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By
all accounts, the schools in New York City are in serious trouble.
Although the New York City school system includes some of the
nation's best and most competitive public schools, the average City
school falls short by almost any measure. In 1998, for example, only
63 percent of New York City's high school seniors met the new
standards for the Regents English exam, which are soon to be a
requirement for graduation, compared to 73 percent in the state as a
whole and to 83 percent in wealthy, suburban districts. Moreover,
the New York City school system is plagued by shortages of qualified
teachers and of adequate facilities. For example, a report recently
released by the New York City Comptroller finds that the percentage
of science teachers lacking state certification nearly doubled from
16.5 percent in 1992-93 to 30.4 percent in 1996-97, and that the
percentage of math teachers lacking certification increased from 20
to 23 percent over the same period. Some experts also claim that
even if New York City's Board of Education were able to spend $11
billion to build and renovate schools over the next five years --
more than double what it spent over the last five -- it would still
have to place tens of thousands of students in cramped or decrepit
classrooms and to deprive whole neighborhoods of required services,
such as pre-kindergarten.
Many factors account for the poor performance of New York City's
schools, including, among other things, the politics of state
educational aid and the high cost of providing education in the
city. Despite its poor performance, for example, New York City
receives less aid per pupil from New York State than does the
average district. Moreover, many scholars have shown that the cost
of education, which is analogous to the cost of living, varies
widely from one school district to another. In particular, higher
wages or a higher concentration of students from disadvantaged
backgrounds make it more expensive to reach any given level of
educational performance. Thus, the relatively high wages in the New
York City region combined with the City's relatively high
concentration of students from poor families, from single-parent
families, with limited English proficiency, and with disabilities
results in educational costs that are far higher than those of other
districts in the state. Professors William Duncombe and John Yinger
of the Maxwell School at Syracuse University have estimated, for
example, that New York City must spend about $3.50 per pupil to have
the same impact on student performance as the average district
receives for $1.00.
The poor performance of the City's schools is widely known and is
often the subject of commentary by educators and public officials.
On April 22, 1999, Rudolph W. Giuliani, the Mayor of New York City,
declared that the New York City school system is "dysfunctional." He
went on to say: "The system is just plain terrible, it makes no
sense, and the end result of it is that if this were a business
system, it would be in bankruptcy. The whole system should be blown
up and a new one should be put in its place."
The Mayor's hyperbole demonstrates the depth of his frustration, and
indeed that of many other people, about the apparent intractability
of this problem.(1)
This frustration has mounted over the years as dramatic steps have
been taken in the City's schools, apparently without major impact.
Many other dramatic steps have been proposed. Unfortunately,
however, evidence for evaluating alternative proposals is severely
limited and there is no consensus on the best way to proceed.
Nevertheless, the debate has started to focus on four general
approaches that are widely seen as the most likely to make a
difference. These approaches are whole-school reform, charter
schools, vouchers, and administrative reforms. The issue facing the
City is which one, or which combination, of these approaches to
pursue.
Whole-School Reform
Because they offer the promise of help for low-performing inner-city
schools around the country, comprehensive or whole-school reform
programs have become one of the hottest topics in educational
policy. Thousands of schools nationwide have turned to one of these
programs. In 1994, Congress encouraged adoption of these programs by
allowing Title I funds to be used for comprehensive school reform.
Moreover, in 1998, the federal government passed the Comprehensive
School Reform Demonstration Program which provided an additional
$150 million to assist schools in implementing "research-based,
school-wide" reforms.
Starting in the late 1980s, the New York City Board of Education has
experimented with five different comprehensive school improvement
programs: Accelerated Schools, the Comer School Development Project,
Effective Schools, Efficacy, and Success for All. Most of the
schools that implemented one of these programs were identified as
low-performing schools by the New York State Education Department's
Registration Review process. Schools identified for registration
review were encouraged by state and district officials to adopt a
whole-school reform program, and, in fact, 38 of the 64 schools
identified prior to 1994 chose to do so.
The Success for All program, for example, was initiated in Baltimore
in 1986 and now is used in hundreds of schools in twenty-three
states. This program builds on the philosophy that all children are
capable of learning; focuses on reading, which is seen central to a
student's success in primary grades; and employs both one-on-one
tutoring in class and a family support team for issues that arise
outside of class. The intensive reading instruction is combined with
frequent assessment to identify, and channel additional help to,
students who are having difficulty. The family support team works
with social service agencies and parents to solve social problems
that are obstacles to school success. In recent years, Success for
All has been expanded to include curricula in math, social studies,
and science.(2)
Because they engage students, parents, teachers, and administrators
in a common effort, these reform programs are often energizing and
popular. How well do they actually work? In February, 1999, the
Washington-based American Institutes for Research (AIR) released a
report, commissioned by five leading education groups, that
evaluates twenty-four existing reform programs. The conclusions of
the scholars who wrote this report and others are telling. According
to a story in Education Week by reporter Lynn Olson:
More than anything, experts said last week, the study underscores
the need for strong, third-party evaluations of school-wide reform
models. "The fact is that the capacity to do this kind of research
is very limited in this country," said Marc S. Tucker, a founder of
America's Choice, one of the 24 models reviewed. "I believe that
it's very important for the federal government to put a fair amount
of money on the table to make this kind of research possible." Ellen
Condliffe Lagemann, the president of the National Academy of
Education, a group of education researchers and scholars, agreed.
"It's amazing how little evaluation there is," she said. "Since the
early 20th century, the people who have peddled the educational
reform strategies that we all hear about tend to be successful
because they're the best entrepreneurs. It doesn't necessarily have
anything to do with any research credibility."
This lack of evidence is reflected in the fact that only one of the
five programs implemented in New York City, Success for All, has
been subjected to an independently conducted evaluation with a
control group. Moreover, the independent studies of Success for All
have not found unequivocal evidence of program effectiveness. One
study, by Professors Steven Ross and Lana Smith, matched 109
students in kindergarten through second grade in a Success for All
school with 111 similar students in another school. Among
kindergarteners, students in the Success for All schools did better
on 2 out of 3 tests of language skills, but among second graders, no
differences between the schools could be detected. In a survey of
independent evaluations of Success for All, researchers at the
University of Maryland, headed by Professor Elizabeth Jones, found
that, relative to comparison students, Success for All students
performed better in two cases, the same in two, and worse in two.
The five programs implemented in New York City are not the only ones
available. In fact, the AIR report examined 24 such programs. Only
three of these programs, Success for All plus two not currently used
in New York City (Direct Instruction and High Schools that Work)
were said to be supported by strong evidence that they improve
student achievement. It should be noted that Success for All
achieved this rating despite the ambiguity found by the University
of Maryland study, apparently because some studies of this program
show clear student improvement. Five other programs, including the
Comer School Development Program, were found to have some
"promising" evidence of an impact on student achievement, whatever
that means. Evidence for the effectiveness of the Accelerated
Schools program was rated "marginal," and the other two programs
used in New York City were not rated at all.
Charter Schools
Charter
schools are public schools operated under a contract with some
governing agency, usually not the local school board, and free of
many state and local educational laws and regulations. They appeared
on the scene in the early 1990s and have taken off rapidly since
then. According to the U.S. Department of Education, by the fall of
1997 approximately 700 charter schools were operating in 29 states
and the District of Columbia, and this growth is likely to
accelerate over the next few years. Charter schools enroll only
about 0.5 percent of public school students in the 17 states where
charter schools were operating in the 1996-97 school year, but over
100,000 students attend charter schools. Charter school enrollment
varies from less than one-tenth of one percent of the state's public
school enrollment in Florida, Illinois, and Louisiana to more than
two percent of the state's enrollment in Arizona.
Charter schools are public schools, but what sets them apart is
their charter -- a contract with a state or local agency that
provides them with public funds for a specified time period. The
charter itself states the terms under which the school can be held
accountable for improving student performance and achieving goals
set out in the charter. This contract frees charter developers from
a number of regulations that otherwise apply to public schools. The
freedoms accorded to charter schools have raised an array of hopes
and fears about the consequences of introducing charter schools into
the public system. Some people hope that charter schools developed
by local educators, parents, community members, school boards, and
other sponsors might provide both new models of schooling and
competitive pressures on public schools that will improve the
current system. Others fear that charter schools might, at best, be
little more than escape valves that relieve pressure for genuine
reform and, at worst, add to centrifugal forces that threaten to
pull public education apart.
Time will tell which hopes and fears are realized. Presently, the
rapid expansion of charters testifies to widespread excitement about
the charter idea, but it tells us little about the reality of
charter schools. In fact, there is not yet any credible evidence
concerning the impact of charter schools on the achievement of
students who attend them or on the regular public schools that these
students leave behind.
New York
was relatively slow to get on the charter school bandwagon, but in
1998 the New York State legislature passed, and Governor George
Pataki signed, the New York Charter Schools Act. This act authorizes
the establishment of charter schools under contracts issuable by the
State Board of Regents, which is an independent governmental
organization that oversees education in New York State. As described
on the internet by the Charter School Research Project, each charter
school in New York will run as a non-profit, public "education
corporation," with its own Board of Trustees. While under the
oversight of its Sponsors and the Regents, it will have considerable
autonomy to govern the school, guided by the objectives in the
charter/contract. Charter public schools must be non-sectarian,
cannot charge tuition, must accept all students, cannot
discriminate, and are entitled to utilize all of the state's
per-pupil aid allotment corresponding to each student enrolled. They
also are allowed to raise money from private sources. When
applications are greater than slots in the school, a lottery system
must be used to determine admission. School districts are
responsible for ensuring that public funds associated with each
student follow that student.
The law has been written to give charter public schools a great deal
of flexibility to deal with legal responsibilities in
transportation, special education, buildings, and other services.
Likewise, services contracted with districts will be "at cost," and
charter schools must meet the same health and safety, civil rights,
and student assessment requirements applicable to other public
schools. A charter school is exempt from all other state and local
laws, rules, regulations or policies governing public or private
schools, boards of education, and school districts.
Charter schools must design educational programs to meet or exceed
the student performance standards adopted by the Regents. Regents
exams are required, to the same extent as in other public schools.
Charter schools can grant diplomas. Charter public school
applications can be submitted by a variety of groups, individually
and in conjunction with each other. Applications can be for new
"start-up" schools and for the "conversion" of existing public
schools to charter status. Applications must be submitted to Charter
Sponsoring Agencies: a local district school board, the Board of
Regents, or the State University of New York (SUNY) Board of
Trustees. Applications to "convert" existing public schools must go
to the local District school board, or to the Schools Chancellor in
the case of New York City, and require a majority of parents in that
school to favor conversion.
The Regents has final oversight responsibilities over all charter
schools. Charters are granted for up to 5 years, and then must come
up for renewal and review. Charters can be revoked. The law allows
for an unlimited number of "conversion" charter public schools. In
addition, the SUNY Board and the Board of Regents are each allowed
to Sponsor up to 50 "start-up" charter public schools. Nationally,
about 25% of all charter public schools are "converted" public
schools. Employees at charter schools are officially employees of
the non-profit, education corporation set to run the school.
Teachers are to be certified, with a few carefully limited
exceptions. Employees of "converted" public schools are bound to the
local bargaining unit and existing bargaining agreement. Employees
of "start-up" schools are not immediately bound to local bargaining
units or existing agreements, unless the student population is over
250. For those not bound, teachers have the right to bargain as in
any public school. Charter public school employees must be given
standard retirement benefits.
Finally, the New York legislation sets up the Stimulus Fund, for the
assistance of those in need of support to effectively get charter
schools running. Likewise, this law makes New York State eligible to
get a share of the $100 million set aside by the U.S. Congress for
the purposes of helping the start-up of charter public schools.
Because this legislation is so new, neither New York City nor any
other place in New York State has any experience with charter
schools. Nevertheless, several public officials have expressed
enthusiasm about the idea. New York City Schools Chancellor Rudy
Crew has said that "Charter schools offer much more benefit to the
overall conversation about competition in the public school sector"
than do vouchers (which are considered in the next section). He has
proposed converting 11 existing public schools to charter status and
establishing several new, industry-specific charter schools in
music, business, automotive technology, and animation arts. Some of
the conversions may be completed as early as September 1999, whereas
the first new charter schools are scheduled to open in September
2000.
Mayor Guliani has proposed spending $2.5 million on charter schools
in each year for the next two years. Most of this money will be used
to support local efforts to start charter schools. However, as
pointed out by the New York City Independent Budget Office (IBO), a
non-profit research organization, the budgetary impact could be much
larger that this if charter schools are successful in attracting
students, and associated state aid dollars, away from regular public
schools. IBO further points out that with reduced resources, it may
be harder for the Board of Education to compete with charter schools
by improving the quality of the education it offers. In addition, if
those drawn to charter schools are disproportionately students with
greater ability or motivation, the average cost associated with
improving academic achievement in regular public schools, both to
make them competitive and to meet new standards, will rise.
In late April, officials from the Mayor's office, the Board of
Education, and the United Federation of Teachers met to negotiate
the conversion to charter schools of the 11 public school identified
by Dr. Crew, and in particular to negotiate teachers' rights in the
new schools. According to Randi Weingarten, president of the United
Federation of Teachers, this session was intended to put the final
touches on a deal allowing charter school teachers to retain their
pension and health benefits. "We were worried about the good
teachers fleeing these good schools because they didn't have their
basic pensions, their basic health care," Ms. Weingarten said.
However, the session broke down when city officials said that the
newly independent schools would have the power to give their
teachers a raise -- a possibility that would undermine negotiations
with other unions. While union and board officials believe such
salary increases are unlikely because of tight budgets, city
officials said the schools could get private grants. James F.
Hanley, the Mayor's labor negotiator said that the city did not want
salaries to be raised unless teachers increased their productivity.
"Every other union will say you are giving them more money without
increase in productivity," Hanley said. "We don't bargain in a
vacuum. Everyone is looking over their shoulder."
Deputy Schools Chancellor Lewis H. Spense was stunned by this
reaction. "This just strikes me as a bizarre concern," Spense said.
"They seem prepared to scuttle the whole charter movement over
this." Spense accused mayoral aides of trying to impose bureaucratic
regulations on schools that are supposed to be free of red tape. "If
you start regulating them, you will destroy the whole purpose of
charter schools," Spense said. "The whole purpose is to get the
heavy hand of bureaucracy off of them so they can flourish. This is
the bureaucratic deadening of the charter schools we have been
fighting."
Vouchers
In his
State of the City address in January, 1999, Mayor Guiliani proposed
an experiment with school vouchers in one of the City's 32 community
school districts. The Mayor said that his inspiration was a program
in Milwaukee that uses tax dollars to send students below a certain
income level to private and parochial schools of their choice. About
6 percent of the public school population participates in the
Milwaukee program. This type of voucher plan would create
competition, allow poor families to have the same choice in
selecting schools for their children as rich families have, and
force the city's failing public schools to improve, the Mayor said.
He insisted that it was clearly worth trying in one district. He set
aside $12 million in his budget plan to entice school districts to
participate.
This plan could not be implemented without the approval of Schools
Chancellor Crew and the Board of Education. This approval was not
forthcoming. "I heard him say something about taking a pill to
suspend disbelief and it certainly is something he's asking everyone
in the city to do," Dr. Crew said, referring to a line in the
Mayor's speech. "Charter schools offer much more benefit to the
overall conversation about competition in the public school sector."
City Council Speaker, Peter F. Vallone and many educators also
criticized the plan, saying it would drain scarce funds from
struggling public schools.
Civil
libertarians and teacher groups challenged the Wisconsin program in
court, saying it violated the First Amendment's separation of church
and state. But the Wisconsin Supreme Court upheld Milwaukee's
nine-year-old program in June, 1998, saying that it did not "have
the primary effect of advancing religion." The program prohibits
private schools from requiring students to participate in religious
activities, and Guiliani hinted that his own voucher program would
have a similar provision. "The children are not in any way required
to take religious education," he said. "People who oppose it will
find all kinds of reasons why it isn't working. It makes a lot of
sense though, doesn't it. To create that kind of competition." Even
if a voucher program had this provision, however, it is not clear
whether it would be constitutional in New York, where the state
constitution specifically prohibits the use of public money
"directly or indirectly" for schools under the control of "any
religious denomination." Thus a voucher plan might have to be
limited to private schools without any religious affiliation.
Guiliani's praise for voucher programs -- which are strongly
supported by Republican leaders nationwide -- contrasted sharply
with comments he made in 1995 during a speech to a teachers' union.
At the time, he said that vouchers would be "a terrible mistake"
because they would bleed the public schools of needed financing. But
the following year, when the school system was struggling with
severe overcrowding, Guiliani briefly contemplated using public
funds to send 1,000 students to parochial schools. Facing criticism,
the Mayor instead found private financing for the project, mostly
from foundations and Wall Street Corporations. Asked why Guiliani
was now strongly advocating a voucher program, his press secretary,
Coleen Roche, stressed that he wanted it in only one school
district, as an experiment. When Guiliani spoke out against vouchers
in the past, he was concerned about legal roadblocks, she said.
Anthony P. Coles, a senior adviser to the Mayor, said that the
Wisconsin Supreme Court's recent decision to uphold the Milwaukee
program was "very helpful" and that New York's program would be
modeled on it. Despite Dr. Crew's apparent reservations, Coles
expressed confidence that the Board of Education would forge ahead
with a pilot voucher program. Since Guiliani wanted only a pilot
program, it would not need approval from Albany, he said. "The
important point is that we'll try it and see whether it should or
shouldn't be expanded," Coles said. "Maybe it's an idea that will
not be terrific, but we'll never know that until we try it." Ms.
Weingarten rejected this view. She said her organization would fight
a voucher program "in every way we can." She added, "Vouchers can
never educate all the children you need to education, and they badly
drain much needed support from underfinanced public schools."
Debate over Mayor Guliani's proposal continued throughout the first
few months of 1999. The Mayor intensified his push for the proposal
by sending his aids to convince the school board's seven members to
vote for the plan. By early March, three members were opposed,
three, including the Mayor's two appointees, were in favor, and one
was undecided. Meanwhile Chancellor Crew, who was hired with
Guliani's blessing in 1995, spearheaded the opposition. At one
point, a person close to Crew told The New York Times,
anonymously, that the Chancellor would resign if the voucher plan
were passed by the Board of Education. "The Chancellor has been
clear with his board, with the Mayor and with his staff that in
principle he could never support vouchers in the New York City
public school system," the person said. "He feels that it is the
beginning of the end of public education, period, if you start
funneling taxpayer dollars into private education." The Chancellor
himself weighed in a few days later. "Always in your life you come
up to the proverbial hill to die on," he said. "This is mine."
After a meeting between the Mayor and the Chancellor on March 9, Dr.
Crew officially withdrew his threat to resign -- at least
temporarily -- and said that he and Mayor Guliani would try to work
out their differences over using City money to send public-school
students to private and religious schools. This change of heart came
as the Mayor promised that he would not try to bring the issue to a
vote by the Board of Education, although he reserved the right to do
so later. Both men seemed to gain from this compromise. Dr. Crew
could contend that he had emerged as a principled defender of public
education. Mr. Guliani could argue that he, too, had ceded no
ground, a stand that could help to raise his stature within a
national Republican Party enamored of school-voucher programs.
However, interpretation of this compromise seemed to differ between
the two men. A few days after the March 9th meeting, Dr.
Crew said that the voucher issue was "behind us" and "off the radar
screen." In contrast, Mr. Guiliani insisted that vouchers were still
in his plans. "It's not off the agenda; it's very much on the
agenda," Mr. Guliani said.
In a final push for vouchers at the end of April, Mayor Guliani
proposed a pilot voucher plan to be run out of City Hall, with no
participation by the Board of Education. This plan called for
tuition payments of about $7,000 to as many as 3,000 public school
students so they could attend private and parochial schools in the
city. This plan faces serious practical and legal challenges.
Although Mr. Coles asserted that the City's lawyers had determined
this approach was legal, Board officials disagreed. Moreover, the
plan appears to require the cooperation of at least one of the
City's 32 community superintendents for the purposes of selecting
the voucher recipients. It is not at all clear that this cooperation
would be forthcoming. According to Mr. Cole, however, "It would be
valuable to have a district volunteer to participate in the program,
but the corporation counsel has been asked by the Mayor to develop
other appropriate legal alternatives to make tuition vouchers
available to people who want them."
While Mayor Guliani and Chancellor Crew battle over the Mayor's
proposal for a publicly financed voucher program, thousands of New
York City schoolchildren are already taking part in similar programs
run with private donations. The Student-Sponsor Partnership began
offering financial aid to disadvantaged high school youths in 1986.
Since then, the group has sent 3,029 students, mostly blacks and
Hispanics, to private schools at a cost of $26.9 million. Two years
ago, the School Choice Scholarships Foundation championed by Mr.
Guliani began offering vouchers to low-income students in the second
through fifth grades. Since then, it has committed about $11 million
in private donations to 2,220 students. The typical voucher in these
programs is about $2,000 per year, which is enough for some Catholic
schools but does not come close to covering the tuition for an elite
private school, which can approach $20,000.
Just last hear, the Children's Scholarship Fund announced a national
voucher program financed by Theodore J. Forstmann, a Wall Street
financier, and John T. Walton, heir to the Wal-Mart fortune. This
program, which applies to low-income, public-school students in
kindergarten through eighth grade, brought a flood of applications
from around the country, including 168,000, about one-third of the
total, from New York City residents. As Mayor Guliani said at an
April 22nd ceremony announcing the 2,200 winners, who were selected
by lottery, "That's a remarkable number of parents and children who
want to be in a school other than the school that they're in."
Meanwhile, scholars and educators have be actively debating the
impact of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, which has been in
place for nine years. Scholars agree that this program has spurred
the creation of private schools, given low-income parents new
choices, and bolstered many existing private schools, especially
Catholic schools. However, there is no agreement about impacts of
the program on either the students who participate or on the public
schools they leave behind. In part, this uncertainty is due to the
nature of the available information. As one leading scholar,
Professor Henry Levin of Stanford University, puts it, "Among the
limitations in drawing conclusions based on this experiment are the
high attrition rates of students, the fact that relatively few
schools participated, and the very substantial problems of missing
data on test scores and student background variables."
Nevertheless, several scholars have attempted to evaluate the
Milwaukee program -- and come up with widely varying results. One
study compared the achievement of program participants with
statistically similar students in the Milwaukee public schools over
a five-year period and found no significant differences. Another
study compared two groups of students who had been granted vouchers:
those accepted at oversubscribed private schools and those rejected
by these schools who stayed in the Milwaukee public schools. The
authors of this study argued that the assignment to these groups was
random because oversubscribed schools had to select applicants using
a lottery. They found that in the third and fourth year of
participation in the program, the students in private schools
performed significantly better than the students in the "control"
group. However, Professor Levin and other scholars have pointed out
that this methodology is flawed because many students, presumably
those performing worst, drop out of the program and because students
who are rejected at one private school may attend another.
The most careful study of the Milwaukee program was conducted by
Professor Cecilia Rouse of Princeton University. Using sophisticated
statistical techniques to account for unobserved differences between
students, Professor Rouse found, in Professor Levin's words, "a
modest advantage at the private schools with respect to mathematics
achievement, a differential gain of about 1.5 percentile points per
year over public schools. She found no difference in reading
achievement." As Professor Rouse recognizes, however, this
conclusion is limited to the students who applied to private schools
in Milwaukee, who probably are relatively motivated students with
parents who place a relatively high value on education, and may not
generalize to other groups of students, even in Milwaukee. Moreover,
neither the Rouse study nor any other sheds light on the ability of
school vouchers to force improvements in public schools.
Administrative Reform
A
very different approach to reform is to alter the administrative
structure of the New York City schools. Both Mayor Guiliani and
Council Speaker Vallone have recommended dissolving the seven-member
Board of Education.(3)
Like previous mayors, Mr. Guliani argues that the Board of Education
serves the political interests of the five borough presidents more
than the school children it should represent. (The Board has a
representative from each borough plus two mayoral appointees.) As a
result, Mr. Guliani would like to replace the Board with a new
Department of Education, led by a commissioner instead of a schools
chancellor. Unlike the chancellor, who is chosen by the Board, the
commissioner would be appointed by the Mayor with the consent of the
City Council. Under this system, the Mayor would bear ultimate
responsibility for the system's performance, with sweeping new
powers to fire principals. Deputy commissioners for each borough
would have no vote but could lobby on a borough's behalf.
The New York Times endorsed this solution. "Given that the
schools are of central importance to the city and the current system
has failed to fix their chronic problems," The Times said
in an April editorial, "it makes sense to lodge responsibility for
their performance in some future mayor's office rather than in an
entrenched education bureaucracy. Voters would still exert political
control through citywide elections. Chicago has already made its
mayor responsible for the schools, with promising early results, and
Detroit has followed the same path." The change in Chicago took
place in 1995, when the Illinois State Legislature gave Mayor
Richard M. Daley the authority to pick a five-member school board,
as well as the chief executive and his deputies. In June, that board
will expand to seven, and the City Council, which Daley controls,
will gain the responsibility to approve all of Daley's selections.
The board, in turn, will select the chief executive. Fred Hess, the
director of the Center for Urban Schools at Northwestern University,
said that the results were palpable. Under the leadership of Paul
Vallas, who had been Daley's budget director, the system has gone
from a $350 million deficit to a balanced budget, Hess said. And
test scores have risen as well: the performance of elementary school
students on standardized math tests rose to 39.6 percent scoring at
the national norm last year from 29.8 percent in 1995.
According to Ms. Coletti, Dr. Crew agrees that the seven-member
board is overly political, but also believes that a commissioner
appointed by the Mayor would be even more subject to political
whims. Thus, Dr. Crew favors a different solution. In particular, he
has suggested that the Board of Education be replaced by a
university-style board of trustees whose members would be selected
-- perhaps by the mayor, the City Council, and a committee of
parents -- not for their political value but for their expertise in
areas like curriculum and finance. That board would then select the
chancellor. Moreover, Dr. Crew would like to see a far more
independent chancellor, operating with less oversight than he does
now. Struggling to be heard above the fray, William C. Thompson Jr.,
the current Board president, said that the status quo served as the
best possible check, however imperfect, against the excesses of a
mayor and a chancellor.
Another approach to reform would be to break up the New York City
School District into many smaller districts. With 1.1 million
students and over 1,100 schools, this district is about 20 times as
large as the next largest district in the state, Buffalo. Problems
of oversight, responsiveness, parental involvement, and management
are bound to be large, if not overwhelming, in such a large
district. Professors Duncombe and Yinger have estimated that the
City's cost of education per pupil is about 60 percent above the
state average simply because of its large scale. In principle,
therefore, breaking the district into many small districts could
bring the City's educational costs down toward the state average.
For example, the 32 community school districts in the City, which
are now just administrative units, could be turned into separate
school districts, each with its own elected school board.
Even if these potential cost savings could be realized, however, any
such proposal would encounter formidable political and practical
obstacles. It would, for example, dramatically undermine the
authority of leading political figures, including the Mayor and the
Schools Chancellor, and would therefore encounter fierce opposition
from them. Moreover, a transition to smaller school districts would
be costly and complex. In addition, any such change would raise
difficult new financing problems, as some districts would
undoubtedly have much larger tax bases than others.
The Assignments
It is
now the summer of 1999. A conference is being held in New York City
to discuss alternative ways for the New York City School District to
boost the performance of its students, particularly in the
low-performing schools. Mayor Guliani, Chancellor Crew, Speaker
Vallone, and other leading public officials in New York will be in
attendance, along with teachers' union representatives, educators,
academics, and representatives of the New York Independent Budget
Office. Some New York State officials will be there, too, but the
purpose of this conference is not to try to squeeze more money out
of the State. The major actors have agreed to put off that issue
until a major law suit, brought by the Committee on Fiscal Equity, a
non-profit organization based in New York City, is resolved. (This
suit charges that New York State has created a school system that
does meet its constitutional obligation to provide an adequate
education to students in New York City.) Instead, this conference is
designed to determine what New York City should do to boost student
performance using the funds that it already has or funds that it
could raise itself.
As an expert on urban education, you have been asked to make a
presentation to this Conference on the Future of New York City
Schools. In particular, you have been asked to address the following
questions: What is the right reform strategy for the New York City
public schools? What approach, or combination of approaches, is most
likely to be effective in raising student performance in the City?
Why?
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Endnotes
1. This hyperbole also brought some angry
reaction from Schools Chancellor Rudolph F. Crew, who denounced the
Mayor's "destructive rhetoric." "We will not succeed," Dr. Crew
said, "by engaging in reckless statements that discourage vibrant
new teachers from signing up to work here and demean the millions of
New Yorkers who so successfully entered America through the portals
of the New York City Public Schools." Randi Weingarten, the
president of the United Federation of Teachers, agreed. The Mayor's
comment, she said, "feels like an attack on everyone who wants to do
the hard stuff to get a better education for all kids."
2. This discussion of Success for All is taken
from Barnett (1996).
3. Unlike Mr. Vallone, Mr. Guilliani also called
for a new "corporate board" whose members would be appointed by the
Mayor and the Council and whose chief duty would be "better public
relations."
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