This month's opening of the public schools in New York City may well be the rockiest in memory. The city's long-troubled school system is in the midst of a top-to-bottom overhaul not seen since decentralization in the early 1970s. Most students will return to schools that are adjusting to both major administrative and instructional changes.
Key to the reforms enacted by Mayor Michael Bloomberg and put into place by Chancellor Joel Klein is a reallocation of power to a clearly defined and publicly accountable management team, leadership training and more budget autonomy for principals, and a uniform early-grade curriculum for all but the highest performing schools. These types of changes raise alarms for those who held power in the old system, and so it is clear that there are vipers waiting in the grass for this reform and this group of reformers to stumble.
New Yorkers should not rush to judgment on the changes made in the school system. With 40 district offices now consolidated into 10 regional centers and with a new curriculum being implemented in most city schools, no one should be surprised to hear of missteps in the first weeks and months of school this year. Those inevitable missteps will not be reason to return to the old ways of doing business. The old ways may have served certain interests well, but it routinely failed some 60 percent of the city's students who each year are unable to meet state-set standards.
In any such large-scale turnaround, there can be a tension between enacting swift reform to create urgently needed changes and taking the time needed to smooth the way by seeking the opinions and winning the support of those who will be affected by the changes. With children's futures slipping away with each month of the status quo, Bloomberg and Klein can justify opting to create reform as quickly as possible, even if by fiat. But with minimal effort at fostering community buy-in, they have to expect a lot of resistance.
In the present case, the pace of change has launched numerous complaints about decision-making secrecy and top-down control, as well as grave worries about the impotence of competent educators to make decisions about the schools and classrooms for which they are responsible. For now, these real anxieties should be tempered with an understanding that such means may be necessary in this early stage of reform. There may be no other way to turn the battleship around except through many hands working together on orders from on high. And there may be no other way of ensuring that issues that arise on the decks during the turnaround are reviewed and addressed for their system-wide ramifications.
City schools vary enormously in their capacity for quality leadership and instruction. Klein and company insist that they are committed to managing these different schools differently. This is wise. Functional schools should run themselves; dysfunctional schools should be managed carefully. Parents and others need to be vigilant here to make sure that autonomy is granted to the schools, leaders, and school leadership teams who demonstrate that they are accountable to their students.
And no one should confuse what is needed to make the important structural reforms now put into motion and what is needed for continual improvement of the quality of teaching and learning in classrooms. This includes a collegial environment, experienced pedagogues to provide instructional leadership and mentoring, investment in effective professional development, shared planning time for teachers, and long-term consistency.
New Yorkers will get an opportunity to express themselves on the overhaul of the school system in the November 2005 mayoral election. It will be fair to judge the Bloomberg-Klein reforms at that point.
At that time, the voting public should be prepared to look not just at test scores but beyond to other important indicators of school-level and system-wide improvement.
• Are teachers and principals getting ongoing training and support?
• Is the quality of the professionals in the schools improving?
• Are qualified faculty staying put, especially in the schools that need them most?
• Is a plan underway for systematic class-size reduction?
• Are there more pre-kindergarten seats?
• Has a capital plan been adopted to create sufficient additional safe, healthy, up-to-date facilities?
• Are schools more responsive and inclusive of parents?
• Is accurate, timely information about the school policies and practices readily available?
• Are struggling students receiving more support?
• Are more kids staying in school?
• Is the graduation rate rising?
In the short term, New Yorkers need to remind themselves how bad the school system had become before these reforms were put in place. Since the mid-1980s, the school system has been tracking high school students and reporting on their graduation success. In all that time, the high school graduation rate, arguably the bottom line indicator of success, has remained at just about 50 percent.
The school system is still drastically underfunded, overcrowded, and, subject to policies, like teacher transfers, that put the needs of adults over the needs of children. City and school officials must tackle these. State lawmakers must make good on the Campaign for Fiscal Equity school-funding decision and ensure that the city schools have adequate resources with which to accomplish their goals.
There is still much to be done. But the current reforms, combined with others already in progress, such as the initiative to create more small high schools should be given a chance to play out for the benefit of the city's schools.
Raymond Domanico is senior education advisor to the Metro NY Industrial Areas Foundation.
Jessica Wolff is a public school parent and Director of Policy Development at the Campaign for Fiscal Equity, a not-for-profit coalition working to reform New York State's education finance system to ensure adequate resources and the opportunity for a sound basic education for all students in New York City.
The views expressed are their own.
Since the terrorist attacks two years ago, immigrants have become the object of fear and rage, and, increasingly, the subject of research. Both groups opposed to further immigration and those who advocate for immigrants try to buttress their arguments with the steady flow of reports, studies and findings from think tanks and universities. Four recently released reports, two of them about housing, should give both sides in the debate some fresh ammunition.
IMMIGRANTS AND HOUSING
Latinos are most affected by the lack of affordable and low-rent housing in New York City, according to a new report (in pdf format) by the Center for Puerto Rican Studies. In Latino neighborhoods such as Washington Heights and Bushwick, residents are spending most of their income on rent.
Seventy-three percent of nonimmigrant Latinos and 83 percent of immigrant Latinos rent their home, the highest percentage than other groups (For Blacks, 78 percent for nonimmigrants, 75 percent for immigrants, and, for whites, 53 percent for nonimmigrants, 59 percent for immigrants), noted the study.
" This report equivocally shows that affordable housing should be one of the most important priorities for any elected official who cares about New York's Latino community," study author Carlos Vargas-Ramos told the Daily News.
Another recently released study by the National Housing Conference also found that immigrants are having trouble finding affordable housing. Study author Barbara Lipman used census data and housing survey to analyze immigrants's living condition and found that immigrants are likely to spend more than half of their income on housing.
" Obviously, it's an issue if you're paying half of you income on your housing; what do you have for anything else," she told Fresno Bee. Lipman's study also shows that low and middle income immigrants are six times as likely to live in overcrowded homes.
Last December, Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced his plan to preserve 38,000 units of affordable housing, and build 27,000 more over the next five years. Bloomberg has said that he is committed to the plan despite the city's budget deficit.
MOVEMENT OF FOREIGN-BORN POPULATION
A new census report tracking the movement of foreign-born population from 1995 to 2000 found that New York state sent 205,000 more immigrants to other states than it received from them. Similar " gateway" states such as California and Illinois also lost their foreign born population to other states.
Some believe that immigrants are leaving the "gateway" states for the same reasons natives do: to find affordable housing and a better standard of living.
" It's a middle-class flight motivated by cost and congestion," demographer William Frey told USA Today.
However, the same census report also shows that New York state had a constant supply of new immigrants, with 583,769 people who were born in another country entering the state in the same five-year period.
In New York City alone, foreign born population accounts for 36 percent of the city's 8 million total population, according to 2000 Census.
IMMIGRANTS AND WAGES
A new study by University of California researcher Liza Catanzarite shows that newly arrived Hispanic immigrant workers drove down wages in working class and service jobs.
By analyzing 1990 Census data of male workers in 38 US metropolitan areas, including New York City, Catanzarite found that both native people born and immigrants earned on the average 11 percent less than others in comparable fields when they worked along side newly arrived Hispanic males.
" These findings push us to understand that wage penalties in 'brown collar' occupations stem from newcomer Latinos' marginal status, and not from immigration per se," Catanzarite told the Associated Press.
The term "brown collar" refers to occupations where Latinos are over represented, mainly low-level service and manufacturing jobs, according to the study. Immigrant Latinos constitute as much as 40-71 percent of workers in many of these fields.
Catanzarite also noted that new Hispanic immigrants are unable to resist low wages and have little political power to demand higher pay. She suggested that better protections for immigrants will, in turn, help raise wages for all.
An immigrant from Bangkok, Thailand, Chaleampon Ritthichai is the editor of The Citizen.
When the New York State Education Department began the phase-in of stricter new graduation standards, educators feared that an increasing number of students would drop out of schools before they graduated.
In recent months, evidence has emerged that this nightmare is coming true – and that it is even worse than expected: some schools may be deliberately driving them out.
In the late 1990’s, the state began requiring that all students in New York pass five rigorous Regents exams in order to receive a high school diploma. At that time, fewer than one in five New York City students met that requirement. Since then, new state and federal accountability policies have further ratcheted up the pressure on students, educators, and school officials by adding penalties for schools and districts whose students do not pass these and other required tests at acceptable rates.
Dropout numbers have been gradually edging up since the new graduation standards were implemented. But there is another disturbing trend, according to a recent New York Times investigation, as well as a studyreleased last winter. Drop-out rates may dramatically underestimate the number of New York City high school who leave the public schools without graduating.
According to these reports, New York City Department of Education data show tens of thousands of students who leave the high schools categorized as "discharged." This category includes students who transfer to other schools or school systems or who go to private schools; it also includes students who move from regular high school programs into alternative programs -- programs that lead a General Educational Development diploma (GED) rather than to the much more marketable regular high school diploma.
The reports allege that many low achieving high school students, unaware of their legal right to stay in a regular high school until they are 21 years old, are being counseled or forced into high school equivalency programs. More and younger students than ever are being encouraged to join these programs, though the GED is a less valuable degree than the regular high school diploma, and though most of the students who leave high school with the intention of enrolling in one of these programs either never join or never receive the certificate.
Students who do not complete these alternative programs may not be counted as dropouts in Department of Education statistics. Advocates believe that the official dropout rate of 20 percent would climb to 25 or 30 percent if these students' outcomes were included.
Chancellor Joel Klein has acknowledged this "tragedy" and the need to create more programs for students who need more time to graduate. The Times quoted Klein as saying, "The goal is for students to graduate in four years, but we've got to stop giving the signal that we're giving up on students who don't do that."
Now that the Department of Education has acknowledged the problem, advocates recommend specific steps to remedy it, including analyzing discharged students data to learn more about the students affected and creating state and city policies explicitly discouraging the practice of pushing out at-risk students. Advocates for Children of New York has also filed suit against the Department of Education charging that Franklin K. Lane High School in Brooklyn illegally discharged hundreds of students over the past three years.
New High School Bill Introduced in the U.S. Senate
The No Child Left Behind Act may add to the Department of Education's pressure to shunt aside low performing high schoolers. Under the federal education law, high schools receive "credit" only for students who graduate on time with a regular diploma. Schools thus get no incentive to keep students in school for a fifth or sixth year in order to help them graduate, though, in New York City, an additional 10 percent of students are able to graduate after a fifth year.
New York City is not alone in its need to address these problems. Democratic Senator Patty Murray of Washington recently introduced new legislation to help reform the nation's secondary schools, citing a need to reach older students largely left out of No Child Left Behind. The Pathways for All Children to Succeed (PASS) Act seeks to provide extra support for high school students through a focus on adolescent literacy, counseling, and a grant program to improve student achievement in low-performing high schools.
Jessica Wolff is a public school parent and Director of Policy Development at the Campaign for Fiscal Equity, a not-for-profit coalition working to reform New York State's education finance system to ensure adequate resources and the opportunity for a sound basic education for all students in New York City. The views expressed are her own.