Mike Klonsky's Small Talk - Going Ga-Ga Over Mayor Bloomberg's Version of Small Schools

From Mike Klonsky's Small Talk - Going ga-ga over Mayor Bloomberg's version of small schools:

July 2nd

What did they expect?

The Bloomberg/Klein/Gates crowd are all going ga-ga and patting each other on the tush over the news that New York's new heavily-funded small schools have produced higher graduation rates than the city average. Well, duh! What did they expect?

From the Post:

"We've got to tell everyone in the country to throw away excuses and throw away low expectations," Schools Chancellor Joel Klein said at a press conference at the Evander Childs Educational Campus School in The Bronx. That school, which Klein's mother attended half a century ago, saw its graduation rates surge from 31 percent in 2002 to an estimated 80 percent this year.

Times reporter Julie Bosman says the announcement "appeared to solidify the first signs of progress in the city’s new small schools that came last year when a group of 15 schools that opened in 2002 graduated their first senior classes."

“I think it demonstrates that this problem is solvable,” said the Gates Foundation's Marie Groark . “Schools that New York City has taken leadership in developing are a critical element in any city’s strategy in improving high school graduation rates.”

The Mayor's small schools, which began opening in 2002, were funded by the New Century High Schools project, a $30 million collaboration among the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation and the Open Society Institute. The Gates Foundation has invested more than $100 million into city schools. Most of the money has been channeled through the New Visions organization.

"It's really quite amazing, and it says that if you really make changes, these kids can be educated. And for so many years, the conventional wisdom was, 'Oh, they're minorities, they can't be educated,' and I think that is such an outrage," Mayor Bloomberg said on weekly WABC radio show.

It's really not so "amazing," Mr. Mayor. We've been creating good small schools for more than 30 years. I hope you're not trying to ride that horse as a presidential candidate. You see, small schools have always produced better results. They did not begin with your administration. What you and Mr. Gates did was to make small schools a top-down market-driven reform which actively discriminates against minority and special-needs children. Comparing your new schools to the rest of the district's huge, traditional high schools, which continue to be warehouses for the neediest children, and patting yourselves on the back when the data is released to the press, is simply to reinforce your two-tier system of education. Shame on you.

“These schools are artificial environments,” says David C. Bloomfield, the president of the citywide parent council on high schools and an education professor at Brooklyn College. Mr. Bloomfield filed a complaint with the United States Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights last year about the policy of allowing small schools to exclude some students during their early years.

Leonie Haimson sent me this blog post from NYC Public School Parents:

First of all, these comparisons assume that the students who attended both sets of schools were similar. Yet the independent evaluation done by Policy Studies Associates (in pdf) revealed that the students who were admitted to the small schools in all respects were much more likely to succeed. (This study was suppressed by New Visions until a copy was leaked by a critic to the NY Times in 2005.)

Historical Amnesia

Deb Meier reminds a young small-schools teacher and others with "historical amnesia" that small schools did not begin with Bloomberg/Klein.

In a piece on Bloomberg’s ambitions for the Presidency and another on the High School of International Business and Finance, NY Times reporter Sara Rimer suggests that Bloomberg/Klein are the first to worry about how to educate the kids at the bottom, the first to develop small schools, the first to be enamored of test score accountability, the first to eliminate “social promotion” and so on. How does she explain that half of NYC's kids were starting high school at least one year over-age in the late 80's. Shouldn’t a fact-checker catch such historical untruths? My young friend’s ignorance is forgivable, the NY Times reporter’s is less so.