Mayor Bloomberg, in his State of the City address, in January, proposed a top-to-bottom reorganization of the NYC public schools. Because the plan had been drafted in secret by Mr. Bloomberg, Mr. Klein and their multi-million dollar no-bid contractors, when it was first announced, no one could understand it at all. At the post-speech hearing of the NYC Council Education Committee, Advocate Gotbaum, Speaker Quinn, and Chairman Jackson (among a host of others were shocked that such far-reaching changes would be imposed with no consultation whatsoever with stakeholders or electeds.

I suppose it's not so odd, but the schools that Mr. Klein and Mr. Bloomberg want to impose on our children are entirely unlike those which their children attended. Both Spence and Ms. Porters sport small classes and individualized teaching.

As Mr. Bloomberg's proposal has become clearer over the last few weeks, it has drawn concerted opposition from the NYC Council, parents, teachers, the Working Families Party, ACORN and many others. If you care about public education not at all and intend to stop reading now, take away my overall judgment as a parent and somewhat informed observer: The Bloomberg/Klein proposals will destabilize every school and will facilitate the looting of the education budget by contractors. The educational theory upon which this chaotic re-shuffle is based seems to me to be -- every child, teacher and school is fungible with every other.
It seems to me the only thing Mr. Klein learned about schools, he learned in law school. Children are, to him, widgets. In later posts, I'll write about the movement to stop Mr. Bloomberg and Mr. Klein, but below, an attempt to set out some of the mismanagement principles of their erratic proposal.

When they took over the school system from the Board of Ed, Mr. Bloomberg and Mr. Klein swept in a new management scheme of "Regional" superintendents and tossed aside the closer supervision. Under the new proposal, Principals will report directly to Tweed. As a result, school leaders will have no effective supervision. Instead, they'll be judged on the children's outcomes on standardized tests.

Principals will get budgets based on their enrollment; the more children, the bigger the budget. This will create an incentive to hire the cheapest teachers, beginners, because they will get more classroom coverage for their school's dollar. Principals will be encouraged to contract-out for support services (formerly supplied by the school district) from an approved list. Will entities already doing business with Mr. Klein get on the list? Since they'll bet their jobs on English and Math scores of the kids, which principal will spend money on art or music? which on PE?

Greatly touted, but actually not thought out, is a proposal to deny tenure to most teachers. I blush as I recall Deputy Mayor Wolcott's defense of this facially dubious but actually insane proposal. He said only the very best should get tenure; most applicant should be denied tenure and fired.(Without regard to qualifications). At present he said 90% of eligible teachers get tenure. Under the new regime, 90% wouldn't get tenure, which would vastly churn the teacher-force. At present, a large proportion of new teachers leave before coming up for tenure. If 90% of the rest are also eliminated, the pool of experienced teachers will shrink -- reducing payroll costs but subjecting the children to less skilled instruction. In reality, of course, it's the principal who needs to decide whether to deny a teacher tenure. In actual practice they have to deicide whether to keep someone they know or to go fish for a new one.

By keeping the principals' purse strings tight (warnings of cuts have already been sent out for next year) Mr. Klein and Mr. Bloomberg reward principals who keep classes large and run by inexperienced teacher. By threatening to fire principals whose children do badly on the tests, Mr. Bloomberg and Klein encourage principals to spend money only on test-prep. Thus, they plan a race to the bottom.

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