leonie Haimson on nyceducationnews listserve:

The national backlash on Bloomberg’s candidacy for presidency has begun – before he has even announced – from the conservative magazine, The Weekly Standard.

Nevertheless, lots of the criticism below is apt. Two major PR stumbles omitted:

1- the bus route fiasco; when thousands of kids were left stranded on the side of the road in the middle of winter, under the advice of DOE million-dollar consultants, and the Mayor refused to apologize but said that parents were a bunch of complainers;

2- when a private plane flew into a E. side apt. building, and questions were asked about why private aircraft was still allowed to fly over Manhattan even after 9/11 (when they have long been banned from DC). The Mayor, who likes to fly himself around in his own fleet of planes and heliocopters, responded that would be like banning cars from the streets because of traffic accidents.

Clearly, the billionaire Mayor lacks the common touch.

The Weekly Standard
The Mystery of Michael Bloomberg: Why does a popular but mediocre mayor think he should run for president?
by Fred Siegel & Michael Goodwin
05/14/2007, Volume 012, Issue 33

New York
There is a stunning disconnect between Michael Bloomberg's modest accomplishments as mayor of New York and his elevation to a figure worthy of presidential consideration--albeit as an independent candidate. In Bloomberg's own words, "How likely is a 5′7″-Jew-from-New-York billionaire who's divorced and running as an independent to become president of the United States?"

The answer is obvious, but that doesn't mean Bloomberg and his billions couldn't become a major force in national politics. Or that he doesn't have a plan that would, under the right conditions, put him in the Oval Office. His plan, he tells confidants, is to spend upwards of $500 million of his own money--about twice as much as the major party nominees--on TV ads and get-out-the-vote efforts, a strategy that's worked for him twice in New York. The only catch is that he first wants to see who Democrats and Republicans nominate. If the parties put up fringe-leaning nominees, leaving the middle open, Bloomberg would use his moneybags to try to create a centrist path to victory.

Meanwhile, the outlines of his platform are clearly visible. He's been zigzagging across the country, including in some primary states, leading the charge for handgun control, public health reform, and his "reformist" educational policies. Think of a sane George Soros.

The Washington Post has featured his presidential possibilities on its front page; Slate has touted him as a great manager; the New York Times, New York magazine, and the New York Sun are enthusiastic about a Bloomberg run; Rupert Murdoch was quoted as saying the mayor "would be my choice" for president, while savvy consultants are mapping out the scenarios that would give him a chance. In a mixed omen, Al Sharpton, warm to a Bloomberg candidacy, has described him as "Ross Perot with a r�D+1sum�D+1." It's quite an array.

Looming behind the disjuncture between his managerial failures as mayor and the presidential palaver is the mystery of how a mayor so emotionally detached from the lives of most New Yorkers, so aggressively aloof from the supposedly populist sentiments of New York politics, can be riding so high in the local polls. Even after a rough first quarter in this, his sixth year in office, his job approval ratings generally hit 70 percent.

True, his low-key personality was a relief to many New Yorkers after Rudy Giuliani's brawling. But his passionless, matter-of-fact approach to the job stands in stark contrast to the from-the-gut styles of the two most recent successful and popular mayors, Ed Koch and Giuliani. Indeed, Bloomberg's style is closer to that of failures Abe Beame and David Dinkins. Of Koch, who led the city out of the 1970s fiscal crisis, the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan said, "History will record [him] as having given back New York City its morale." Rudy beat down the twin scourges of crime and soaring welfare dependency. After almost a term and a half, it is still impossible to credit Bloomberg with a transformative achievement or discern any legacy.

Bloomberg's reputation is built on the idea that he's not just another politician but an apolitical manager who rises above petty interests. But this image reverses the reality. Bloomberg's failures have been managerial, while he's been a brilliant success politically by catering--via the city treasury and his own fortune--to those petty interests.

Bloomberg's greatest substantive achievement is to have successfully continued Giuliani's reforms regarding crime and welfare. He has also continued Giuliani's aggressive pro-development policies that, combined with the recent economic boom, have led to a record number of housing starts and an unemployment rate that is the lowest in 30 years. But where he has struck out on his own, it has been a different matter.

"Manager Mike," the first mayor to also be the city's wealthiest man, put education at the center of his 2001 run for mayor. Beginning with his first campaign speech, he pledged "to do for education what Giuliani did for public safety." He invited people to judge him on the issue and said he wanted to be the "education mayor." Based in part on that promise of accountability, Bloomberg was given unprecedented mayoral control of the schools, which had been in the hands of a fractious and unaccountable Board of Education.

He has done a marvelous job of selling himself as a model school reformer to the New York press, to the New York elites, and to mayors across the country. Mayors Antonio Villaraigosa of Los Angeles and Adrian Fenty of Washington, D.C., have spoken of Bloomberg as their model, "the standard-bearer for educational reform."
But the "reformed" school system led by Bloomberg's chancellor, Joel Klein, a former high-ranking Justice Department lawyer, has been more notable for administrative upheaval and noncompetitive contracts than higher test scores. Over the last five years--despite $4 billion in additional spending (the annual operating budget for education is now more than $16 billion and the city has a five-year, $10 billion education capital budget) and three harrowing reorganizations of the original "reform"--student performance has been basically flat. Reading scores in many elementary schools are up, but math scores in middle schools have declined. Graduation rates have inched up, but still barely 50 percent graduate in four years.

Bloomberg and Klein have lurched from their initial strong central control of the schools to a recent attempt at decentralization, both of which have sown confusion. Things began badly when they instituted a "progressive" education curriculum that had failed everywhere it was tried. More recently there has been a school bus fiasco: Roughly 7,000 students were left stranded in the dead of winter when a new routing plan imposed by an expensive consulting firm with a no-bid contract proved unworkable. Blasted by parents and critics, Bloomberg denounced them as know-nothings "who have no experience in doing anything." The parents, he snapped, just need to call 311, the all-purpose gripe-and-information line he established.

The imperiousness was striking, and it is often more than stylistic. Mild-mannered Democrat Bill Thompson, the city comptroller and former Board of Education president who plans to run for mayor in 2009, when Bloomberg will be forced out by term limits, complains that "I can't talk to the mayor about education," because Bloomberg sees criticism as either a front for the unions or as a personal attack on Klein.

Thompson had a sometimes rocky relationship with Giuliani but notes that while "Rudy could be a pain in the ass, . . . he really understood this stuff." Added Thompson: "If you asked for more money, he wanted to know exactly how it would be spent."

Giuliani, by legal training and temperament, was hands-on, sometimes to a fault, but he almost always knew enough about a topic to evaluate the advice he was given. Bloomberg, on the other hand, has never immersed himself in the details of either city government or education. He delegates responsibility to deputies like Klein, who himself has limited interest in budgetary and programmatic intricacies. "You ask Joel," explains Thompson, "where the money is going, and he'll say something like 'to improve reading scores.'" Asked whether he sees any real gain in schools under Bloomberg, Thompson says only that "the jury is still out."

Yet the public doesn't blame Bloomberg. He gets credit for trying to fix the schools, and Klein gets the blame when things go wrong. The pattern is similar with the NYPD. Bloomberg gets credit for keeping crime low, but when cops recently killed an unarmed black man in Queens in a hail of 50 bullets, activists demanded the scalp not of Bloomberg, but of the very successful police commissioner Ray Kelly.

Both cases illustrate how Bloomberg has managed the politics by greasing the usual skids. With the police shooting case, Bloomberg abandoned the cops, three of whom were later indicted and now await trial. Shortly after the shooting, the mayor said, "It sounds to me like excessive force was used" and deemed the incident "inexplicable" even before the details were known.

On schools, Bloomberg has neatly separated himself from Klein by handing out generous raises to the very teachers' union fighting Klein's reforms. The contract that runs through the end of his term provides cumulative hikes of nearly 41 percent. And while there have been modest productivity gains--30 minutes were added to the school day, meaning teachers must be in the schools all of 6 hours and 50 minutes--time- and money-wasting work rules and perks, all part of a 204-page contract that Klein tried to reduce to 8 pages, have survived largely intact. So while the unions detest Klein and openly urge he be fired, Bloomberg skates on by.
The managerial failures don't stop with the schools. Nearly six years after 9/11, the city has only begun to make real progress on Ground Zero in large part because it was never a Bloomberg priority. Like mob bosses, he and Gov. George Pataki divided up Manhattan--Pataki got downtown and Bloomberg focused on the far West Side of Midtown. In his first term, Bloomberg tried to succeed where Giuliani failed by building a football stadium there for the New York Jets, hoping then to use the stadium as the centerpiece of his plan to lure the Olympics to Gotham.

Indeed, Bloomberg's early economic development program, aside from some sensible rezoning proposals, consisted mostly of attracting the Olympics. Money was no object. Bloomberg proposed to subsidize the well-endowed Jets ownership by giving them for a mere $200 million a West Side Manhattan property worth a billion dollars on the open market. The plan was defeated by the opposition of the Dolan family, which owns Madison Square Garden, and by State Assembly speaker Sheldon Silver, the entrenched Democrat who represents a district in lower Manhattan. The International Olympic Committee finally ended the wrangling by awarding the 2012 games to London.

Bloomberg's dogged pursuit of his unpopular stadium plan and his record level property tax hikes combined to give him a 24 percent approval rating, the lowest ever held by a modern mayor. It was no mean feat to be rated below the disastrous David Dinkins. Midway through his first term, it appeared that Bloomberg would have a hard time winning a second one.

But to Bloomberg's great good fortune, the former Bronx Borough president and Dinkins ally, Democrat Freddy Ferrer, again came to his rescue. Ferrer, who called himself the "un-Giuliani," working with Sharpton, had made Bloomberg mayor in 2001, when he devoted all his energies to subverting the campaign of fellow Democrat Mark Green.

In 2005, Ferrer, who campaigned on repealing the Giuliani policing reforms and raising taxes, made for such an appalling alternative that his candidacy, plus Bloomberg's ability to spend considerably more on consultants than Ferrer spent on his entire campaign, carried Bloomberg to a record level victory margin. In his two campaigns, Bloomberg has, with the aid of top notch consultants, directly spent nearly $160 million, while his opponents spent a total of $24 million.
Bloomberg can thank the hedge fund and private equity boom on Wall Street, the record high stock market, and soaring real estate values for keeping his budget in the black. But not even the good economic times would have been enough to maintain his popularity given his many gaffes if New York were the city it once was or is assumed to be.

Consider the following: The mayor was informed that a set of subway switches had burned out and couldn't be replaced for months or even years, guaranteeing massive delays. Bloomberg, an engineer, nonchalantly said fine, that's the way it will have to be. He reversed himself only after howls of public protest. And only then did transit officials acknowledge that they could do most of the job in weeks.

Or consider this: After a July 2006 blackout produced by Con Ed incompetence left more than 100,000 Queens residents without electricity for a week, Manager Mike declined even to visit the affected areas until the press began to hound him. Even then he declared, "I think [Con Ed CEO] Kevin Burke deserves a thanks from this city. He's worked as hard as he can. . . ."

It's safe to say Bloomberg will never be confused with Fiorello LaGuardia. When it comes to holding people accountable, Bloomberg seems to have taken lessons from George W. Bush.

At a time when Brooklyn is experiencing a private sector housing boom, the same businessman mayor who tried to give away valuable Manhattan property for a song has supported a half-billion dollars in direct and indirect subsidies for the Atlantic Yards apartment, office, and arena complex in Brooklyn being built by fellow fat cat and subsidy king Bruce Ratner. Homelessness is at record levels, but no one has been called on the carpet and, again, the public seems to give the mayor credit for trying, even if he fails. And then there are the civil liberties violations: During the GOP convention, hundreds of mostly nonviolent protesters were penned in by chain-link fences topped with barbed-wire for up to 44 hours.

Had homelessness reached unprecedented levels under Giuliani, the interest groups would have been marching in the streets. Had Rudy proposed a similar level of subsidy for a project like Atlantic Yards, the liberals would have howled with rage. Had Giuliani held protesters behind barbed wire, the Village Voice would have relentlessly argued that fascism had (once again) arrived in New York, and the New York Times would have run a 34-part series about the assault on civil liberties.
Why didn't this happen? It didn't occur for the same reason most Republicans have been remarkably quiet about Bloomberg's penchant for raising taxes and revenue by (1) ticketing store owners with fines for "illegal awnings" (too many letters) and (2) ticketing cars trapped in snow storms. The New York State Republican organization is more of a business, a local franchise, than it is a political party. In 2001, the year he ran for election to succeed Giuliani, Bloomberg donated $705,000 to the state GOP, the largest donation since the days of Nelson Rockefeller. In 2002, while George Pataki was running for reelection for his third and final term as governor, Bloomberg donated another half-million to the party, and he's continued to give. The money buys acquiescence if not adulation.

Similarly, in the years before he ran for mayor, Bloomberg supported worthwhile African-American, Asian, and Latino arts organizations with generous and sometimes massive contributions. Half a million dollars went to the well-respected Dance Theater of Harlem and $100,000 to Ballet Hispanico. As he geared up for reelection in 2005, he donated at least $140 million to more than 800 institutions and groups, including to Lenora Fulani, an anti-Semite who ran the local, cult-aligned Independence party.

All his generosity might not have availed Bloomberg of popularity if New York still possessed a sizable, civically engaged middle class. Instead we have a barbell social structure, with the very wealthy and a vast upper middle class on one side, a massive number of immigrant and minority poor on the other, and little in between. The middle class as such is less than 20 percent of the population here.

Most of its members live by serving the wealthy above them or the poor below. Insulated though they are, the upper middle class resent the truly wealthy who bid up the cost of real estate. But with their kids in private schools and private recreation programs, they have little need for city government outside of public safety. They like the mayor's low-key style. As long as crime remains under control, Bloomberg's failures, in so far as they are even aware of them, don't impinge on them.
The failed schools and the hourglass economy don't provide much upward mobility for workaday immigrant and nonimmigrant strivers. They leave the city anyway, draining off potential discontent. Exit makes far more sense than trying to buck the cost structure and political system beholden to organized interests. Besides, they are continually replaced by new arrivals. Still, soaring housing prices, stagnant job growth, and the highest combined state and local taxes in the country have, notes urbanist Joel Kotkin, produced a high rate of out-migration by the college-educated population.

Bloomberg's slender list of achievements will make it hard for him should he enter the national race. And although he's been running for president--despite demurrals--for some time, he's unlikely to become an open candidate unless one or both of the parties nominate unelectable duds--think Newt Gingrich versus John Edwards. If, come the super-primaries on February 5, 2008, the nominees are Rudy and Hillary, Bloomberg will keep his money in his pocket. He won election as mayor in 2001 by spending $92 a vote, but not even Michael Bloomberg can do that kind of checkbook politics on a national scale.

Fred Siegel, a professor of history at the Cooper Union for Science and Art in New York, is the author of The Prince of the City: Giuliani, New York and the Genius of American Life; Michael Goodwin is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and a columnist for the New York Daily News.


�D"m Copyright 2007, News Corporation, Weekly Standard, All Rights Reserved.

Bloomberg builds housing without schools

Selections of Leonie Haimson post on nyceducationnews listerve:

Even though the Mayor assembled a task force on sustainability to come up w/ suggestions for how to serve a population that is expected to grow by a million by 2030, to deal w/ the increased pressure on housing, energy, sewage, transportation, parks, playgrounds, and other municipal services, the task force was explicitly instructed to leave out schools from their considerations – even though most of our schools are already overcrowded and are likely to become even more so in the future.

See the report of plaNYC 2030 at http://www.nyc.gov/html/planyc2030/html/home/home.shtml

To add insult to injury, the only actual mention of schools that I have found in the 160 pg. plan, aside from opening up school playgrounds for after school and weekend hours, is to use school buildings for more housing!

The report uses as a model of what should occur more frequently in the future PS 109 in East Harlem, and how wonderful it is that the school is being converted to artist housing: “By working with HPD and the Department of Cultural Affairs to open new affordable spaces for artists, we can not only preserve our physical city but also its essential creative spirit. “ The authors go on to describe in detail the battle of community residents who fought with tooth and nail for the school building to be landmarked and preserved rather than torn down– without mentioning that what they really wanted was for it to be a school again!

This is the mentality we are fighting in this city. While all of our elected officials, including our Mayor, always proclaim education comes first, it really comes last – that is, if it ever enters their minds at all.

And this is why we must ask our elected officials to require that schools be incorporated in all large scale developments – and not just 500 seats, when the need is more than 1,000, as the Atlantic yards project. And why we need a better capital plan -- one that provides at least twice as many seats as the one currently proposed by DOE.

More on this soon; meanwhile see comments from Deborah Glick, Assemblymember from Lower Manhattan, and her letter to Chancellor Klein on this subject.

thanks,

Leonie Haimson
Class Size Matters

124 Waverly Pl.

New York, NY 10011

www.classsizematters.org

http://nycpublicschoolparents.blogspot.com/

To subscribe to our newsletter, send an email to classsizematters-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

To contribute to Class Size Matters, please click here.

--- Deborah Glick <glickd@assembly.state.ny.us> wrote:

Dear Friend

As our city administration advances an unprecedented number of residential development projects, especially in Lower Manhattan, I have serious concerns about whether commensurate public amenities have been adequately planned for in order to accommodate such growth. Too often it seems that large scale development moves forward with little thought as to the necessary infrastructure that must be
provided for the subsequent influx of residents it attracts. This is particularly true when planning our city's school system. I believe that the City must undergo in-depth population projections for every neighborhood to ensure that class sizes are appropriate and to properly plan for new school construction.

Below is the text of a letter I wrote to Chancellor Klein on this important education issue.

Sincerely,
Deborah J. Glick
Assemblymember

April 20, 2007

Joel Klein, Chancellor
NYC Department of Education
52 Chambers St.
New York, NY 10007

Dear Chancellor Klein:

In recent years there has been an increasing push to attract residential development to New York City. However, while much of this development is aimed specifically at families with school-aged children, it often fails to take into account the provision of commensurate public amenities such as schools, in order to match these rapidly changing demographics. This has been particularly true in Lower Manhattan.

I am particularly concerned about the Department of Education's (DOE) seeming lack of in-depth demographic planning, which is crucial to adequately identifying the necessary educational resources for specific neighborhoods. It is my understanding that beyond general projected growth figures for Regional and Community School Districts, no current projections exist for the more narrowly defined geographic catchment areas, which often bear the brunt of development projects slated for particular neighborhoods. Such a study would help identify those communities facing a disproportionate amount of residential growth and thus inform their specific needs for locally zoned schools. If such an effort has not already commenced, I would encourage DOE, in conjunction with the Department of City Planning (DCP), to undertake such a study based on these catchment areas.

As New York City faces an unprecedented amount of residential growth across the boroughs, it is critical that DOE carefully plan for and provide the necessary infrastructure to accommodate this growth in specific Sincerely,
Deborah J. Glick
Assemblymember