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Speeches
Thank you for having me here today.
While others will speak to the specifics of Brown v. Board of Education, I would like to tell you about the way the principles underlying that case are still at work in New York City today.
Brown v. Board of Ed was about equality. Its legacy is that every child, black or white, male or female, rich or poor has a right to the same basic quality of education.
We have come a long way in the fifty years since that landmark legislation and have made great strides, but there is still inequality in our public schools.
Ask yourself these questions: Does the average child going to public school in New York City receive the same quality of education as the average child in Westchester ? Do children in economically disadvantaged neighborhoods in the outer boroughs receive the same quality of education as children in wealthier neighborhoods in Manhattan ?
Clearly, we still have a long way to go to achieve real fairness. Today, I’d like to talk about some of the main challenges the New York City public school system faces on the way to a quality education for all students.
Let me start with the fundamental lack of fairness shown to New York City schools by Governor Pataki.
Ever since he came to office, the Governor has short-changed City schools, even though we have the greatest needs in the State.
In 1993, the Campaign for Fiscal Equity had to take the State to court to get New York City its fair share of education funding. The State Supreme Court ruled in the City’s favor.
Governor Pataki fought that decision. He claimed that school children should be entitled to an 8 th grade education only. But in June of 2003, the Court of Appeals disagreed and made the final ruling in our favor.
Yet here we are again in 2004, fighting with the Governor for every dollar.
Responding to a court order, in September, Governor Pataki formed the Zarb Commission to determine exactly how much funding it would take for the State to fulfill its obligations.
But the Zarb Commission’s report didn’t include any numbers specific to the City, and CFE says its statewide projections are billions of dollars off the mark.
Make no mistake: CFE and the City of New York will win this fight eventually. We have the law on our side. But the sooner Governor Pataki stops ignoring the needs of our schools, the sooner we will be able to provide a quality education for all our children.
It’s not just the State that’s making it difficult for New York City to ensure a quality education for everyone. The National No Child Left Behind Act is also a cause of grave concern to anyone who understands the unique circumstances of the New York City public school system. As a matter of fact, NCLB threatens to hamper any positive reforms going on in our schools today.
Under NCLB, the federal government threatens to withdraw billions of dollars in Title 1 funding—federal money we’ve received since 1965 to help our high-poverty schools—if the City doesn’t follow certain guidelines and improve performance on standardized tests.
Everyone wants our schools to be held accountable for how well they teach our children, but by failing to take into account New York City’s unique problems and needs, NCLB undermines fairness rather than encouraging it.
Specifically, NCLB will likely reinforce two of the most serious problems facing City schools: push-outs and overcrowding.
Before NCLB became federal law, New York State was already experimenting with an accountability system based on high-stakes testing. The result is over 160,000 high school age students pushed out of school since 1997, in violation of their legal right to literacy, support, and educational services.
In recent months, Chancellor Klein has acknowledged this scandal and pledged to put an end to push-outs. There is little doubt, however, now that the City is threatened with the loss of hundreds of millions of dollars in NCLB funding if test scores do not improve, that administrators will be under more pressure than ever to push out struggling students.
The other major New York City problem that NCLB makes worse is the severe overcrowding in our schools. Under NCLB, students are allowed to transfer out of under-performing schools and eventually the schools are shut down. It’s self-evident that closing down failing schools and allowing students to transfer en masse will only increase the overcrowding at other schools. The only reason the policy hasn’t already led to chaos is that so few eligible students have taken advantage of the option to transfer.
Wealthy school districts can simply ignore the aspects of NCLB that are inappropriate to their needs because they don’t rely on federal dollars. New York City doesn’t have that luxury and so is forced to comply—or at least try to comply—with these harmful mandates. Is that fairness? Is that equality?
Unfortunately, we can’t blame all our difficulties on the state and federal governments. For some of the problems our schools face, we need look no further than our own Department of Education.
Look at the Mayor’s social promotion policy, a policy that he had to railroad past his education committee by firing three of its members and replacing them.
No one in this City is in favor of social promotion. We all realize that children cannot be rubber-stamped through the system and sent into the real world without the basic skills they need.
I believe the Mayor’s plan to provide interventions for 3 rd graders before they take the all-important test that will determine their future is a step in the right direction, as is the new summer school plan. But holding back failing 3 rd graders will not work.
New York City tried holding back students in the ’80s, but rescinded the policy because the students who were held back didn’t improve in later years. As a matter of fact, 40% of the held-back students eventually dropped out compared with 25% of students with similar test scores who were promoted.
Chicago has been experimenting with its own retention program in recent years. But a study by the Consortium on Chicago School Research concludes that students who were retained in 8 th grade were more likely to drop out and that that retained students did not improve their reading skills as much as low-performing peers who were not retained. In response to the criticism, Chicago is shifting its emphasis from retention to preventative services in earlier grades.
Most troubling of all, the National Association of School Psychologists says that holding back low-performing students at the elementary school level has a negative impact on all areas of achievement and adjustment.
Advocates for Children points out that, in the past, the practice of holding back large numbers of students has been much more common in school districts with high percentages of poor, black, and Hispanic students. Again, we see inequality in the way education policy is formed and applied. The children with the greatest needs are the ones most vulnerable to bad ideas.
When a child in the third grade cannot read, the system has failed that child. To hold a child back in the same third grade class in which he or she did so poorly before is to stigmatize that child for a system-wide problem—without actually solving the problem. It is simply unfair.
Mayor Bloomberg should reconsider his retention policy, but given the way he dealt with those advisors who disagreed with him, that seems unlikely.
One area in which the DOE has seemed more willing to admit its mistakes is special education.
There is serious inequality and unfairness in the system for children with disabilities. They don’t get the services they need in order to learn effectively because the Mayor and Chancellor unilaterally decided to make reforms to the system, and these have failed miserably.
My office conducted a survey of nearly 200 school psychologists and nearly 100 administrators. 87% of them said that the Mayor and Chancellor’s so-called reforms to special education have damaged the system.
74% of those psychologists and administrators said that their school has a backlog of students who have been evaluated but haven’t been placed in a special ed program or received the services that their own school psychologists deemed necessary.
What’s worse, we found that school administrators and psychologists were under pressure to keep down the rates of evaluations and placements. It’s impossible to tell how many students in need of evaluation are simply being ignored.
Why aren’t children being evaluated or receiving the services they need? Because the so-called reforms have created chaos, and administrators have been encouraged to minimize the special services provided to children who may need them. One told us that he was threatened with a negative review if there were more than 10 requests for student evaluations at his school.
So administrators are under siege. They then pressure school psychologists, and what happens to the children? Students who have special needs wind up without necessary services.
One school psychologist told us that a fifth grade boy at her school was forced to sit at home for two months because the psychologist hadn’t had a chance to evaluate him and determine if he was a risk to other students in the classroom.
After denying there was a problem and attacking our report, the DOE finally admitted that special education needed an overhaul. Now, I’ll be keeping a close eye on special education to make sure that the DOE keeps its word and addresses this unfairness.
On May 11 I’m hosting a public forum on special education to discuss current and ongoing problems in the delivery of special ed services. For those of you who may be interested, the forum will be held at Hunter College from 5:30 – 7:30PM.
Other Team Bloomberg reforms have unfortunate unintended consequences, as well.
The small school movement gives some children an opportunity to learn in a more focused environment.
But when the DOE restructures large, overcrowded high schools into mini-schools, there is inevitably an overflow and many students wind up at neighboring schools, which then become overcrowded themselves. It’s not fair and it’s not equal.
There is also inequality in the preparation City school children receive before they get to elementary school.
Some families can afford preschool education to prepare their children to succeed, but many cannot. Head Start was established to close that skills gap. But until there is a Citywide universal pre-K program, there will still be inequality in our schools.
All children deserve a sound education, no matter where they live or who they are. That is the legacy of Brown v. Board of Education. But we all know that neighborhoods with high poverty and large minority populations do not offer the same quality of schools as wealthier, whiter neighborhoods.
It is perhaps the Mayor’s single greatest responsibility to close that gap. But until he gives a seat at the table to teachers, administrators, and advisors who know more about the City school system than he does, until he stops running our schools like a corporation, he will continue to make harmful decisions that exacerbate inequality.
Good intentions are not enough. We all need to work together to achieve real equality in education. It is our duty and our children’s right.
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