New York Rethinks Its Remaking of the Schools

[Rootsie]

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/09/nyregion/09Klein.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print

The New York City schools chancellor, Joel I. Klein, is once again rethinking the nation's largest school system.

He has hired Chris Cerf, former president of Edison Schools, the commercial manager of public schools in 25 states. He has retained Alvarez & Marsal, a consulting firm that revamped the school system in St. Louis and is rebuilding the system in New Orleans. And he has enlisted Sir Michael Barber, a former adviser to Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain who is now at McKinsey & Company in London.

These consultants, often in pinstripe suits and ensconced in a conference room on the third-floor mezzanine of the headquarters of the Education Department in Lower Manhattan, are working with a small army of city education officials, all led by Mr. Klein's chief of staff, Kristen Kane. The effort is being paid for with $5 million in private donations.

Together, the consultants and officials are re-examining virtually every aspect of the system, not quite three years after Chancellor Klein and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg charted perhaps its most exhaustive overhaul and made it a laboratory for educational experimentation, closely watched across the country.

They are evaluating everything from how textbooks and paper are bought, to how teacher training programs are chosen, to how students, teachers, principals and schools are judged. They are running focus groups of dozens of principals, and they are studying districts in England, Canada and California.

A top goal is to find ways to relax much of the very centralization put in place by the Bloomberg administration and give principals a far freer hand, provided schools can meet goals for attendance, test scores, promotion rates and other criteria.

An ideal system, they suggest, would put schools near the top of the organizational chart and potentially eliminate or change dozens of administrative jobs. Hypothetically, principals, now supervised by a local superintendent, might choose either to keep that overseer or to use the money to hire a different achievement adviser. Support services, like counseling programs, could be outsourced.

"This is entire system reform," Mr. Cerf said over a cheeseburger lunch at a downtown bistro. "This is the most important and urgent thing going on in American public education today. If it can be done well and right here, it will be a national pace car for change."

Chancellor Klein, in an interview last week, said: "I see this as truly an evolutionary restructuring."

Even some principals who are avid supporters of Mr. Klein wonder, however, if the effort is futile. State and federal mandates limit the authority of principals and are largely outside the chancellor's control. There are also the constraints of union contracts, which regulate so much of the workings of schools, like teacher schedules.

"How much can the system support increased autonomy and authority of school leaders without making the commensurate changes with respect to the external demands," asked Anthony Lombardi, the principal of P.S. 49 in Middle Village, Queens. "Ideally there should be a balance of accountability, autonomy and contractual flexibility."

The search for a more flexible structure comes four years after Mr. Bloomberg won direct control of the schools. He reorganized the 32 community districts into 10 instructional regions under tight central direction. The system has imposed new promotion rules and introduced targeted help for struggling students; achieved sharp gains on state reading and math tests in most grades; and opened dozens of small high schools.

William G. Ouchi, a business professor at U.C.L.A. and the author of "Making Schools Work," praised the city's effort and said he believed it would succeed. But Professor Ouchi, who advised Mr. Klein during the first restructuring, also said the new effort was an acknowledgment of failures in the mayor's first term.

"I think it was a normal human error," said Professor Ouchi, who calls the current structure too rigid. "Those of us who study large organizations for a living know the first reaction of a new C.E.O. is to grab the reins of power and control everything, because they don't want anything to go awry."

Mr. Klein and his aides say a tighter fist was needed at first to stabilize the sprawling and often dysfunctional system. The decentralization they envision now, they say, entails the daily operations of schools, rather than the system's management.

"It isn't that the strategic direction is going in a totally new way, or that we have a clean slate and are starting from scratch here," Ms. Kane said.

"We feel have made a significant amount of progress over the last couple of years, but we have got to continue to change. We are not at all satisfied with all of the student achievement results, putting aside whatever improvements have happened."

She and other officials cautioned that the process was in its earliest stages and the final decisions, to be made by Mr. Klein and approved by the mayor, are still a long way off.

In his quest, Mr. Klein has turned to a team of outside experts, including Mr. Cerf, a longtime friend.

Mr. Cerf, 51, like Mr. Klein, 59, is a former clerk at the United States Supreme Court and worked in the Clinton administration. As president of Edison, the nation's largest private operator of public schools, Mr. Cerf helped the company's founder, H. Christopher Whittle, navigate many troubles, including an outcry over its handling of schools in Philadelphia.

Mr. Cerf, an expert on tracking school performance, was also an informal adviser to the chancellor in the mayor's first term and now works for the Public-Private Strategy Group, a consulting firm based in Montclair, N.J.

The firm of Alvarez & Marsal is widely regarded as having expertise on public school budgets. Sajan P. George, 36, a specialist in municipal finance who is leading the firm's work in New York, helped Orange County, Calif., out of bankruptcy in the 1990's and once assisted the Australian government with a review of the horse- and greyhound-racing industries.

And then there is Sir Michael, who served as Prime Minister Blair's top aide for putting into effect education, health, criminal justice and transportation initiatives. He is regarded as a leading thinker on holding educators and public officials accountable for student achievement.

Sir Michael, as a senior education official before joining Mr. Blair's cabinet office, served on a committee nicknamed the "hit squad" because it shut schools that were failing to meet national standards. Britain, which has a strict national curriculum and exams, has developed a system of inspecting schools every three years.

"As it happens, the English education reform has been through a lot of the stages they are now going through," Sir Michael said in an interview..

At Mr. Klein's direction, the consultants' most immediate mission is to create a framework for expanding the "autonomy zone," a pilot group of 42 schools whose principals were largely cut free of administration this year after agreeing to meet performance targets. Mr. Klein announced in January that 150 more schools would enter the zone this fall.

The consultants are also working to fulfill the chancellor's pledge to redirect $200 million from administrative budgets to schools.

But to hold principals accountable, the department must have a way to judge performance. So the officials and consultants, led by James Liebman, a former law professor at Columbia, are looking to develop more sophisticated measures of performance and to vastly increase the amount of data available to administrators and teachers.

Officials are wrestling with a host of complex questions. If a school fails to meet its goals, what are the consequences? Who metes them out? And in granting autonomy, how can the school system avoid what some experts view as a flaw in charter schools — privately run but publicly financed — which is that if they fail, typically the only remedy is to close them?

To give principals more control over school finances, the consultants from Alvarez & Marsal are mapping how every dollar flows through the system's $15 billion budget and how the flow might be altered.

For instance, what prices should be set if services like teacher training, now provided by the administration, were essentially for sale, to be purchased only by schools that want or need them? How can spending authority be given to principals without losing economies of scale? How can controls be established to prevent patronage and corruption?

Mr. Cerf is trying to reconceive how principals and schools interact with the larger system by exploring a more rudimentary question: what services do schools need or want from the administration?

Skeptics say that the administration is wasting time and money on the consultants and that the mayor, a businessman, and the chancellor, a lawyer, remain fixated on systems and structure, rather than the interactions inside classrooms.

"Isn't it insane to play 52-pickup another time when structure is far less important, far less consequential, than the daily dealings between teachers and students?" asked Diane Ravitch, the education historian and frequent critic of the administration.

Noting that the city's four-year high school graduation rate of about 53 percent had barely budged during Mr. Bloomberg's tenure, Ms. Ravitch added: "It is hard to see why this number will increase as the result of yet another massive upheaval in the structure of governance."

And Randi Weingarten, the president of the city teachers' union, said: "Joel and all his management guru types never talk to anyone who actually does the work — that's what so mind-boggling. Our mission isn't constantly trying to reinvent ourselves into an entrepreneurial model that will get golden globes at the Harvard Business School. How do we help all 1.1 million kids get a decent high school education?"

Indeed, the entire reorganization is geared toward empowering principals at a time when the administration is locked in a bitter contract dispute with principals and their union. Last week, about 2,000 school supervisors rallied outside City Hall to demand a new contract.

But Mr. Klein and his aides say they expect to produce a school system unlike anything the city has seen, with schools the primary drivers of decisions, and administration acting in service to them.

Chancellor Klein often offers an example from Edmonton, Alberta. Principals who once had to wait endlessly for the central office to send painters to spruce up a building were instead given the money to get the job done themselves.

"We are trying to devolve both dollars and power to the schools," Mr. Klein said. "As much as we can in the next couple of years, I'd like to see the dollars flow first to the school and then to the people out of the school."

[Rootsie]

This 'new vision' has nothing to do with 'better governance' of schools. It is part of the massive global movement towards corporate privatization. People in NY had better wake up and see what it means when they invite lots of private CEO-types and Edison into the picture. It means the end of local control, even of government control of what happens in the schools.

[three_sixty]

yo fuck THEY schools. - Dead Prez

" . . . the great H. L. Mencken, who wrote in The American Mercury for April 1924 that the aim of public education is not
 
to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence. ... Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim ... is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States... and that is its aim everywhere else.
 
Because of Mencken's reputation as a satirist, we might be tempted to dismiss this passage as a bit of hyperbolic sarcasm. His article, however, goes on to trace the template for our own educational system back to the now vanished, though never to be forgotten, military state of Prussia. And although he was certainly aware of the irony that we had recently been at war with Germany, the heir to Prussian thought and culture, Mencken was being perfectly serious here. Our educational system really is Prussian in origin, and that really is cause for concern.
 
The odd fact of a Prussian provenance for our schools pops up again and again once you know to look for it. William James alluded to it many times at the turn of the century. Orestes Brownson, the hero of Christopher Lasch's 1991 book, The True and Only Heaven, was publicly denouncing the Prussianization of American schools back in the 1840s. Horace Mann's "Seventh Annual Report" to the Massachusetts State Board of Education in 1843 is essentially a paean to the land of Frederick the Great and a call for its schooling to be brought here. That Prussian culture loomed large in America is hardly surprising, given our early association with that utopian state. A Prussian served as Washington's aide during the Revolutionary War, and so many German-speaking people had settled here by 1795 that Congress considered publishing a German-language edition of the federal laws. But what shocks is that we should so eagerly have adopted one of the very worst aspects of Prussian culture: an educational system deliberately designed to produce mediocre intellects, to hamstring the inner life, to deny students appreciable leadership skills, and to ensure docile and incomplete citizens 11 in order to render the populace "manageable."
 
It was from James Bryant Conant-president of Harvard for twenty years, WWI poison-gas specialist, WWII executive on the atomic-bomb project, high commissioner of the American zone in Germany after WWII, and truly one of the most influential figures of the twentieth century-that I first got wind of the real purposes of American schooling. Without Conant, we would probably not have the same style and degree of standardized testing that we enjoy today, nor would we be blessed with gargantuan high schools that warehouse 2,000 to 4,000 students at a time, like the famous Columbine High in Littleton, Colorado. Shortly after I retired from teaching I picked up Conant's 1959 book-length essay, The Child the Parent and the State, and was more than a little intrigued to see him mention in passing that the modem schools we attend were the result of a "revolution" engineered between 1905 and 1930. A revolution? He declines to elaborate, but he does direct the curious and the uninformed to Alexander Inglis's 1918 book, Principles of Secondary Education, in which "one saw this revolution through the eyes of a revolutionary."
 
Inglis, for whom a lecture in education at Harvard is named, makes it perfectly clear that compulsory schooling on this continent was intended to be just what it had been for Prussia in the 1820s: a fifth column into the burgeoning democratic movement that threatened to give the peasants and the proletarians a voice at the bargaining table. Modern, industrialized, compulsory schooling was to make a sort of surgical incision into the prospective unity of these underclasses. Divide children by subject, by age-grading, by constant rankings on tests, and by many other more subtle means, and it was unlikely that the ignorant mass of mankind, separated in childhood, would ever re-integrate into a dangerous whole.
 
Inglis breaks down the purpose - the actual purpose - of modem schooling into six basic functions, any one of which is enough to curl the hair of those innocent enough to believe the three traditional goals listed earlier:
 
1) The adjustive or adaptive function. Schools are to establish fixed habits of reaction to authority. This, of course, precludes critical judgment completely. It also pretty much destroys the idea that useful or interesting material should be taught, because you can't test for reflexive obedience until you know whether you can make kids learn, and do, foolish and boring things.
 
2) The integrating function. This might well be called "the conformity function," because its intention is to make children as alike as possible. People who conform are predictable, and this is of great use to those who wish to harness and manipulate a large labor force.
 
3) The diagnostic and directive function. School is meant to determine each student's proper social role. This is done by logging evidence mathematically and anecdotally on cumulative records. As in "your permanent record." Yes, you do have one.
 
4) The differentiating function. Once their social role has been "diagnosed," children are to be sorted by role and trained only so far as their destination in the social machine merits - and not one step further. So much for making kids their personal best.
5) The selective function. This refers not to human choice at all but to Darwin's theory of natural selection as applied to what he called "the favored races." In short, the idea is to help things along by consciously attempting to improve the breeding stock. Schools are meant to tag the unfit - with poor grades, remedial placement, and other punishments - clearly enough that their peers will accept them as inferior and effectively bar them from the reproductive sweepstakes. That's what all those little humiliations from first grade onward were intended to do: wash the dirt down the drain.

6) The propaedeutic function. The societal system implied by these rules will require an elite group of caretakers. To that end, a small fraction of the kids will quietly be taught how to manage this continuing project, how to watch over and control a population deliberately dumbed down and declawed in order that government might proceed unchallenged and corporations might never want for obedient labor.

 
That, unfortunately, is the purpose of mandatory public education in this country. And lest you take Inglis for an isolated crank with a rather too cynical take on the educational enterprise, you should know that he was hardly alone in championing these ideas. Conant himself, building on the ideas of Horace Mann and others, campaigned tirelessly for an American school system designed along the same lines. Men like George Peabody, who funded the cause of mandatory schooling throughout the South, surely understood that the Prussian system was useful in creating not only a harmless electorate and a servile labor force but also a virtual herd of mindless consumers. In time a great number of industrial titans came to recognize the enormous profits to be had by cultivating and tending just such a herd via public education, among them Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller.
 
Tre you have it. Now you know. We don't need Karl Marx's conception of a grand warfare between the classes to see that it is in the interest of complex management, economic or political, to dumb people down, to demoralize them, to divide them from one another, and to discard them if they don't conform. Class may frame the proposition, as when Woodrow Wilson, then president of Princeton University, said the following to the New York City School Teachers Association in 1909: "We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class, of necessity, in every society, to forgo the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks." But the motives behind the disgusting decisions that bring about these ends need not be class-based at all. They can stem purely from fear, or from the by now familiar belief that "efficiency" is the paramount virtue, rather than love, lib, erty, laughter, or hope. Above all, they can stem from simple greed.
 
There were vast fortunes to be made, after all, in an economy based on mass production and organized to favor the large corporation rather than the small business or the family farm. But mass production required mass consumption, and at the turn of the twentieth century most Americans considered it both unnatural and unwise to buy things they didn't actually need. Mandatory schooling was a godsend on that count. School didn't have to train kids in any direct sense to think they should consume nonstop, because it did something even better: it encouraged them not to think at all. And that left them sitting ducks for another great invention of the modem era - marketing.
 
Now, you needn't have studied marketing to know that there are two groups of people who can always be convinced to consume more than they need to: addicts and children. School has done a pretty good job of turning our children into addicts, but it has done a spectacular job of turning our children into children. Again, this is no accident. Theorists from Plato to Rousseau to our own Dr. Inglis knew that if children could be cloistered with other children, stripped of responsibility and independence, encouraged to develop only the trivializing emotions of greed, envy, jealousy, and fear, they would grow older but never truly grow up. In the 1934 edition of his once well-known book Public Education in the United States, Ellwood P. Cubberley detailed and praised the way the strategy of successive school enlargements had extended childhood by two to six years, and forced schooling was at that point still quite new. This same Cubberley - who was dean of Stanford's School of Education, a textbook editor at Houghton Mifflin, and Conant's friend and correspondent at Harvard - had written the following in the 1922 edition of his book Public School Administration: "Our schools are ... factories in which the raw products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned .... And it is the business of the school to build its pupils according to the specifications laid down."

- source: http://www.spinninglobe.net/againstschool.htm