NYC Schools Under Bloomberg/Klein: What Parents, Teachers and Policymakers Need to Know

[tonysam]

I came across a free download of a book with essays about the NYC public schools situation under the "leadership" of Bloomberg and Klein here:

link


You can order the book on demand here for $12:

link


Obviously I am not soliciting this, but I thought this was a good resource for people interested in the dire situation in the city.


A snip from one of the essays:

The administration’s insistence on ignoring the views of parents and community
members has gone hand-in-hand with an accelerating attack on the whole notion of
the neighborhood public school—which often anchors communities, particularly in
low-income neighborhoods. The DOE’s much-vaunted small-school initiative,
subsidized by private money, flooded comprehensive neighborhood high schools
with the high-needs students that the small schools had been allowed to
exclude—including high percentages of English Language Learners and students
with disabilities. In the few new high schools built, the administration refused
to allow preference for admissions to neighborhood children.40 When the DOE
centralized admissions for elementary schools, which had previously been controlled
by the individual districts, families of pre-Kindergarten students were obliged
to re-apply to Kindergarten at their schools.41 In the spring of 2009, the
administration put hundreds of Kindergarten students on waiting lists for their
zoned neighborhood schools.42 These policies appeared designed to undermine
the support of neighborhood residents—and their elected officials—for their
local public schools, further easing the administration’s plans to charterize and
privatize the system.


The chancellor continually promoted the success of charter schools, which were
given space in public school buildings, causing a loss of classrooms for the
traditional public schools that were forced to share their space. Yet these charter
schools were provided with the ability to cap enrollment and class size at low
levels—a privilege not accorded traditional public schools, who were essentially
denied this opportunity by the administration’s refusal to use the state funds that
had been allocated for class size reduction according to their intended function.43
The chancellor’s unrestrained praise for charter schools and his comparative
contempt for traditional public schools was bizarre in light of the fact that he
had been put in charge of improving the public schools; if charter schools were
indeed more successful, that surely resulted from his own failure of leadership.

These policies, and the widening inequities that have resulted, have led to profound
dissatisfaction among many parents and educators alike. A 2008 survey by the
United Federation of Teachers revealed that 85 percent of New York City public
school teachers believe that Chancellor Klein and the Department of Education
had failed to provide them with the resources and supports they need to succeed.
Similarly, 85 percent said that the chancellor’s emphasis on testing had failed to
improve education in their schools.44 In a Quinnipiac poll taken in March 2009,
New York City public school parents disapproved of Mayor Bloomberg’s
handling of education by 54 to 41 percent.45 The year before, in another poll,
over 70 percent of parents identified class size reduction as the most important
reform, and over 80 percent said that problems of overcrowding and/or excessive
class sizes had remained the same or worsened over the last few years.46 A majority
of parents felt that the overwhelming emphasis on standardized testing had
caused too much stress for their children, and many said that the school system
was being run like a business rather than an educational enterprise. They also
believed that the DOE had mismanaged finances and had embarked on too
many confusing reorganizations.

[MichiganVote]

1. Local control is a thing of the past. The whole nation will go in this direction or no Fed. $$

[tonysam]

2. It's just going to make the schools worse, not better, with even

more mismanagement and corruption than there already is.