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Leadership, Law, and Policy
November 18, 2009
At this point in the Mayor’s remaking of our school system, claims of dramatic academic gains seem built on sand.
Analyses prepared for Assemblyman James Brennan by legislative aide Shawn Campbell demonstrate that the Bloomberg administration grossly overstates the impact that the reforms have had on New York City’s student achievement. State test scores are tainted by the exams’ designed-in flaws. Progress Reports’ school grades are malleable, rising or falling according to administration convenience. Graduation rates are untethered from college and career readiness. They are the end result of suspect strategies called “credit accumulation” and “knowledge management,” not subject mastery and understanding.
But the Mayor has a renewed opportunity to value learning over his well-known data obsession. Like Midas, who confused gold for true wealth, the DOE can redeem the promise of mayoral control by focusing on instruction. A vast literature exists for what works. New funding is promoting necessary research and development. Structural innovations like accountability, teacher merit pay, charter schools, and vouchers show varying, if any, success and, even if effective, have no capacity to directly improve learning. The Mayor’s cheap trick — hands off schools, just measure their outcomes — is an irresponsible abdication of leadership. It betrays his and his Chancellor’s instructional ignorance.
In Beth Fertig’s excellent new book, Why cant U teach me 2 read?, the WNYC reporter shows most of the Chancellor’s minions avoiding classrooms as they distantly crunch numbers. Her main heroes, besides the indomitable students who persevere amid scholastic chaos, are educators outside the system who rehabilitate its human road kill. They use proven instructional methods like Orton-Gillingham for dyslexic students to move pupils from failure to functionality. The road is tortuous — learning is hard for all, the teachers and the taught — but stands in stark contrast to the self-congratulatory mantra of accountability issuing from those at the top.
DOE headquarters staff at the Tweed Courthouse seem bent on “gotcha” tactics, identifying failing schools based on radar readouts, unconcerned about realities on the ground. Instructional support is outsourced. The main educational job at Tweed is to create untested new schools to replace those that are closed. And closure, in the weird, sad logic of these bureaucrats, is deemed success; a system proud of its ashes.
Lost in this technocratic activity is an important change in principals’ habits during the Bloomberg years. A mountain of evidence suggests that instead of frequent in-class observations, principals now remain in their offices poring over data or in meetings with outside data monitors. Or they are wasting time on the road, traveling to yet more meetings as members of a far flung network of schools.
To those who argue that this evidence is only anecdotal, there are three responses. The first is that total classroom observation time is not measured by the DOE, so that the data’s absence is a product of the DOE’s own disinterest. Second, something’s gotta give! With their aforementioned new duties, principals’ time has been reallocated. From what? From their presence in classrooms, lunchrooms, and schoolyards where the kids and teachers are; where essential, non-quantitative data are gathered by every good principal for staff evaluation and coaching, for face-to-face student contact, for knowing what hasn’t been entered into ARIS, the data system used at Tweed to fashion decisions. Finally, this seems to be a national trend. Even The New Teacher Project, an accountability-friendly organization, decries in “The Widget Effect,” its recent report (which did not include New York in its sample), principals’ failure to make adequate visits to the classrooms of new and developing teachers.
Yale political science and anthropology professor James C. Scott describes in Seeing Like a State how public officials create systems to prioritize desired data, obscuring other potentially useful information. That is Bloomberg’s hubris. In depending so much on a monoculture of standardized tests to derive his impressions, he has forgotten — if he ever knew or cared — that test scores don’t equate with rounded learning. Tests do not measure the true heartbeat of intellectual pursuit. If the Mayor wants to change education, not merely schools, he will read Fertig’s book and understand that redemption is found only in a commitment to quality instruction.
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November 18th, 2009 4:05 pm
“The Mayor’s cheap trick — hands off schools, just measure their outcomes — is an irresponsible abdication of leadership. It betrays his and his Chancellor’s instructional ignorance.”
Oh, yeah!
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November 18th, 2009 4:55 pm
Amen! In a strong professional learning community, the principal is a welcome and frequent part of the classroom.
Why can’t both be done? Top-down accountability, and bottom-up attention to the massive amounts of qualitative data [the kind only observable through regular classroom visits] good principals review on a regular basis.
I’d like it if the mayor and the chancellor would not tell principals and teachers how to do their jobs. Just come up with a strong set of outcomes that we can all agree on (that’s a huge sticking point right now of course, and the national trend seems to be finally moving away from standardized testing as the sole purpose of education), provide the necessary resources to execute, and, yes, hold school leaders accountable for making it happen. And stay out of the way.
I can’t help but comment that my vision here sounds like the way a good charter school board functions.
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November 18th, 2009 11:13 pm
Finally! Someone get’s it.
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November 19th, 2009 5:17 am
Mr. Bloomfield,
You make some good points, but I wish you had taken the next step and asked why this is so, and for whose benefit. As a public school parent and teacher, I can assure you it’s not for the benefit of students.
As someone with firsthand experience of the pedagogical and professional deformities caused by mayoral control, as well as a citizen who has observed corporate control flooding into every aspect of American life, I’d suggest that it’s about power and control of the few over the many. This is the case everywhere else in our society, so why should education be exempt, notwithstanding the Orwellian PR echo chamber that dominates most discussion of urban education today?
Bloomberg, Klein and the other supporters of mayoral control have neither classroom experience nor much concern for what happens there, so long as it’s under their thumb. Revealingly, the current head of the New Teacher Project is a former labor relations lawyer; even Michelle Rhee stopped in the classroom long enough to have a cup of coffee before going on to “better things.”
Central to their agenda is the need to impose on the classroom the neo-Taylorist control of the work process. Classrooms have been one of the last places where the people who do the work have been the one’s who had some control over it; the business model of eduction is largely about overturning that, centralizing power and policy formation while enforcing local responsibility for each school to “hit their numbers.”
Unfortunately, too many people following education play the ingenue when it comes to the (unavoidable) politics of it. And when we’re talking about politics, we’re talking about power: who has it, how they get it, use it and keep it, and in whose interests they use it.
Viewed from that perspective, what should we conclude about the current regime?
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November 20th, 2009 8:45 am
Thanks again for an incisive article. I am not against testing. But this recent onslaught of incessant testing at the expense of instruction and actual learning is short-sighted and non-productive. I’m concerned with the large amounts of money spent on the morass of testing, analysis and surveys when the money (and time!) could be better spend in class instruction, curriculum, supplies and smaller class sizes.
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November 20th, 2009 2:51 pm
As a retired principal I completely agree that the main responsibility of the principal is to improve instruction and learning by being present and very visible in the school. Classroom visits and well prepared classroom observations are critical. These observations drive professional development, and enable individual teacher growth which ultimate greatly benefit students. Given all the conflicting demands on school leaders, time for classroom visits and observations must be a high priority. The additional claims on the principal for such tasks and out-of-school meetings as described by Professor Bloomfield further delimit time for being visibly present in the school
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May 2nd, 2010 1:15 am
I am an old friend/student/mentee of Dr Costelloe and was wondering if anyone knows where I might find him. My name is Eric F. Coppolino and my business email is dreams@planetwaves.net
Among other things I would love it if he made it to the Dewey reunion next month. If you see this and you know him please send this his way.
Many thanks
Eric F Coppolino
John Dewey High School class of 1981
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