Whether to award billions in back pay to teachers seems to be one of the central education decisions that face Mayor de Blasio. Before retroactively doling out this taxpayer’s dough, wouldn’t it make sense to do an assessment of what the enormous surge in money laid out for education in the Bloomberg years has actually accomplished?
This idea is advanced by one of New York’s savviest education writers, Andrew Wolf. The publisher of the weekly Riverdale Review in The Bronx, he’s made the education story his life cause. He’s neither pro-union nor anti-union; he’s a hard-headed partisan of public education.
“My advice to de Blasio,” he told me a few weeks ago in an e-mail predicting that de Blasio would tap Carmen Farina as the next chancellor, “is to appoint a bluer-than-blue-ribbon panel of nonpolitical experts to evaluate the numbers and tell us honestly how are children really doing. Nothing will work until we put aside the spin and tell the truth, no matter how painful, no matter whose ox is gored.”
What triggered that e-mail was then-Mayor Bloomberg’s press conference Dec. 4, when he claimed, as a story posted on his Web site put it, that the “four-year graduation rate for New York City public high schools in the 2012-2013 school year was 66 percent — a new record high.”
Bloomberg cited “preliminary figures” showing that the graduation rate rose 42 percent since 2005, when the state started publishing New York City graduation rates.
It was a pre-emptive move. Clearly Bloomberg didn’t want to leave it to de Blasio to toot (or not toot) Bloomberg’s own horn.
Bloomberg did, however, leave to de Blasio the negotiations on a teachers’ contract — and all those claims for billions in back pay. Hence the window for a hard-headed look at the mayor’s claims.
What Wolf wants to know is whether the numbers have been, as he put it to me, “artificially enhanced through controversial devices.” He’s referring to things like “credit recovery,” which he labels as giving “children course credit for subjectively graded ‘projects,’ even though the student failed the actual course.” He notes that such figures as the rates at which City University colleges find that new students need remediation suggest a city high-school diploma doesn’t mean one is prepared for college-level work.
“If we are to succeed in truly ‘fixing’ our schools, we need to begin with the truth,” Wolf wrote me. “What do our children know, and is it enough to allow them to succeed in life, both as educated citizens and full participants in our economy?” Hence his campaign for a blue-ribbon panel to really dig into the data.
An ideal candidate to head it, in Wolf’s reckoning, would be David Steiner, dean of the Hunter College School of Education. He came to prominence as state education commissioner by admitting that “cut scores” were set artificially low (largely under his predecessor) to make student results on state tests look better than they actually were.
“By telling the truth, superintendents and even mayors running school systems may not look as good,” Wolf argues, “but the truth is that the children are equally tall whether we measure them in feet and inches or centimeters.”
It’s unlikely, to say the least, that de Blasio will undertake such a blue-ribbon review. All the greater what I regard as the central tragedy of Michael Bloomberg’s legacy on education. He gained mayoral control of the schools and hired, in Joel Klein, a brilliant chancellor.
Bloomberg, however, ruled out from the start the most radical idea in school reform — a system of vouchers that would let the money follow the decision of the parents in respect of what’s best for their children. It was the mayor’s view that vouchers were a chimerical idea, one that would never produce a practical program.
So we are left to feud about charters, which are a compromise originally designed to give parents a way to escape the teachers’ union but stay within the bounds of public education. Now we have a mayor who’s against charters as a matter of principle.
We’ve bid farewell to the one mayor who might’ve had the wherewithal to give vouchers a real try but shrank from the task, and said hello to a mayor whose first order of business will be trying to find money for teachers whose results we lack statistics to measure.