Never one to aim low, Bloomberg promised what most people thought was impossible:
“If four years from now reading scores and math scores aren’t significantly better,” he said in 2001, “Then I will look in the mirror and say that I have been a failure. I’ve never failed at anything yet, and I don’t plan to fail at that.”24
* * *
In his first days as chancellor, Klein learned how the old system had worked. Much of it ran on old-fashioned political clout. One assemblyman quietly suggested to Klein, “Protect this principal’s job, and I’ll protect you politically.”25 Another politician, a borough president, couldn’t get certain children placed in certain schools and fumed at the new chancellor, “Fuck you. Why can’t we work together?”26
Klein ignored the meddlers and began to carry out the Bloomberg list of priorities. He would close failing schools, add choices, streamline the bureaucracy, give principals more power, try to reward good teachers, and sideline most of the “lemons,” the system’s term for those who could not do the job but bounced from school to school. Yet, he would not earn much love for these efforts. Nobody likes the disruptor.
* * *
Closing the failing schools, the “dropout factories,” as they were so often called, would stir the most anger from students, parents, teachers, and even former students. Alumni of these troubled high schools, even the worst ones, rallied to keep the doors open. One particularly raucous example involved Jamaica High School in Queens.
Jamaica had once been a star in the city’s public school system. Luminaries like Stephen Jay Gould, Art Buchwald, and former U.S. attorney general John Mitchell were alumni. But, by the time Bloomberg was in charge, Jamaica High’s glory days were long gone. The school of four thousand students had a graduation rate far below 50 percent, and it ranked in the bottom 7 percent of the city’s high schools. That record did not stem the outrage. One particularly angry alumnus was George Vecsey, an author and sports columnist for the New York Times. Vecsey compared Joel Klein to Cambodia’s genocidal dictator Pol Pot, arguing that “The city destroyed a piece of history because of its own failure.”27
Jamaica High’s same grand building, a Georgian revival–style structure with columns and a great lawn suitable for a great school, became four specialized high schools: Jamaica Gateway to the Sciences, a math and science academy with about 400 students and a four-year graduation rate of 91 percent by 2016; Queens Collegiate, a college preparatory school with about 650 students and a graduation rate of 77 percent; Hillside Arts and Letters Academy for arts and music, with about 420 students and a graduation rate of 81 percent; and the High School for Community Leadership, with 357 students and a graduation rate of 84 percent.28
Closing a school also caused a backlash among the teachers because it gave Bloomberg and Klein an opportunity to cut the staff. The new school principals could hire teachers who fit their new programs—violin teachers for the music academies, computer experts for the data centers, et cetera.
School closings so angered local communities that Bloomberg’s successor decided he wanted to spend more than $700 million to improve them instead. That didn’t work, as it turned out, and Mayor Bill de Blasio eventually canceled his expensive program to prop up failing schools in 2019.29
Meanwhile, the Research Alliance for New York City Schools at New York University was one of the first to begin assessing how closing these big schools by Bloomberg had affected the students. They found “meaningful benefits” for those who went on to the smaller schools. Not surprisingly, those who stayed behind as their school withered and died fared about the same as those at other failing schools still operating in the system.30
* * *
Bloomberg and his education team would eventually close 164 failing schools and create 654 new ones, including 173 charter schools. “To tie this to Bloomberg and his philosophy about how this is all supposed to work, this is a market process,” explained Sean Patrick Corcoran, associate professor of economics and education policy at New York University. “They saw themselves as facilitating this marketplace and making sure people had enough information to make choices.”31
Still, choice was not a simple concept for the city’s teenagers, not like picking Nikes over Adidas. Eighth graders were required to apply to twelve high schools as options, listing their preferences. Those possibilities were advertised in a 626-page directory—online or printed out to be about the same size as their grandparents’ old Sears, Roebuck catalog. They had to slog through the school data to pick, say, a high school for contemporary arts and a collegiate academy in the Bronx and then ten others. Then the administration would let them know which school would be theirs.
This array of choices, like those in any bazaar, put a great deal of pressure on the consumer—in this case a student already coping with all the stress of hormones and social media. For many, it worked far better than the old system. For some, who had no parent or guidance counselor or friend to help, the tyranny of choice was more like a crapshoot. It was easier for too many of them to simply stay in the neighborhood and live with a school that offered far less.32
Just as Bloomberg was leaving city hall, Corcoran and other NYU researchers issued a critical report33 showing that, despite the efforts to expand options for all students, “low-achieving students attended schools that were lower performing,” and that this was no accident. These students tended to pick those schools as the less challenging ones—i.e., the easier ones—when they made their high school choices.34
* * *
Michael Bloomberg ardently promoted public charter schools as another option, especially for lower-income kids. Public charters, launched in New York in 1998 by Republican governor George Pataki, were independent, not-for-profit public schools set up to have more freedom to experiment with ways to educate. In New York, the unions had little say over these schools, but unlike in some other states, the charters were closely monitored to make sure they were doing the job.
When Bloomberg arrived there were seventeen charter schools in the city. Unions and other groups worked to disparage the charter movement, arguing that they picked off the better students, disciplined too many kids, got rid of those who couldn’t keep up, and drained money from the main public school system. But every year, the charter schools advocates claimed, about 50,000 students35 languished on their waiting lists after entering, and then losing, in lotteries to go to such schools as Success Academy or the Harlem Children’s Zone or KIPP academies, some of the best-performing charter schools in the country. By the time Bloomberg left, the 183 charters served more than 72,000 students—nearly 80 percent of whom qualified as poor enough for the free lunch program.36
Public charter schools were supposed to be laboratories, experimental classrooms providing guidance about what worked and, of course, what didn’t. One positive assessment of Bloomberg’s city charters came from Stanford’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes, which concluded in their 2013 report that the city’s charter school students performed far better than those in similar public schools. The Stanford analysts were concerned that reading scores for charter schools were sliding in some schools, but overall, it was as if the charter students had an additional month of reading instruction and five months more in math than those in the regular public schools.37
These charter students were often poor, mostly Hispanic and African American. But they shared one important advantage. Each student had that parent or grandparent or guardian or friend or adviser—in short, an advocate—who worked hard to get them into those schools. This was clearly a problem for the many kids who didn’t have an adult at their side or for those who were homeless and shifted from address to address. And even for those who had all the support, the lotteries to determine who could go to these schools became truly heartbreaking when a student’s name was not called.
Not all charters were successful, of course, even when they were encouraged and carefully vetted. Some failed like the charter school anoin
ted to be a showcase in the Tweed Courthouse near city hall. The Ross Global Academy eventually closed in 2011 after the city and state cited its poor performance.38
Some critics argued that the charter schools suspended too many students—their way of culling the troublemakers and sending them back as another problem for the regular public schools.39 Critics also questioned whether charters got rid of those students with emotional or learning problems who had accidentally won their lottery.
Bloomberg didn’t waver. The main idea behind these public/private schools was basic to the Bloomberg ethos—competition. They added a few more kiosks to the city’s education market. For Bloomberg, “school choice is an important way to hold schools accountable for success because when people vote with their feet you know that it’s real, and it’s pretty obvious which direction they are going.”40
* * *
If closing failed schools and introducing more choices for students was the basis for Bloomberg’s educational reform, dismantling the old power structure would be both basic and disruptive.
At the same time, word got out that Bloomberg’s school system would be an exciting place to work. Instead of slogging your way up from the lowest ranks to the top, reform-minded educators were welcomed by Bloomberg and Klein if they were ready to experiment with new ways to make the system work better. David Weiner, who worked as a principal and later as an administrator in charge of a teacher evaluation system, said New York became a haven for energetic and innovative educators.
It was a vibrant, exciting, “kinda sexy” place to work, Weiner said shortly after Bloomberg left office and Weiner moved on to help raise private funds for public schools.41
Bloomberg liked to boast that he was keeping the good teachers in city classrooms. Before he arrived, an estimated twelve thousand of eighty thousand teachers either left (often to work for better salaries in the suburbs) or retired every year, and the city had trouble filling those slots with certified teachers. “Today,” he boasted in 2008, “we have 50-odd thousand teachers a year from around the country who apply to teach in the New York City schools system, and we have only about 5,000 vacancies.”42 It helped, of course, that Bloomberg had eventually raised starting teachers’ salaries by a healthy 43 percent.43
Bloomberg and Klein also shifted more power to the principals at the city’s growing number of schools. A new Leadership Academy trained up to seventy principals a year in management skills, often over a short summer course. The academy’s programs “focused on developing the principal as CEO, placing particular emphasis on the use of data to determine and manage the improvement process.”44 Very, very Bloomberg.
Klein also offered principals a different deal. They could have far more control over their schools, more freedom to hire and to budget for their students, but in return, they would sign five-year contracts, promising to improve student achievements.
It was quite a gamble, and some in the principals’ union advised against it. If the school didn’t improve, the principal went on the “ladder of consequences,”45 a form of probation that sounded like a medieval torture device. A first-year failure meant the principal needed a new plan. The second year, the principal could be removed. The third year on the ladder, the school could be closed altogether and the principal might even return to teaching.
Klein boasted the contracts were a success because more than three hundred principals agreed that “If I don’t hit the ball, they’ll be sending me to the minors.”46 Not all principals were ready for such independence and the risk that went with it,47 and Bloomberg’s successor quickly moved back to a system that had less independence school by school and more control from above.
The move to the Tweed Courthouse and the major trimming of the bureaucracy also helped Bloomberg save money and redirect it into schools. The budget for city schools grew from $11.4 billion to $19.9 billion while he was mayor, plus he invested $27 billion in new schools and other capital improvements.48 And the billionaire mayor reached into his own pocket on occasion to fill in the gaps. He used his Fund for Public Schools, a nonprofit corporation, to add part-time consultants to the department. He gave money for a makeup date as a second chance for those who did not do well on a first try on the exam for the city’s best high schools, and he provided money to help train principals, to name a few ways he used his private wealth and connections to help his public schools.
Of course, the Bloomberg team also depended on data, which would not always work out to the mayor’s advantage. An early analysis of a massive school system by McKinsey & Company found lots of paper, few emails, and a system that took months to find out the number of kids who had a school lunch on a specific day.49 Klein found that solid data was “a shockingly rare commodity,” and not simply because of outdated technology.50 He recalled early in his term innocently asking which teachers were doing well in schools with the most students from low-income families. The reply: “I can’t do that.51 The union doesn’t let us do things like that.” Klein spent most of the rest of his term pressuring for numbers in a world that viewed data as sterile and unproductive.
Test scores for students became a particular embarrassment for Bloomberg and Klein. At first student scores on state tests soared from 39 percent of students proficient in several grades in English in 2002 to 69 percent in 2009. Math scores were even better—up from 37 percent to a stunning 84 percent. When the state scores came out, Bloomberg declared that this success was “nothing short of amazing.”52 As it turned out, it was very short of amazing.
When the state made the tests harder and less predictable, 42 percent of students in the city were proficient in English and 54 percent in math. Better, but certainly not amazing. And after Bloomberg left office in 2013, data in the city’s education department became another unacceptable four-letter word.
* * *
The relationship between Mike Bloomberg and the teachers union was promising in the beginning. At first Randi Weingarten, then the forceful and media-savvy head of the United Federation of Teachers, stood shoulder to shoulder with Bloomberg, who promised more money for her members. Bloomberg even joked in 2008 that when he proposed performance-based bonuses, Weingarten’s response was “Well, in New York City, we’ve already got performance pay and that’s why the Mayor makes a dollar a year.”53
Such public cheerfulness lasted while Bloomberg increased teachers’ salaries and benefits,54 which brought in more applicants and slowed the stampede of good teachers to the suburbs. Bloomberg praised the way Weingarten cooperated on the “third-rail” issues, like trying to eliminate the so-called “rubber rooms,” where ineffective or troublesome teachers were exiled while the system tried to fire them.
Behind the scenes, it was not so cozy. Weingarten’s relationship with Chancellor Klein grew more acidic with every shake-up. She increasingly saw an amateur meddling with, not fixing, the problems at hand. And overall, she concluded that the Mike Bloomberg years were a distraction, a series of lost opportunities and wasted time.
“I like the guy,” she said years later about Bloomberg himself. “We still like and respect each other,” but, but, but, but. Pushed to come up with something positive about the Bloomberg education era, she paused, then praised the ex-mayor for recognizing that teachers should be considered professionals. They should stand as a solid part of the middle class, which meant more pay. “I worked with many a mayor who would not have recognized that need.”55
Bloomberg did pay better salaries. But he wanted to pay even more to the best teachers. Merit pay was generally against the union code—their question was who was qualified to pick the “best” teachers? Weingarten’s United Federation of Teachers and Bloomberg agreed to a compromise announced in 2007 for about two hundred “highest needs” schools. Instead of determining pay teacher by teacher the way Bloomberg’s company would decide employee by employee, a compensation committee at every school (two school leaders and two union representatives) would decide how to parcel out funds.56
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sp; Well, that didn’t work. Teachers weren’t motivated by the extra money since the committees almost always decided to share the bonuses with every teacher, good, mediocre, or awful.57 Bloomberg liked to say they tried some things that worked, and when they didn’t, he was not afraid to admit it.58 This program was a good example, and after $56 million in uninspiring bonuses, he canceled it.59
Bloomberg seemed to have a special gift for infuriating teachers. Once, when speaking to students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2011, he mused about how he would run the ideal school system: “If I had the ability, which nobody does really, to just design the system and say, ex cathedra, this is what we’re going to do, you would cut the number of teachers in half, but you would double the compensation of them, and you would weed out all the bad ones and just have good teachers. And double the class size with a better teacher is a good deal for the students.”60
When Bloomberg got back to the city, teachers were fuming. Understandably. Half of them were bad? Bigger class sizes?
Such comments only added to the simmering anger among teachers, especially those active in the union. Accustomed to hearing praise about how they had sacrificed their lives for the next generation, teachers were increasingly irritated that their worth was being judged more and more by data and by test scores and by a cold, rich mayor.
During Bloomberg’s final years running the city, his relationship with the union was a lot closer to open warfare. Randi Weingarten was the kind of tough negotiator who could manage an unruly union crowd but could also survive a social dinner uptown. She wooed the media and had friends at every level in government and finance. But by Bloomberg’s third term, she had moved up to become president of the American Federation of Teachers in Washington. Her replacement was Michael Mulgrew, a muscular negotiator who could turn on all the charm of a nightclub bouncer.
The Many Lives of Michael Bloomberg Page 19