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NY Mayor Brings Business Model to Create Caste System in the Schools

The instructional plan that Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg announced for New York City schools last week boils down to a simple philosophy, borrowed from the business world: freedom for schools that thrive, and a uniform curriculum
and schedule, dictated by the chancellor's office, for those that struggle.

"It's time to have a unified way of teaching our children," Mr. Bloomberg said as he laid out his strategy for the gargantuan task of raising student achievement in the 1,000
city schools with disappointing, sometimes abysmal, test scores.

But is the system that Mr. Bloomberg envisions really so unified? Some parents and educators quickly sounded alarms, saying they feared that the mayor was creating a caste system by allowing successful schools to do whatever they
want while putting the others under lock and key.

Their concern revolves around issues of race and class. The student population in low-performing schools largely reflects that of the entire system, which is overwhelmingly
minority and poor. Most of the 200 highest-performing schools, on the other hand, are demographic anomalies, with large numbers of white and Asian upper-middle-class children.

Whites made up 57 percent of the enrollment of schools with the top fifth of all math and reading scores on the state's fourth-grade test last year, and only 2.5 percent of the students in the bottom fifth. But the discrepancy is really about class, not race: many of the top schools are in well-heeled neighborhoods like the Upper West Side in Manhattan; Park Slope, Brooklyn; and Bayside, Queens. These are the schools whose teachers are most likely to be
experienced, and whose parents are most likely to be
college-educated and heavily involved in their children's education. Many have unusual programs: dual-language classes, for example, or curriculums that incorporate the arts into academic subjects. Since their test scores are
high, they do not have to focus relentlessly on basic skills the way failing schools do.

Is it fair, some ask, for middle-class students to attend schools that can improvise and innovate, while poor students are captive to more rigid, routinized lessons and schedules?

"If the method is mandating something to teachers and having teachers mandate to kids, that is less than ideal," said Lucy Calkins, an education professor at Columbia University Teachers College, though she added that it was
unlikely that New York would take such a regimented approach.

She added, "It would be of great concern to me and most of the people I know if we had an educational apartheid system with one method of instruction for poor kids and another for middle-class kids."

Yet many experts believe that poor children, whose lives outside school may be highly unstable with little intellectual stimulation, and their teachers, who are often new and have little training, need as much structure and
top-down direction as possible. New York City has already tried this kind of regimented approach in the Chancellor's District, a group of about 40 low-performing schools that
have been required to use single, strict curriculums in reading since 1997.

The reading program in these schools, called Success for All, is so structured that teachers are given a literal script and down-to-the-minute schedule, breaking drill-like reading lessons into segments of no longer than 10 minutes. The prepackaged lessons are supposed to ensure that all teachers - even novices or the most inept - can teach reading.

The structure is also thought to be important for the students, who are some of the city's poorest. Only about 1 percent of the students in these schools are white. Success for All comes first thing in the morning, for 90 minutes, in every classroom. There is a lot of repetition of sounds and words (chants like "The sound of B is b-b-b-b-b!" emanate from early-grade classrooms) - the idea being to
keep students focused on the rudimentary aspects of reading.

"If you're in a middle-class school and someone is using ineffective strategies, it's more likely your mom will notice and take you for tutoring, or work with you herself," said Robert E. Slavin, a researcher at Johns
Hopkins University who created Success for All. "But in high-poverty schools, kids have fewer sources of rescue if the school screws up."

Though Success for All has been somewhat true to its name in terms of raising test scores at Chancellor's District schools - many of the schools' scores have climbed steadily since the program was introduced - Department of Education
officials said last week that they doubted that such a regimented program would be used as part of Mr. Bloomberg's uniform curriculum.

Mr. Bloomberg did not explain what the curriculum would look like, but he did give a sense of the schedule. All students in kindergarten through eighth grade would get at
least an hour of math.

Students in kindergarten through fifth grade would have at least 90 minutes of reading and writing instruction daily, he said. Children in kindergarten through third grade would get an additional 45 minutes of phonics instruction, which involves practicing the sounds that build words and matching them with letters.

While it remains to be seen just which math and reading curriculums the department chooses - Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein has promised to have them in place by September - Mr. Bloomberg made a strong case for why most
schools need a uniform approach. He pointed to two perennial truths about the city schools: that their poorest students tend to be highly mobile, moving between several schools over the course of a year, and that the system hires a huge number of new teachers each year. (The number this year was 8,000, 2,000 of whom came through a fast-track certification program with only a summer of training.)

"Too often," Mr. Bloomberg said when he unveiled the plan on Wednesday, "students and teachers who move from school to school are distracted and discouraged by having to adapt
to entirely new teaching methods and curricula -
frequently, mid-school year."

The city teachers' union recognized this problem in 1999 when it began writing step-by-step curriculums with detailed lesson plans. Randi Weingarten, the union president, called Mr. Bloomberg's plan helpful to both students and teachers, even if it does create a dichotomy.

"I see it as creating very necessary supports," Ms.Weingarten said. "They are in fact trying to give kids a lot of what they may not have had in their lives because of poverty."

Dr. Slavin said that in fact, the structure and consistency are even more important for teachers in low-performing schools than for students. "It makes it easy for them to be
sure they're including all the elements that should be going into high-quality reading lessons," he said.

Many teachers have complained about scripted and even nonscripted common curriculums, saying they quash creativity and spontaneity. But others say that once teachers learn such curriculums, they can add their own ideas here and there.

"A lot of other countries have common curriculums yet teachers can still be very creative," said Diane Ravitch, an education historian. "If they come up with a curriculum
that is research-based and effective, it will be a good idea. But the missing element here is: what are they to mandate and impose?"


— Abby Goodnough
Fearing a Class System in the Classroom
New York Times
Jan. 19, 2003
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/19/education/19SCHO.html?ex=1044288909&ei=1&en=3998c25b2c36387f

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