Post by Moses on Apr 18, 2005 6:45:28 GMT -5
April 18, 2005
Bloomberg's Schools: Much Tumult, Mixed Progress [sic]
By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN
....From the moment he won control of the schools, less than six months after taking office, Mr. Bloomberg has urged voters to judge him on education. "I want to be held accountable for the results, and I will be," he said in June 2002 when Gov. George E. Pataki signed the law putting Mr. Bloomberg in charge. "I do promise you that you will see in the very near future that we are going in the right direction."
With the mayor's re-election campaign now under way, retracing some of his steps through the school system over the last three years - to districts where he made major announcements, schools that he singled out as models or in critical need of repair - shows that the academic results so far have been mixed at best. On much of the school system, the main impact of the changes has been shock and tumult: start-up difficulties, dizzying and at times conflicting policy changes, high staff turnover.
For Mr. Bloomberg and his schools chancellor, Joel I. Klein, some of the shock and tumult has been precisely the point. In their view, a badly broken, maddeningly bureaucratic system that overwhelmingly failed the city's students - especially poor black and Hispanic children - has been permanently dismantled.
But across the city, reading scores in the third through eighth grades have been flat since the mayor's overhaul began in 2003. Math scores have risen steadily since 2000, though officials inside and outside the system trace the progress to changes made by the former chancellor, Harold O. Levy, and say recent gains are a continuation of that trend.
Since Mr. Bloomberg took charge, overall attendance rates have not changed - with improved numbers at new small high schools offset by declines in old larger schools. School safety remains a murky picture. The four-year graduation rate has risen, yet the number of students receiving a Regents diploma, meaning they met a set of state requirements including Regents exams, has declined.
....the mayor's inability so far to achieve clear-cut success, even where he had personally shone a spotlight, helps explain why many New Yorkers fail to see any change and why some say things are actually worse.
In District 5, for instance, where Mr. Bloomberg began his efforts two years ago, it is not surprising that Ms. Johnson and other parents do not see all the changes as helpful. The parents of more than 42 percent of fifth graders like Ms. Johnson's daughter, Raanesha, got letters this year saying their children were in danger of being left back. Among third graders, the number was more than 52 percent.
Two years ago, Mr. Bloomberg announced his initiative to improve special education, at Public School 87 in Middle Village, Queens, pointing to the school as a model program. But for much of this year, the school's parents fought to preserve a special reading program for children with learning disabilities, as a new principal tried to dismantle it. The parents also struggled to fend off steep cuts in gym and art classes.
And at Thomas Jefferson High School in East New York, Brooklyn, which the mayor visited on the first day of this school year to cheer the opening of four new small schools in the Jefferson building, little has gone right. Three of four principals have quit or been removed. At one school, three of six teachers quit; at another, attendance is worse than it was at the old big school before Mr. Bloomberg took over.
...."What I would hope people evaluate us on are the clear leadership and commitment," Mr. Klein said in an interview, "and the boldness....
In the interview, Mr. Klein and Deputy Mayor Dennis M. Walcott, the top education official at City Hall, pointed to a series of changes that they say will pay long-term dividends: 16 million books delivered in the last two years, uniform reading and math programs, reading and math coaches to support teachers, dozens of new small high schools, and a parent coordinator hired for every school. They also said that more children are eating breakfast and lunch prepared at school and that those meals are more nutritious.
But most of these points have a counterpoint. Every school has one parent coordinator, whether it has 500 students or 5,000. For that reason alone, the impact of the new position has varied. Some schools have been more effective than others at adopting the new reading and math programs. The new small schools have aggravated overcrowding in the existing big schools and prompted debates about the equity of the money and resources being spent.
Some accomplishments that Mr. Bloomberg and Mr. Klein are proudest of - a new training academy for principals and an aggressive effort at professional development for teachers - are largely out of public view. And again, results have been mixed.
The administration boasts of having driven down the cost of school construction, but critics say that new schools and the state money to build them have not materialized fast enough to reduce class size.....
A New Bureaucracy
Test scores aside, many parents say the new bureaucracy is harder to navigate than the old one, that the parent councils that replaced the local school boards are powerless, that community involvement has been quashed, and that the Panel for Educational Policy, which replaced the Board of Education, is now merely a rubber stamp for the mayor.
These views were conveyed vividly in a recent New York Times Poll. One-third of registered city voters said that the quality of public education had gotten worse since Mr. Bloomberg took office. Slightly more - 34 percent - said that it had not changed, while 23 percent said that the schools had gotten better.
The outlook was grimmer among public school parents: 46 percent said the quality of public education had gotten worse while 21 percent said the schools were better. Among the places where parents and community advocates say the schools are as dysfunctional as ever is District 5, in Harlem. The survey was conducted between Feb. 4 and Feb. 13 and had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 4 percentage points among registered voters and plus or minus 5 percentage points among school parents.
In January 2003, Mr. Bloomberg chose the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, in the heart of District 5, as the setting for an address laying out his plan to fix the schools, including everything from new curriculum to the reorganization of the city's 32 districts into 10 regions.
But the changes have had little impact on student achievement. In District 5, nearly one-third of third graders scored so low on tests last year that they had to attend summer school. And nearly half of those students failed again in summer school and were forced to repeat third grade. "Student performance in terms of statewide and citywide standardized tests has been in the toilet for a long time, and this mayoral takeover of the schools has not changed that," said Rose Marie Seabrook, the president of the District 5 parent council.
The council is another example of dysfunction, Ms. Seabrook said. It is supposed to have nine elected parent members but has just four. Some were ineligible to serve, while others never showed up. One fifth-grade teacher from District 5 praised the special tutoring program, where she worked on Saturdays and during vacations, but said that the children in her regular classes had not been well served by the mayor's changes. Like many educators interviewed, this teacher asked not to be identified, citing the bitter relations between teachers and the administration and a fear of reprisal by superiors.
...."It seems that everything is being done to say it was done," she said. "We're not getting the support that we need. We're not adequately trained."
She added, "Things are worse for these kids since they have been in power."
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