From: borden@head-cfa.harvard.edu (Dave Borden)
Newsgroups: alt.politics.clinton,alt.politics.elections,alt.politics.libertarian,talk.politics.misc
Subject: New York City Public Schools (Was: Why can't the liberals just admit that public education has failed?, and before that, was: The New Education President)
Date: 27 Jan 93 17:58:11 GMT
Organization: Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, Cambridge, MA,  USA


In my last post, on the subject of vouchers, I cited an article from The
Economist, from which I drew a few figures on the New York City public school
system.  I've typed up and posted this article, for readers' information.

I'd like to clarify a few things.  First of all, though most of the proponents of
vouchers today, are Republican conservatives and/or libertarians, not all of them
are.  I, for one, am a Democrat; I even volunteered for the local Clinton/Gore
campaign this time around.  That doesn't mean that I agree with every democratic
position, or every liberal position.  I agree with some of them, and disagree
with others.  I'm not the only Democrat who reads this newsgroup who thinks that
vouchers are a good idea, provided the cost of the voucher is sufficient to fund
a good education without additional funds being needed.  I think that the public
school establishment has succeeded in tying the idea to partisan politics, with
the effect that many Democrats and liberals as a reflex think that the idea is
just an excuse for giving the rich a tax cut while neglecting the poor.  This is
unfortunate, because it makes it difficult to judge the idea objectively.  I
honestly feel that a voucher system, or some similarly dramatic step, is urgently
needed to help cure the disaster of the inner cities, and to prevent even greater
disaster in the future.  The motives of the educational establishment need to be
critically examined: is the establishment doing its best for the children in a bad
situation, or is it rather doing its best to perpetuate its own existence, at the
cost of the taxpayers, with the children bearing the greatest cost of all?  Read
this article, and judge for yourself:


from The Economist, Dec. 19th-25th 1992, pp. 24-25

New York's schools
A classfull of unions

A word like Kulturkampf is not often heard, even in New York; but it aptly
describes the battle that is raging there.  Ever since the chancellor of the
city's schools, Joseph Fernandez, saw fit to include, in the recommended
booklist for seven-year-olds, books such as "Daddy's Roommate" and "Gloria
goes to Gay Pride", the city has been hotly divided between moral relativists
and traditional fogeys; between the New York Times on one side, and George
Will on the other.  On December 1st Mr. Fernandez fired the entire school
board in Queens, a heavily Catholic school distrcit, because members had
refused to include these books in their curriculum; on December 9th the Board
of Education reinstated them.  High moral warfare, indeed; and a smokescreen
for the real problem facing New York's schools, which is that they cannot
educate the children who sit behind the desks.

   Why are the 995 schools so ineffective, when New York city spends more per
student ($7,414 in fiscal 1992) than all but a handful of other big
metropolitan districts?  The answer is simple.  A Soviet-style bureaucracy
has enveloped the school system, and powerful, obstinate unions prevent
reforms from happening at anything more than a snail's pace.  The one person
with any direct responsibility for school achievement, Mr. Fernandez, promised
to deliver perestroika when he came to New York three years ago.  Parents and
children are still waiting for it.

    Yet to blame Mr. Fernandez would be too hard.  The whole school system is
flawed.  Some of the weaknesses stem from New York's worsening social
conditions and rapidly increasing enrollment.  But the easiset way to 
understand why test scores and general achievement continue to decline, even
as education spending goes up, is to look at the results of a 1990 study by
Bruce Cooper of Fordham University.

    Mr. Cooper's research found that in New York city schools, just 32 cents
of every dollar spent on education goes into the classroom: that is, for
teachers' and assistants' salaries, textbooks, supplies and equipment.  (The
national average is 61 cents.)  The other 68 cents is spent on administrative
staff, curriculum planning, bus services, security guards, and such things as
political lobbying and an office of public affairs.  No one questions the
need, these days, for security guards to keep the guns out: nearly 9,500
"safety incidents" were reported during the 1991-2 school yesar.  But other
parts of the bureaucracy seem more interested in perpetuating their existence
and raising their salaries than in educating New York's children.  To hire a
new security guard, for example, takes five layers of officialdom.

    The United Federation of Teachers (UFT) has 115,000 paid-up members in New
York city alone, giving it vast financial resources and nearly insurmountable
influence not only over teachers' salaries, but over all facets of the
education bureaucracy.  Mr. Fernandez, selected to be chancellor only with the
blessing of the UFT, has reciprocated with UFT-approved appointments of senior
officials for powerful Board of Education agencies like personnel, budget and
special education.

    The UFT also has the dubious distinction of engineering the passage of a
state law in the 1970s that greatly undermines teacher accountability,
granting them tenure on the basis of a review of their work over the past six
months, rather than (as elsewhere) over the past few years.  Perhaps the
clearest indication of the UFT's presence and power is that it has
representatives in neasrly every one of the city's public schools with, as one
observer puts it, "their fingers in the pie every day of the school year".

    It was not supposed to be this way.  Mr. Fernandez was expected to lead
New York city out of its educational wasteland.  He was lured to the city from
Florida with a $1m dollar house in Brooklyn Heights and a $195,000 salary,
$65,000 more than the mayor.  His celebrated "school-based management" (SBM),
which is designed to devolve power away from centralised administrators and
towards local school officials and parents, worked well when he was
superintendent of schools in Dade County; his admirers thought he could make
it work in New York, too.

    The chancellor does not lack nerve, and he has tried to tackle bloat.
Some 240 New York schools now take part in SBM, and scores there seem to be
improving.  In fiscal 1992 cuts of $15.3m were made in Central Office spending,
and more than 4,000 teachers were induced to take early retirement.  But the
best reflection of Nr. Fernandez's tenure has been the battles he has chosen
to fight, and not to fight, during his term as chancellor.  He has used up
valuable political capital on issues such as condoms in schools and
homosexuality in the curriculum, often at the expense of basic educational
issues.

    His contract as chancellor expires in June.  Few observers believe the
seven-member Board of Education will choose to renew it; but it makes little
difference who the chancellor is, so long as the existing bureaucracy remains
entrenched.  Education reformers agree that the only hope for improved
achievement in New York city schools is for someone, notably the chancellor,
not just to take on the unions, but to defeat them.  Easier said than done.