Bloomberg's legacy in education: total failure [View all]

[HiPointDem]

Mayor Bloomberg’s decade-long school reform set out to reduce the race-based achievement inequities that characterize the city’s public schooling outcomes. Bloomberg and his first Schools Chancellor, Joel Klein, defined the school system’s racial achievement gap as the “key civil rights issue of our time.” In 2009, Chancellor Klein proclaimed that “neither resources nor demography is destiny in the classroom.” And in 2010, a broadside that Klein wrote with Michelle Rhee, the founder of Students First, declared, “The single most important factor in determining whether students succeed in school is not the color of their skin or their ZIP code or even their parents’ income – it is the quality of their teacher...”

The Bloomberg administration mounted systemic efforts to reduce inequity by expanding school choice through creating new small schools and charter schools, and by closing large numbers of struggling schools.

But after a decade of reform efforts, ZIP code and income are still the major factors predicting college success for New York City’s high school graduates. Is Demography Still Destiny? a study recently conducted by the Annenberg Institute for School Reform (AISR), found that the college readiness rates of the city’s high school graduates were strongly and negatively correlated with the percentage of black and Latino residents in the city’s neighborhoods. The average income in those neighborhoods was almost as highly correlated with readiness. So counter to the mayor and the former chancellor’s assertions, ZIP code, race or ethnicity and income still strongly determine students’ academic outcomes across the city’s classrooms. To the extent that students’ academic outcomes determine their future possibilities, demography – zip code, race or ethnicity and income – still shape students’ destinies as well...

The NYCDOE’s initial response to the AISR college readiness study was that the rates were worse in 2002, before the regime’s reform effort began. This response may be accurate, though it is hard to be sure because there was no readiness indicator available to measure high school graduates’ preparedness for college a decade ago. Still, the scale of current failure is so universal across the city system, with less than 25 percent of all the city’s students graduating college-ready, that it is hard to imagine significant progress across the past ten years.

In spite of the dramatic expansion of choice programs that have created almost two hundred small high schools and one hundred charter schools, the closure of some 150 struggling schools, and the development of increased options in the city’s high school admissions process, at least 75 percent of all the city’s students are graduating high school unprepared for college. Most of those unprepared graduates are black and Latino, most of them are from poor families and most of them live in neighborhoods comprised of large majorities of black and Latino residents.

http://www.citylimits.org/conversations/186/college-readiness#.UOmV2zXoYZd.twitter

Ten years of the Bloomberg dictatorship & the results are in: FAIL