October 5, 2006--However's

I understand the frustration of the leaders of the New York City Education Department, a frustration shared by many well-intentioned political and educational leaders around the country.

The NYC mayor got the state legislature to turn control of the public schools over to him and take it away from an “independent” board of political appointees; the Education Department has to work with a teachers union and a supervisors union, both of which via their contracts have enshrined in their work rules so many impediments to change that for all intents and purposes these unions run the schools; and now after three years of reform efforts test scores for the city’s lowest-income students are still lagging. The gaps in achievement between Anglo, Asian, and minority students are still immense. Thus the understandable frustration.

The Mayor Blumberg-Chancellor Klein regime has had considerable success, though, in attracting outside funding from corporations and foundations to support some of their efforts. Most significant has been the work, stimulated by this external funding, to create small schools. The theory being that small schools allow for more personalization which in turn leads to improved student performance and the development of collegiate aspirations. The bottom line is to see more students stay in school, get a richer academic education, graduate, and then go on to college.

The Gates Foundation has been the major funder of this small-schools agenda, granting tens of millions of dollars to the Education Department to, as they put it, “catalyze” this structural transformation of the city’s public schools.

So far so good. But there are a number of however’s—the first being that this noble experiment does not seem to be working as advertised: there is no significant evidence that the small schools in NYC, much less anywhere else in the country, are producing the intended results. Thus, the city, and so many other districts, tempted by the Gates money, bought into an unproven model—there was scant data that showed that just creating small schools was transformative. In fact, there is growing evidence that small charter schools may actually have negative effects on low-income and minority children.

But it gets snarkier—the Gates money is about to run out, it was after all considered to be catalytic, so what to do? According to a report in the NY Times, the Education Department is giving serious consideration to using taxpayer money to replace the Gates money and to turning over the management of these small schools to private entities. (Article linked below.) Even maybe to Edison Schools or New Visions for Public Schools. This on paper sounds good—these kinds of operations do their work outside the normal big-school-district bureaucracy and are thus thought to be both more efficient and more effective.

Again, guess again—neither has in fact proven itself. The for-profit Edison Schools company, though in business now for many years, has not produced good results in its inner-city schools; and New Visions, a NYC-based nonprofit that specializes in helping to start and run small schools, also operating for decades, has not produced evidence that it can significantly improve the achievement of low-income children.

So we again see the triumph of ideologically-driven, unproven ideas over evidence-based practice. The Gates, Annenberg, Ford, and Carnegie Foundations as well as New Visions and the charter and voucher advocates all share one thing in common—the belief that smallness and teacher and parental control trump any approach that emphasizes basics or direct instruction or achievement testing. Even if the latter appear to work better.

Again, it’s not about better, it’s about belief.