Save Our Schools DC

By Samuel G. Freedman

New York Times
September 13, 2006

WHEN Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Chancellor Joel I. Klein gained unprecedented power over the vast archipelago of public education in New York more than four years ago, they were the beneficiaries of three beliefs widely held in the city.

The first was that the system of decentralized control, ended after 35 years by the State Legislature in June 2002, had been a misadventure of bureaucratic inefficiency, academic inconsistency and persistent corruption.

The second was that the education program advocated by Mr. Bloomberg’s predecessor, Rudolph W. Giuliani, with its emphasis on steering public money into vouchers for private schools, was too radical for New York.

The final factor was that Mr. Bloomberg, astride a personal fortune, and Mr. Klein, an anti-trust lawyer in the Clinton administration, were so independent and incorruptible they could be trusted to run a system with more than a million students and a budget well into the billions with few, if any, of the traditional forms of government or community oversight.

It is clear that Mayor Bloomberg and Mr. Klein have indeed created a third way, though many might not realize it. Their reinvented school system has many more private components than ever before, which come under very little outside scrutiny.

This not-so-public part of the public school system has received more than $330 million in grants and donations from private sources over the past three years, according to Education Department statistics.

While several hundred million dollars barely compares with the annual budget of $15.4 billion from public sources, some of the private money has gone toward devising and carrying out two relatively untested and consequently divisive initiatives of the current administration — the rapid opening of scores of small schools and the recruitment and training of principals in a new Leadership Academy.

Outside money also supports the educational programs of private, nonprofit organizations as disparate as Outward Bound and the Asia Society. These various groups have helped found, operate, and support roughly 200 public schools — in essence a school system within a school system. The largest of these partners, New Visions for Public Schools, itself has a hand in running 117 of these schools, 83 of which started during the Klein years, serving 25,000 pupils.

The overarching question is whether these initiatives amount to efficient innovations to a sclerotic system or an evasion of the normal checks and balances of government.

Chancellor Klein describes this parallel track of schools and policies as essential to his efforts to shake up, if not circumvent, the bureaucracy, allowing risk-taking and experimentation. Essentially he and the mayor say to New Yorkers: Trust us.

“I don’t want to disempower leadership when it’s tackling some tough issues,” Mr. Klein said in an interview last week. “Isn’t what you want most in government performance?”

In Mr. Klein’s view, added layers of accountability lead right back toward the lumbering pace and complacency of the old, independent Board of Education and community school boards. The line of accountability now runs straight from Mr. Klein through a submissive Panel for Educational Policy to the mayor himself.

“I don’t think there’s a lack of transparency,” Mr. Klein said of his initiatives. “Transparency is knowing what we’re doing, who’s doing it, why we’re doing it. You don’t have to have a vote on every item. That’s where you have the problem of paralysis.”

Some education experts who have praised Mr. Klein and Mayor Bloomberg for raising test scores and graduation rates, particularly in schools with large numbers of low-income and nonwhite pupils, express misgivings about the way even worthy changes have been achieved. “There is a trend that I think of more as corporatization than privatization,” said Raymond Domanico, the senior education adviser to the Industrial Areas Foundation in New York. “In privatization at least you’d get some empowerment of consumers, which in public education would mean families and parents. They are the check against private forces. And in the public-sector model, there are rules and governmental checks and balances. What we’ve seen is an engagement of private organizations without any effective counterbalance.”

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