Bill de Blasio has courted opponents of charter schools, school performance accountability and other actions identified with Mayor Bloomberg. In last week’s debate, in fact, de Blasio said his greatest regret was putting too much faith in mayoral control of schools under this mayor.
But evidence shows that New York City schools are headed in the right direction — so the candidate shouldn’t head in the wrong one.
When Bloomberg became mayor, less than half the students in city high schools graduated in four years. Today, nearly two-thirds graduate on time. That means that each year, 18,000 more young people complete high school than would have a decade ago. And the percentage of graduates who enter college without needing to take remedial courses has doubled since 2001.
On campuses where new small schools replaced large underperforming high schools — a reform that Bloomberg pushed since his earliest years as mayor — the student makeup did not change, but the graduation rate did, increasing from 38% to 68%. According to researchers, students who won the lotteries to attend these schools do better than students who were denied admission, by several measures: They are more likely to graduate on time; they’re more likely to get a high score on the English Regents exam.
The charter schools that de Blasio has said he wants to charge rent to? A research team led by Stanford’s Margaret Raymond compared test scores in New York City charter schools with traditional schools serving very similar students in New York State.
They found that over a year, the typical charter school student gains one more month of learning in reading and five more months in math than students in traditional schools — and the benefits are evident for special education students, as well as black and Hispanic students in poverty.
Economist Caroline Hoxby, also at Stanford, found that children who attend New York City’s charter schools started out at the same achievement level as a randomly selected group of students who entered the lotteries for the charters but did not win. Then, each year in grades three through eight, the charter students made major gains over the comparison group.
A Mathematica Policy Research study of new city middle schools run by charter networks Achievement First and Uncommon Schools shows similar results. After three years, disadvantaged black and Hispanic children at these schools got significantly higher reading and mathematics scores, and were less likely to change schools, than a demographically similar sample of middle schoolers in traditional city schools.
Improvements are not confined to new high schools or charter schools. The nonpartisan Research Alliance for New York City Schools found across-the-board academic gains for all demographic groups of entering high school freshmen, who now have higher scores on language arts and math test than in 2002.
There’s more. By matching New York City schools with a control group of schools serving similar students throughout the state, NYU’s James Kemple found that elementary school achievement and eighth-grade proficiency scores for New York City are rising faster than in matched schools statewide, and that overall graduation rates are improving more than in comparable schools nationwide.
These achievements are not accidents. They are the result of Bloomberg-era changes in staffing, funding and governance of schools and family choice:
Disadvantaged students have better teachers. New York City has become a magnet for talented educators, especially given the opportunities to create and work in new schools. Further, city leaders put key decisions about teachers in the hands of those best equipped to make them: principals, who were given an incentive to select only the best teachers and not to give tenure to low performers.
The caliber of the city’s teaching pool has improved, as teachers’ math and verbal SAT scores, scores on qualification exams, and attendance at competitive colleges have increased dramatically since 2002.
The lowest-skilled group working in 2002 no longer works in the schools. Because the city has attracted able teachers from many sources, schools serving disadvantaged children no longer have to settle for poorly educated teachers.
Teachers have a say in whom they work with. A collective bargaining agreement negotiated in 2005 introduced to the city “mutual consent” hiring, which means that teachers and principals have to agree on placements, and thus teachers are more likely to work with colleagues whose approaches to instruction are complementary.
This has strengthened the teaching force in almost every school, so that new teachers are much more likely to work with quality experienced teachers who can help them. Strong new teachers are also less likely to leave teaching within a few years than they were before 2002.
Principals are recruited from among the best teachers. City leaders have sought the best people possible for the principalship. Identifying natural leaders among teachers, they found hundreds of excellent people who had not aimed to be principals. By offering challenging and efficient on-the job training and mentorship, the city prepared good people quickly so that transformative leaders would be available when needed.
By 2012, the Aspiring Principals Program had produced leaders for more than 225 New York City schools. These principals were younger than other city principals, and more likely to be black. They took on schools that were lower-performing than the citywide average and served greater shares of black and Hispanic students.
Money is distributed more equitably. Traditionally, the amount spent on a New York City student depended on what school he or she attended. Teacher choices drove school budgets: Senior teachers could choose where they worked; expensive teachers clustered in particular schools, and the district hid the spending discrepancies between schools with high and low proportions of senior teachers.
The city has attacked these inequities head-on via Fair Student Funding, which means that dollars are attached to a student and move to the school in which he or she enrolls. This change led to substantial increases in funding for schools serving low-performing and special education students.
Between 2001 and 2008, high-poverty schools gained more than $ 5,000 per pupil, compared to just under $ 4,000 for the lowest-poverty schools.
The principalship is a better job. Former Chancellor Joel Klein redefined the principal’s job, first with a 2006 pilot program that put 200 principals in control of key staffing and spending decisions, and then providing such autonomy for all principals in the system. Excellent teachers, ambitious principals from other districts, and leaders from other service fields came to see a New York City principalship as an attractive job.
Principals control the money and decisions needed to make their schools work — whether in regard to salaries, curriculum or administrative services. And the city’s 250-school-and-growing Innovation Zone allows many schools to spend dedicated funds in unique ways to increase individualization and instructional time, support teaching with technology and form partnerships with forward-thinking school design groups.
Schools can get help from the source that serves them best. Before Bloomberg, New York, like most other cities, ran its school system like a company store: Schools could get any form of assistance and teacher training they wanted, as long as they wanted what the central office could provide.
The move to pupil-based funding changed this. Funds previously skimmed off by the central bureaucracy for these services instead went right to schools, which could pay a provider of their choice for what they needed.
Sometimes they still shop at the company store. But they’re also looking to universities, consulting firms, and quality nonprofits. Unlike when the school system was the only game in town, when these providers don’t deliver quality or keep promises, schools can look elsewhere.
The city’s accountability system has focused attention on schools where students are not learning. The performance-based school accountability system has been complex and controversial. But it has accomplished one thing for sure: calling attention to schools in which students consistently learn little. It also has helped the city target money and support to schools that disproportionately serve low-income children and children of color. There was concern at first that adverse ratings would spell disaster for schools that received them. But it’s become clear that when a school receives a D or F, it often improves the next year.
Investments in new schools are directly related to the accountability system. As schools consistently failed to produce gains for certain groups of students, city leaders developed new options for them.
Parents have real choices. One of the principles of Bloomberg-era reforms was to increase every family’s ability to choose among good options for their children. The new schools initiative, including hundreds of schools started by the DOE and dozens of charter schools, has made a strong start. Though that goal is still not met, it is clear that parents of all backgrounds and from all areas of the city have more and better options than before.
The Bloomberg administration wasn’t right every time. But it has had many successes, including those described above, which the next mayor should build on, not reverse.
Hill is founder of the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington Bothell. This was adapted from an article written for The Atlantic.
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