LEONIE HAIMSON DESTROYS BLOOMBERG'S NYC EDUCATION RECORD WHILE CANDIDATES IN DEBATE LET HIM MOSTLY GET AWAY WITH SAYING HE DID GREAT

I almost fell off my chair watching last night's Democratic presidential debate as I started screaming at the TV when Michael Bloomberg had the audacity to state, "We treated our teachers the right way and the unions will tell you that."  What? As a UFT Executive Board member for part of Bloomberg's term and a teacher and chapter leader for all of it, I can tell you that his statement is just plain false. The audience reaction at the debate to Bloomberg was just a little too positive. It looked like a rigged audience (donate big bucks to the Democratic National Committee to get in) as this story shows but I want to concentrate here on Bloomberg's education record which Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Joe Biden did not even respond to.

For the clearest evidence of how Bloomberg was wrong when he claimed he treated teachers well, go to a 2008 article in the NY Daily News. The title is Teachers Flunk Joel Klein. Klein was the lawyer who was Bloomberg's handpicked Chancellor who ruled the schools or rather misruled them for eight long years. 80% of us gave him a failing rating in a 2008 survey. His successor was Cathie Black who was a magazine publisher with no education experience. I could go on about how Bloomberg, Klein and Black closed 150 schools, including Jamaica High School, where the public came out and strongly backed the school which was doing alright but that is just me talking personally. 

Parent activist Leonie Haimson, who is the leader of Class Size Matters, has done a detailed takedown of Bloomberg's education record for the Indypendent that should be read by everybody for a full trip down memory lane. 

Leonie has not given up the fight for lower class sizes. She will have a strong presence at the Friday, February 28 City Council hearings on the issue at City Hall at 10:00 A.M.

Leonie's Indypendent piece shatters any myths anyone might have on Bloomberg's education record.

It's all there. Some highlights:

For voters who do not live in New York City or never sent their children to public school here,  you might not be aware that Bloomberg embodied an aggressive free-market ideology with policies that were contrary to research and hugely disruptive — in the worst sense of the word. Far from the benevolent, pragmatic centrist his campaign likes to portray,  Bloomberg and his chancellors reigned over NYC public schools for 12 years with an iron fist, autocratically imposing destructive reforms with little concern for how they upended the lives of communities, students and teachers.

You want specifics?

On class size:

In many respects, his policies contradicted his campaign promises. When he first ran for Mayor in 2002, he didn’t mention the wrecking-ball he later deployed on the school system, but instead pledged to implement a proven reform: to lower class sizes in all schools to 20 students or less in grades K-3. Class-size reduction has been shown to benefit all kids but especially students of color, who make up the majority of kids in New York City schools.

Instead of following through on this promise, subsequent audits from the state and city comptrollers showed, his administration misused hundreds of millions of state dollars meant for class-size reduction. As a result, class sizes stagnated and then rose sharply in his second term.  

 In 2011, at a speech at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Bloomberg announced that if he had his way, he would double class sizes by firing half the teachers. He would “weed out all the bad ones” and pay the rest more. It would be “good deal for the students,” he insisted. What he didn’t mention, of course, is that his own daughters attended a private school where class sizes averaged 14-18 student per class, while over 300,000 NYC public school students were enrolled in classes of 30 or more. By 2013, his last year in office, class sizes in the early grades in public schools had risen to the highest levels in 15 years. 

Testing Mania

Instead of focusing his efforts on improving learning conditions in the schools, Bloomberg and his hand-picked chancellors ratcheted up pressure on students, teachers and schools by basing their fates on standardized tests. 

One of the first indications of Bloomberg’s ruthlessness occurred in 2004, when he precipitously fired two of his own appointees to the mayoral-controlled school board, called the Panel on Educational Policy, after they expressed opposition to his plan to hold back third-graders on the basis of their test scores alone. This event was soon known as the Monday night massacre.

Grade retention based on test scores has no backing in research, which instead shows that holding back kids leads to lower achievement and higher drop-out rates, as he was warned in a letter — signed by 107 educators, advocates and academics, including four past presidents of the American Education Research Association, the chair of the National Academy of Sciences Committee on the Appropriate Use of Educational Testing, and several members of the Board on Testing and Assessment of the National Research Council. 

Yet Bloomberg went on to expand this regressive policy to students in all grades through 8. He was also careful from then on to appoint individuals whose jobs were reliant on city funding or donations from his personal fortune to the school board.

By 2012, his administration finally ended the grade retention policy when, just as experts had predicted, the city’s Department of Education (DOE) found that it had indeed led to higher drop-out rates. Their own analysis revealed that 46 percent of children who were held back more than once had left high school before graduating, compared to 29 percent who were held back once and 11 percent who were not held back at all.

In 2007, Bloomberg also implemented merit pay for teachers based on student test score data. After the city spent $52 million on the merit pay scheme, it was abandoned four years later, when it was found to be ineffective in raising achievement, according to several independent studies.

Intensified School Segregation

Bloomberg’s over-emphasis on high-stakes testing exacerbated stratification and segregation across the school system. Studies show that while he was mayor, he closed many zoned, comprehensive high schools and increased the number of selective or “screened” schools. The percentage of high schools designed to admit a balanced number of high, low and average-achieving students dropped from 55.4 percent to only 27.7 percent by 2009.

He also closed or phased out more than 100 schools that enrolled a disproportionate share of black and low-income students, causing displacement and uncertainty for tens of thousands of students, as well as the loss of permanent positions for many of their teachers. At the same time, hundreds of small schools opened, many of them funded by the Gates Foundation. They refused to enroll any students with special needs or English language learners. Their openly exclusionary admission policies prompted parents to file a complaint with the Office of Civil Rights of the US Department of Education in 2006.  

Though this official exclusion policy eventually ceased, many of the new small schools adopted either “screened admissions,” which are dependent on student grades and test scores, or required students’ families to attend information sessions as part of the application process.  The demand that parents attend these sessions at schools sometimes miles away from where they lived or worked was a serious barrier for many of those with little available time or disposable income.

As more and more small schools opened, many of the larger, unselective high schools that remained in place were further destabilized, as they became even more overcrowded with the high-needs students, many of them recent immigrants still learning English, whom the new schools failed to enroll.

Under Bloomberg, the number of specialized science high schools that base admissions solely on one high-stakes test — an exam that has never been evaluated for racial or gender bias — grew from three to eight schools. At Stuyvesant, the city’s most selective high school, the number of black students admitted fell precipitously from 109 in the year 2000  to only seven in 2010, out of a yearly class of approximately 1,000 students.

Charter School Champion

But perhaps the most controversial aspect of the Bloomberg years is how he encouraged the growth of privately-run charter schools by spending hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to build them separate facilities or even more frequently, give them space inside public school buildings for free. This too-often forced public schools, which already inhabited those buildings, to lose their libraries, art or music rooms and sufficient access to their dining halls and gyms.

As was frequently noted, NYC charter schools tend to enroll far fewer of the neediest students, including English language learners, students with severe disabilities and homeless kids. Many had “no excuses” disciplinary policies, leading to high rates of suspension and teacher attrition.

There's so much more including likening our union to the NRA and the Cathie Black debacle.