Autumn 2003


Tragedy Looms for Gotham's School Reform
Sol Stern

Though New York's billionaire mayor Mike Bloomberg and his handpicked schools' chancellor Joel Klein sure don't look like revolutionaries, they have turned upside-down a school system that resisted change for half a century. Over the past 18 months, with no less courage than managerial skill they have dismantled the dysfunctional old bureaucracy, put the teachers' and principals' unions on the defensive, and created a streamlined administrative apparatus to funnel a bigger slice of the system's $12.5 billion annual budget into the classroom. Yet tragically, they have gotten one critical part of the formula for improving academic performance completely wrong. On the educational side, their magnificent sleek engine for reform is tearing off in the wrong direction, threatening to plunge the academic futures of 1.1 million children over a cliff.

Mayor Bloomberg began his remaking of the old order as soon as the State Legislature voted through mayoral control of Gotham's schools in May 2002. First, he cleaned out the stables at the Board of Education headquarters at 110 Livingston Street, breaking up the patronage and special-interest nests within the central administrative apparatus and selling the empty building. A few months later, he took a wrecking ball to the system's other pillars of patronage and corruption-the 32 community school boards.

Together with Klein, a tough New York lawyer and formerly head of the Clinton Justice Department's antitrust division, Bloomberg created a revamped command-and-control center, placing the several hundred administrators who survived the 110 Livingston Street purge in the Tweed Courthouse, 200 feet from City Hall, where the mayor could keep an eye on them. Bloomberg instructed the troops to focus like a "laser beam" on a single goal-improving teaching and learning in the classroom. To further that goal, Chancellor Klein began a highly publicized search for the "best practices" in classroom teaching and curriculum, an initiative he named "Children First."

One telling sign of how radical were the changes Bloomberg and Klein wrought was the complaint by United Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten that she was the last person to find out what was going on inside the Tweed headquarters. Her union once had the run of 110 Livingston Street, where a UFT vice president was permanently stationed, with instant access to the top administrators in every important bureau. Indeed, there was a time when chancellors and other high-level administrators owed their appointments to the union's influence. At Tweed, union officials now wait in line to see the chancellor, with everyone else.

Thus, as the city's schoolchildren returned to their classrooms this September, Mayor Bloomberg pronounced himself pleased with his creation. "At every level, we have replaced an old school system where responsibility was diffused and confused," he said at a press conference. "There is [now] a direct link from the teacher's desk in the classroom right to the mayor's desk."

What the mayor didn't say was that this link carries messages in only one direction, micromanaging teachers and principals to an extent unprecedented in American K-12 education. Agents of the chancellor (euphemistically called "coaches") operate in almost all of the city's 1,200 schools to make sure that every educator marches in lockstep with the Department of Education's approved pedagogical approaches. There is now only one way, the Tweed way, to teach the three Rs in the schools.

Trouble is, many of the programs and methods now being crammed down the teachers' throats have no record of success and are particularly ill-suited for disadvantaged minority children. In fact, a cabal of progressive educators chose them for ideological reasons, in total disregard of what the scientific evidence says about the most effective teaching methods-particularly in the critically important area of early reading.

Young children who fall substantially behind their peers in reading rarely catch up and almost always remain at risk of academic failure across the board. Thus New York's reading scores-showing that more than half of all students, and over 70 percent of minority students, can't read at basic proficiency levels-are very grim news. Fortunately, as serious educators know, recent advances in the scientific understanding of how children learn to read-based not on wishful thinking, but rather on a remarkable convergence of evidence in experimental psychology, linguistics, and medical research-make it possible to design truly effective instructional programs to raise reading levels in the early grades.

Two separate government-sponsored reports clearly lay out what the scientific evidence says about teaching young children to read. The first, published in 1998 by the National Academy of Sciences, concluded that systematic phonics instruction was the most effective approach. Two years later, the National Reading Panel's even more comprehensive report also concluded that "systematic phonics instruction is significantly more effective than instruction that teaches little or no phonics."

Last year, the American Psychological Association got into the act, too, issuing a report whose conclusions Scientific American summarized: "Our recent review of the topic shows that there is no doubt about it: teaching that makes the rules of phonics clear will ultimately be more successful than teaching that does not. Admittedly, some children can infer these principles on their own, but most need explicit instruction in phonics, or their reading skills will suffer." In addition, in several appearances before congressional committees, Dr. Reid Lyon, chief of the National Institutes of Health's Child Development and Behavior Branch, said the results of his agency's studies argue for the use of explicit phonics programs in the early grades.

Partly because of this accumulating evidence, Congress voted twice, by overwhelming bipartisan majorities, that federal reading funds must go only to school districts that use instructional approaches based on scientifically validated research. Explicit language to that effect first appeared in the Reading Excellence Act of 1998 during the Clinton administration and then again in the "Reading First" section of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001.

New York City is eligible for almost $40 million a year in federal reading funds for six years, as long it meets the standard of "scientifically based research." It should be a no-brainer for Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein to gain an extra $240 million for their schools for something they should be doing even if no federal funds were attached. Or so you might think. For why would an education administration proud of having freed itself from special-interest influence use any reading program that didn't meet the standards for effectiveness agreed upon by such a wide consensus of scientists?

The answer is that in education there are not only special interests but deeply entrenched ideological and therefore political interests. Progressive educators (of whom New York has more than its share) shudder at the thought that science confers validity on the practice of teaching young children to read through scripted lessons in letter/sound correspondence-that is, phonics. Progressive education ideology rests on the Romantic belief that children learn naturally (including learning to read) and that the role of the teacher is to facilitate this natural process through hands-on, or "constructivist," activity in "child-centered" classrooms. Thus, for example, a third-grade math teacher might have the children construct a Japanese garden as a way of learning addition and subtraction as they measure. Almost as a religious belief, progressives emphasize the importance of the classroom environment: arranging chairs in groups, putting rugs on the floors for children to sprawl, providing "workshop" areas where six-year-olds have writing conferences, and having teachers stand off to the side rather than in the front of the class.

Phonics, on the other hand, conjures up everything progressives hate about traditional classrooms-that they are artificial places, where deadening lessons are taught by "drill and kill" methods that destroy children's natural spontaneity and innate creativity, turning them into the regimented conformists that a repressive industrial society needs to man its assembly lines and corporate offices. If this is what science nevertheless says works, then science must be wrong-or at least it must be the wrong kind of science for education.