It is highly ironic that the cornerstone of New York City Schools Chancellor
Joel Klein's argument in favor of the diminished authority and oversight for
the DC Board of Education is the precept that accountability is central to
successful school reform (Op-Ed, April 20).
For it is accountability that will be entirely lacking if DC follows NYC's
lead and institutes a similar, highly centralized, dictatorial model of school governance, manifest in mayoral control.
It is precisely the total, direct authority over school policy and administration granted Mayor Michael Bloomberg by the New York State
legislature that has led, not to wise and informed decisions on how best to
help city students achieve or to clean up the inefficiency of bureaucratic
entanglements in the largest urban school district, but rather, that has led
to a series of profound mistakes, reforms known by the misnomer "Children
First."
Accountability in NYC now begins and ends with the relationship between two
men. Joel Klein is accountable to the Mayor, and the Mayor is accountable to
no one. (That is, until the next election, which is far too late) Together
and seemingly without the understanding or the ability to discern truth from
fiction in education doctrine, they have sanctioned a series of education
reforms that are the polar opposite of what the Mayor first promised to deliver: a return of the basics in education and the end of bilingual
education. The two have instead instituted unilaterally radically progressive, highly restrictive, unproven approaches to reading and
mathematics instruction, elevated its staunchest proponents to new heights
of administrative power, and ( adding insult to injury) enlisted partisan
others in the research and evaluation.
The inevitable long term damage of these decisions to the educations and
futures of hundreds of thousands of NYC school children might have been entirely avoided. The Mayor and Chancellor might have sought to be far more
informed, their decisions might have been advantaged - not limited- by working with a system of district-level and city-level governance, to
support and ensure the meaningful participation in policy and program decisions by a wide range of experts and to provide for meaningful public
engagement.
But none of this is part of the plan under mayoral control.
As it stands now in NYC, the education policy table remains set for only
two, and the greatest consequences set to fall on our children first, and
for years to come.
Elizabeth Carson
NYC parent
Co-Founder, NYC HOLD
http://www.nychold.com
New York City School Chancellor Joel Klein (Op/Ed, April 20) offers his reforms as an advertisement for Mayoral control
of urban school systems. He neglects to mention that he has become deeply unpopular with New York City parents, many of
whom think he is more concerned with control than education.
The decision making process is even more opaque and autocratic than under the old school board system. Expensive whole
language reading and fuzzy math curricula were forced on the system while they were being denounced by outside literacy
and math experts.
One of Mr. Klein's "reforms" is to replace parent elected PTA presidents with "parent coordinators" appointed and paid by the schools,
1,200 of them paid by the city. Many teachers feel that the costly new math and literacy "coaches" are mainly
concerned with enforcing detailed micromanagement from above.
Jonathan Goodman
Professor of Mathematics, Courant Institute, NYU
http://www.math.nyu.edu/faculty/goodman
