Stuck In The Middle

Andrew Friedman

Stuck In The Middle

Last week, hundreds of parents from all five boroughs crowded the steps of the Department of Education's headquarters at the old Tweed Courthouse to decry the findings of a new report that blasted the inequity and failure that characterize middle school education in New York City public schools. The report, entitled New York City's Middle-Grade Schools: Platforms for Success or Pathways to Failure, was published by a coalition of grassroots organizations called the Coalition for Educational Justice.

Parents were right to be upset. Despite Mayor Bloomberg's focus on improving public schools, there is simply no way to overlook the fact that, at least in the city's middle schools, he has failed. And tens of thousands of young people will pay the price.

During the 2005-2006 school year, according to the report's analysis of the DOE's own numbers:

- A majority of eighth graders at 75% of all city school cannot read at grade level.

- Nearly 40,000 of the 53,000 African-American and Latino eighth graders in New York City cannot meet the state reading standards.

- Only 22% of eighth grade students can read at the level of state standards in high poverty schools, while close to 60% can at low poverty schools.

So, we've got failing schools that particularly fail students of color and low-income folks.

To combat this crisis, the Coalition for Education Justice called on Mayor Bloomberg to enact some pretty common-sense reforms, like instituting a well-rounded curriculum at all middle schools, providing more academic and social supports for students, ensuring better trained teachers and principals, and promoting smaller class-sizes.

The Campaign for Fiscal Equity lawsuit will soon be bringing some big state money to New York City's public school system. Mayor Bloomberg would be wise to spend some of that money to fix the crisis in the middle schools.

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Posted at 8:47 AM, Jan 22, 2007 in Education
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Comments

Well, as I see it, the problem with our schools results from the Mayor having much more interest in spin than in actual school improvement.

There has been a long standing dispute in which it has been shown that the Bloomberg administration has been consistently untruthful about high school graduation rates. In addition, Mr. Bloomberg's flacks have consistently supplied misleading data about class size to the public and the NYC Council. Surprise, the data the City supplies tends to claim that classes are smaller than they actually are.

Every six months or so, the Mayor and his Education Commissioner announce new solutions to pretend problems. The current claim, made in the State of the City speech is that teachers have been granted tenure wrongly. Formerly, the problem was teachers and principals had too much freedom (everyone had to follow the same formula every day; scripts were handed out). Now they want to empower the principals, base school aid on enrollment and try to make principals supervise the teachers more closely without actually adding supervisory staff.

A fair amount of the incoherent program results from the Bloomberg idea that any business guy can run a school system and that no teacher or parent views should ever be listened to.

Some of the rest results from Mr. Bloomberg's commitment to use public resources to enhance private schools. He plan for example to give the Randalls' Island stadium to a consortium of private schools -- on the theory, I guess, that public school children don't need exercise because they have to prep for standardized tests See the editorial in this Sunday's NY Times City Section.

Holding Mr. Bloomberg accountable for the state of public education in NYC has proved elusive. Middle schools are floundering, but so are elementary and high schools.

Indeed, elementary schools and high schools have serious problems, too.

The middle schools are worse, though, and not improving. For example, more than twice as many middle schools (47%) failed to meet their federal No Child Left Behind requirements than elementary schools (19%). High Schools, too, fared significantly better than the middle schools at 26%.

Well, the sorry state of our schools combined with Mayor Bloomberg's militant neglect leave us with the question: What should be do about it?

As I see it parents are left in a difficult fix in that the person who should be in a position to press for School improvement is Council Speaker Christine Quinn. She's allied herself so closely with the Mayor, I personally worry that she may be unable or unwilling to take positions which force her into opposition to the Mayor. On Education, perhaps she'll stake out some ground of her own. If she doesn't she'll own Mr. Bloomberg's dismal school record when and if she runs for Mayor.

Those interested in learning how this plays out or in making change themselves may want to attend the hearing of the NYC Council Education Committee which is set for Thursday, January 25th, 1 PM at City Hall.

At issue there, I'm told, may well be efforts to reduce class size; one of the very few measures which produces better educational outcomes for children. NYC Counil Education Chair Robert Jackson is always a pleasure to watch at work, in any case.