An education mayor takes charge: the picture in New York.

In one of the more extreme examples of ancient wisdom proved true, many education reformers are wondering if they should have been more careful about what they wished for in New York City. Please let the mayor run the schools: that was the mantra.

Mired for decades in Byzantine bureaucracy that wasted untold millions of dollars and incalculable numbers of student academic lives, the New York City school system was wrestled to the ground by a billionaire mayor, and almost everyone applauded.

Four years later, where are we? Not far, says Sol Stern, an early supporter of the new regime. Joe Williams, however, is more inclined to give the Bloomberg bunch a pass, at least for now.

A Negative Assessment

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An Education Revolution That Never Was

"Minority kids soar in reading," screamed the banner headline on the New York Post's front page earlier this year. Along with its rival tabloid, the Daily News, the Post supported Mayor Michael Bloomberg's education reforms and now has credited those reforms for a "record setting" 10 percent improvement in the city's scores on state-administered 4th-grade reading tests.

Actually, it's anyone's guess why the 4th-grade scores rose so sharply this year at the same time that the 8th-grade reading and social studies scores went from bad to worse (with only 32.8 percent of city 8th graders meeting state standards in reading and 20 percent in social studies). It could well be due to broader educational forces or to changes in testing procedures. Either could explain why 4th-grade scores were up throughout the state, and student gains in Rochester, Syracuse, and Yonkers were even more impressive than in Gotham (see Hanushek, "Pseudo-Science," pp. 67-73).

In any case, no reputable researcher would rely on a one-year bump in some test scores to judge the efficacy of a new program. In the absence of independent confirmation by testing experts, one should remain highly skeptical of the claims of Mayor Bloomberg and his supporters that his instructional initiatives are working.

Unfortunately, this is also an election year, which means that political spin is likely to drown out reasoned debate about what policies are most likely to work in inner-city classrooms. The premise of mayoral control was that the public would finally be able to hold someone accountable for the schools. But the billionaire mayor has almost unlimited resources to win an electoral spin war, regardless of the reality in the classroom. In addition to dipping into his private fortune for unlimited campaign ads touting his test score gains, he has total control of a $15 billion education empire that doles out jobs and no-bid contracts to potential critics and spends millions on a well-oiled public relations machine, but spends nothing on independent research or evaluation of classroom programs. This has consequences for the national education debate as well. If Bloomberg is reelected, his model of reform through dictatorial mayoral control will surely be urged on other troubled urban school districts.

Before that model is exported anywhere else, however, serious thought ought to be given to what the mayor promised and what he has actually delivered.

City Hall Rules

It once seemed to be a good thing for education reform that Mike Bloomberg was so rich. Having financed his first election campaign completely out of his deep pockets, Bloomberg was unencumbered by debts owed to the system's entrenched interest groups, including the powerful union representing 80,000 teachers. In this favorable political climate, the new mayor was quickly able to persuade the state legislature to vest him with total control of the schools. Even the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) supported the reform legislation after Mayor Bloomberg gave the teachers a 16 percent across-the-board wage hike (plus an extra 5 percent for beginning teachers).

Crammed with thousands of redundant bureaucrats and patronage appointees, the Board of Education's labyrinthine headquarters building at 110 Livingston Street in downtown Brooklyn was the most notorious symbol of the old regime. The mayor seized control of the building, cleaned out the time-servers and the patronage nests, and then sold off the property to the highest bidder. A few hundred top administrators who survived the purge were relocated to the newly renovated Tweed Courthouse building a few hundred feet from City Hall, where the mayor could keep a close eye on them.

The mayor seemed equally bold in his selection of Joel Klein, former chief of the Justice Department's antitrust division, as schools' chancellor. The highlight of Klein's career to that point was his prosecution of the Microsoft Corporation for antitrust violations. Bringing in a "trust buster" to help reinvent a monopoly public school system was hailed by many education reformers (myself included) as a stroke of genius and more proof of Mayor Bloomberg's commitment to radical change.

Bloomberg and Klein then created what appeared to be a streamlined structure for efficiently managing the city's 1,300 schools. Instead of overlapping administrative layers operating through 32 separate school districts, there would now be one clear chain of command extending vertically from the mayor's office to the chancellor, then down through ten regional superintendents, and finally to the principal of every school in the system.

So much for the Management 101 part. What happens in the classroom of the new order?

The mayor presented his master plan, called Children First, in an inspired Martin Luther King Day speech in January 2003. Standing in front of a portrait of Reverend King at the Schomburg cultural center in Harlem, he described the effort to improve the schools as a "civil rights" battle. The administration's new approach, Bloomberg said, was to allow the chancellor's office to "dictate the curriculum and pedagogical methods," including a reading program with "a daily focus on phonics." The mayor also promised, "Our teachers will all employ strategies proven to work." A few days later Chancellor Klein announced that the mainstay of the new citywide literacy curriculum would be a program called Month-by-Month Phonics.

The references to phonics and "strategies proven to work" seemed like a calculated hint that the businessman mayor would favor a return to "basics." This was music to the ears of education traditionalists bemoaning the use of unproven progressive methodologies in inner-city classrooms. Still, Bloomberg also offered plenty of red meat to those reformers pushing for school choice, competition, and incentives in education. Vouchers remain off the table in New York, but Chancellor Klein soon came out for the next best thing: charter schools. He also pressed for reform of the onerous work rules in the teachers' contract, including eliminating the seniority provisions, making it easier to fire incompetents, and establishing a system of merit pay.

For pushing these market-style initiatives, Klein and Bloomberg have been celebrated in the media and the business community as courageous visionaries, even revolutionaries. Two of the nation's most influential education philanthropies, the Gates Foundation and the Eli Broad Foundation, are deeply invested in Bloomberg's structural reforms and see them as national models of reform. The same Bill Gates whose company was prosecuted by Assistant Attorney General Joel Klein has given Chancellor Klein at least $70 million for creating hundreds of new small high schools and charter schools. And California billionaire Eli Broad, who helped finance the Children First planning phase, predicted that Bloomberg and Klein would soon succeed in turning around the schools.

Calamity of the Lams

The only reform that ever matters in education is doing whatever it takes to lift student academic achievement and reduce the scandalous racial gap in learning. Unfortunately, somewhere along the road to the brave new world of charter schools and market incentives, Bloomberg and Klein either forgot, or never comprehended in the first place, that all good education, and, even more so, education for disadvantaged children, starts with systematic and explicit instruction in the basic skills of literacy, numeracy, and other foundational academic subjects. By that standard, there is nothing at all revolutionary about the progressive pedagogy that now rules New York's schools. Even worse, the administration's authoritarian attempts to impose a single instructional approach throughout the system have so demoralized and frightened rank-and-file teachers that it is now virtually impossible for the city to get much-needed reforms of work rules in the next teachers' contract.

The selection of Month-by-Month Phonics in January 2003 provided the first clue that there was an instructional void at the heart of the Bloomberg/Klein reforms. Not only has this program never met the "proven to work" standard set by the mayor; it isn't even a systematic phonics program, despite its name. Even the authors of the program concede the point. Phonics, they argue, is only "one-quarter of a well-balanced literary diet."

The authors' invocation of "balance" was a giveaway. Real phonics instruction teaches children about the sounds of spoken language and how letters represent those sounds. "Balanced literacy" is the brand name for an instructional approach that adds a dollop of phonics to an otherwise whole-language reading program in which children are encouraged to "construct" or decipher meaning from so-called authentic texts. It's a clever marketing ploy that allows school districts to appear to be responding to growing pressure from lawmakers and parents for explicit phonics instruction while doing the opposite.

Mayor Bloomberg likely was never told that Month-by-Month Phonics was part of a stealth whole-language program. The same excuse can't be made for Chancellor Klein, who chose to surround himself with a palace guard of progressive educators who all hate phonics. The key managerial decision in this regard was Klein's selection in August 2002 of Diana Lam as deputy chancellor for teaching and learning at $250,000 per year, the same salary as his own, surely one of the most embarrassing hiring decisions in the history of New York City government. Lam flamed out in less than 18 months after she was caught in a nepotism scandal, but the education damage she caused during her brief tenure was incalculable.

As schools' chief in Providence, Rhode Island, Lam assiduously promoted balanced literacy and "fuzzy" math programs, but the results were nothing to write home about. Fifty-four of the 55 schools in the district were listed by the state as "low performing" when she got there. After she left, three years later, only one of those schools had moved up a notch. Nevertheless, Klein gave her control over curriculum and pedagogical decisions during the planning stages of Children First. It was Lam who convinced Klein that balanced literacy, with its phony phonics component, should be used in virtually all schools.

With Klein's approval, Lam also managed to wipe out one of the few instructional programs that actually met Mayor Bloomberg's "proven to work" standard. It's an explicit phonics program called Success for All that was put into 50 of the city's lowest-performing schools in the late 1990s. Reading scores went up in those schools for four consecutive years. Yet despite the program's good track record and the $27 million that the city had invested in it, Lam dumped it without even so much as a phone call to the program's developer, Robert Slavin. "She decided on the first day not to listen to other voices," Slavin said.

Klein and Lam launched their jihad against phonics at a rather inopportune moment. The National Reading Panel commissioned by Congress had concluded, based on an analysis of 52 randomized scientific studies, that effective reading programs, especially for kids living in poverty, require "systematic and explicit" instruction in phonics. Because of this converging scientific consensus, the No Child Left Behind Act requires school districts to demonstrate that they are using reading programs that have been tested for their efficacy through scientific studies in order to qualify for federal reading funds.

Mayor Bloomberg was warned repeatedly by federal and state education officials that Month-by-Month Phonics wouldn't qualify for the $34 million annually in reading funds available to the city. In a letter to Bloomberg, Klein, and Lam, seven noted reading specialists, including three who had served on the National Reading Panel, said that Month-by-Month Phonics is "woefully inadequate," "lacks a research base," and "puts beginning readers at risk of failure in learning to read." The federal government would be guilty of malpractice if it funded a reading program that its own experts said "puts beginning readers at risk of failure." That alone should have led Bloomberg and Klein to reverse course immediately in the interests of the children and to fire Diana Lam.

Instead, the Bloomberg administration treated the scientists' letter as a political and public relations problem. Enter Professor Lucy Calkins of Teachers College, the doyenne of balanced literacy in New York, with $6 million in city contracts to train teachers for the program. Although the experts' letter was private, Calkins rounded up a posse of 100 ed-school professors, most of whom had nothing to do with reading instruction, to write a counter-letter made public by the administration. It was hardly hot news that education school professors hate phonics. Nevertheless, the administration tried to persuade the public that the letter with 100 signatures outweighed the one from a mere seven reading scientists, as if an educators' plebiscite could resolve the evidentiary questions about the effectiveness of the reading program.

After stonewalling for almost a year, Chancellor Klein found a way out of the dilemma. He agreed to install a phonics program called Harcourt Trophies in only 49 schools in order to qualify for the federal funds. Klein's gamesmanship was unnecessary and tragic. It should have been a no-brainer for the city to pick up more than $200 million in federal funds over six years for something it should have been doing all along. So why would an education administration that claims to care only about the interests of kids decide to use a reading program, Month-by-Month Phonics, that does not meet the standard for effectiveness established by a broad consensus of scientists?

The Romance of Progressivism

The answer is that the progressive educators empowered by Chancellor Klein shudder at the thought that science confers validity on the practice of teaching young children to read through heavily scripted lessons in letter/sound correspondence. Their pedagogical starting point is the great Romantic idea, starting with Rousseau, that children learn naturally (including learning to read). Thus the role of the teacher is to facilitate this natural process through hands-on, "constructivist" activity in "child-centered" classrooms. This can be seen vividly in a CD video distributed by the chancellor's office to all teachers in 2003 and that was still posted on the Department of Education's (DOE) web site as of May 2005.

As the video opens, Klein announces, "This CD will walk you through the research upon which we based our decisions regarding our program choices." The implication is that the city's search for the "best practices" was intellectually serious. Not so. Otherwise, this instructional guide would not be dominated by the pedagogical principles of a radical education guru from Australia named Brian Cambourne, who believes that teachers ought to encourage their students to achieve a "literacy for social equity and social justice."

Professor Cambourne says he came to his theories when he discovered that many of his poorly performing students were actually quite bright. To his surprise, almost all demonstrated competence at challenging tasks in the real adult world, including poker. This led to the brainstorm that children learn better in natural settings with a minimum amount of adult help. So important does Joel Klein's education department deem Cambourne's theories to be that it instructs all city teachers to go through a checklist to make sure their classroom practices meet the down-under education professor's "Conditions for Learning." Which of four scenarios most accurately describes how your classroom is set up? teachers are asked. If the teacher can claim "a variety of center-based activities, for purposeful learning using different strategies, and for students to flow as needed," she can pat herself on the back. But if her classroom is set up "for lecture with rows facing forward," she must immediately change her practice.

You might ask whether there's any evidence for such pedagogy. It's "weak to nonexistent," according to Reid Lyon, former head of all reading research at the National Institutes of Health. "The philosophical and romantic notion that children learn to read naturally and through incidental exposure to print and literature has no scientific merit whatsoever."

That hasn't deterred Chancellor Klein in the least. Constructivist pedagogical guidelines are forced on classroom teachers in weekly "professional development" sessions that are closer to a military boot camp than any serious inquiry into the best classroom practices. No dissent is allowed. Teachers are given lists of "nonnegotiables," a strange and embarrassing concept for any education enterprise. Thus students must not be sitting in rows. Teachers are forbidden to stand at the head of the class and do "chalk and talk" at the blackboard. There must be a "workshop" (students working in groups) in every single reading period. Teachers are also provided with classroom maps indicating the exact location of the teacher's desk, the students' writing stations, and exactly how much of the wall space should be set aside for posting student work. Also nonnegotiable is that every elementary school classroom must have a rug.

Is it surprising then that Chancellor Klein is facing a revolt from teachers like 13-year veteran Jackie Bennett, from a Staten Island high school? Ms. Bennett's problem is that she believes it's not a sin to bring her knowledge of great literature to her students, even if she occasionally lectures. After all, Bennett has a master's in English literature from Columbia University, exactly the kind of academic attainment we supposedly want more of from our teachers.

"DOE administrators talk about balance," Ms. Bennett recently wrote in an unpublished letter to the New York Times.

    What they really want is all-group, all the time. What's more, the
  message is clear: when we visit your classes and the kids are not in
  groups, you have one strike against you.
    My recent experience at staff development is illustrative of just
  how clear that message is intended to be. After spending the morning
  working with my colleagues on a small group activity that entailed
  busy-work that did nothing to further our development as teachers, we
  returned to a whole-class discussion to briefly assess what we had
  learned. I raised my hand and asked if there was any research tying
  group work to better test scores. The answer was no.
    My behavior was reported to the Local Instructional Superintendent,
  and two days later, my assistant principal asked me to forgo
  attendance at the remaining meetings. I had, it seems, been kicked out
  of staff development. Had I made a ruckus? No. But I had asked
  uncomfortable questions. I had thought critically. Though the City's
  Department of Education gives lip service to teaching kids to think
  critically, it is clear they want those critical thinking skills
  taught by drones.

Tyranny in the Classroom

Chancellor Klein has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on mandated professional development sessions of the kind that Jackie Bennett describes. Yet there's no research evaluating the effectiveness of a program that is eating up so much of the city's budget and its teachers' precious time. New York City has nothing like the independent research consortium, based at the University of Chicago, which provides objective third-party evaluation and analysis of performance data supplied by the Chicago school system.

What's indisputable, however, is that the intellectually vacuous nature of these sessions and the central administration's tyranny over classroom instruction is demoralizing many excellent and successful teachers. The city will surely lose many of them. "There isn't one teacher I know who doesn't say they would leave if they could," says Norman Scott, a 35-year veteran classroom teacher and publisher of an independent newsletter for city teachers. In the meantime thousands of teachers have taken to the streets in union-organized protests over Klein's instructional dictatorship. "Let teachers teach," say the placards carried at these demonstrations. At a recent UFT rally, union president Randi Weingarten said: "We knew that a top-down, command and control management and rigid, lockstep teaching mandates would be demoralizing. But I never imagined that guidelines for, say, the workshop model, complete with its limit of ten minutes of direct instruction, would devolve into orders to use it every day, for every lesson and every group of students."

Klein and Mayor Bloomberg have countered that all the tumult in the street is nothing but posturing over a contract dispute. The UFT wants more money, they say, but no reform of the work rules. They are right that the existing contract is a lousy deal for everyone involved. I have been writing about the contract's excellence-killing seniority rules, its lockstep pay schedules, and its other inflexible regulations for years (see "Facade of Excellence," Education Next, Summer 2003). In fact, Joel Klein once told me he had read my critique of the contract, and from time to time he has even borrowed my quip that this is the ultimate "we-don't-do-windows" labor agreement.

The problem is that, because Chancellor Klein has tyrannized all teachers with mindless directives about their classroom practices, he has forfeited any chance of getting significant work-rule changes. Why would any self-respecting teacher be willing to give Chancellor Klein even more power over his or her professional life? Come to think of it, Chancellor Klein has managed to incorporate one of the worst characteristics of the teachers' contract into his own professional development regime. It's the pernicious idea that all teachers are of equal value to a school and should be treated accordingly. Thus the contract mandates that the math teacher with a Ph.D. who teaches AP calculus is on the exact same pay scale as the 7th-grade gym teacher. The teacher who works 60 hours a week, spending extra time with students and parents, is equal to the teacher putting in the contractual minimum of 6 hours and 40 minutes per day.

But consider Chancellor Klein's professional development program. It is meant to indoctrinate and remold virtually every teacher in the system, regardless of that teacher's level of academic attainment, years of experience, established record of success, or personal teaching style. All are herded into professional development boot camp, the 13-year veteran with a master's degree in English literature next to the rookie just out of education school. All are forced to slavishly parrot progressive education theories and apply them in their classrooms. Just as the teachers' contract undermines teaching excellence, Klein's professional development regime demoralizes good professional educators with a previous track record of success.

In the balance between the rules of the teachers' contract and the rules of Joel Klein's pedagogical dictatorship, there is now more harm in the latter. There's always time to change the contract, which is renegotiated every two years or so. In the meantime, creative principals still find ways to work around its restrictions. But if Mayor Bloomberg is reelected, city teachers face four more years of relentless indoctrination in an unproved classroom methodology.

It is true that Chancellor Klein has created dozens of new charter schools and small, new high schools. But school reformers ought not to be so fixated on getting the market incentives right that they lose sight of the fact that what actually happens day by day in the classroom, the content of what teachers actually teach, is the acid test of all education improvement. By that standard the Bloomberg/Klein legacy is an unsettling one. It leaves in place a demoralized teaching staff and classroom practices that in the long run stand little chance of narrowing the racial gap in learning, unless, that is, progressive education finally succeeds in dumbing down all students. This is not a product made for export.

Sol Stern is the author of Breaking Free: Public School Lessons and the Imperative of School Choice.

BY SOL STERN

On the Positive Side

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Bloomberg and Klein Seek to Repair a Failure Factory

The history books will show that New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg seized control of the city's sprawling public school bureaucracy and its 1.1 million students on July 1, 2002. But it was 18 months later when New Yorkers got their first real taste of what mayoral control and accountability were supposed to be about.

It was December of 2003, with the holidays fast approaching, when reports of violence inside several high schools got plastered all over the local press. Readers of the city's dailies were treated to a host of stories about out-of-control students caught brandishing weapons, a teacher and a student being taken away on stretchers after a fight at a school in the Bronx, and students at several schools assaulting school safety officers.

Of course, school officials downplayed the incidents, even suggesting that the teachers union was playing games with the crime numbers. But everything changed when a front-page story in the New York Times pinned the blame for the surge in crimes squarely on Bloomberg's sloppy reorganization efforts. In the process of eliminating the city's numerous community school district offices, it seemed, school leaders had failed to come up with a new method for conducting suspension hearings for violent and unruly students. The new, centralized office couldn't keep up with the demands for the suspension hearings within the required five days of the incident and many violent students walked, in this case, sent back to their schools, reclaiming seats alongside their victims. The message to students was clear: there are no more consequences for violent and dangerous behavior.

But Bloomberg, who had dared New Yorkers to hold him accountable for his ability to improve schools, chose to respond in a way New Yorkers had never seen before: he accepted the blame and pledged to fix it. "We have done a lousy job," the mayor said in a stunning mea culpa on his weekly radio show hours after the Times story hit the streets. "You cannot blame anybody else.... I wanted control [of schools], and I got control. And I am going to do something about it."

The Promise

Thousands of column inches have been written about Gotham's latest experiment in school governance, affecting everything from curriculum (and its accompanying demands that teachers incorporate reading rugs and rocking chairs into their lessons) to managerial and administrative restructuring. And while all of those things certainly matter in terms of what happens inside the city's 1,300 schools, many influential New Yorkers are not sure this is what they bargained for when they demanded that responsibility for the city's schools be placed on the mayor's shoulders.

The New York City Board of Education that Bloomberg replaced had been a failure factory. No one was ultimately in charge of making sure children were educated, and thus no one could be held accountable. The schools' organizational structure itself for years seemed to be designed to protect anyone from ever having to take the blame for anything. The mayor, schools' chancellor, board of education, 32 different community school superintendents (and their 32 school boards) all pointed fingers at one another year after year as students moved through the nation's largest school system without getting much of an education. Corruption and incompetence were widespread, and those who did attempt to place the academic needs of children at the top of the bureaucratic food chain faced tall odds in a system that was already stacked against them.

Mayor Bloomberg was thus applauded when he made gaining control of this mess his top priority. He referred to the Board of Education as a "rinky-dink candy store" that was incapable of reforming itself. "I want to be held accountable for the results, and I will be," Bloomberg said.

As with any school reform effort, this one has not been smooth sailing for the billionaire mayor and his hand-picked chancellor, Joel Klein, a former head of the Justice Department's antitrust division during the Clinton administration. Every success appears to have a countervailing failure, or some sort of negative unintended consequence. Some critics have charged the new administration with doing too much too fast; others of doing too little, too late. "This is an evolution not a revolution," Bloomberg said, attempting to downplay expectations that conditions would improve overnight.

The willingness to admit that his team had screwed up on the school crime and safety, and then proactively do something about it, was what civic leaders had in mind when they called for "clear lines of accountability" in a school system that previously had none. So while critics will rightly debate and second-guess the administration's decisions, management styles, and personnel moves as they relate to schools, the point of this governing structure was that someone should be forced to feel the heat when things go horribly wrong in schools. When Deputy Chancellor Diana Lam got in deep water in 2004 for trying to secure a six-figure school job for her husband, Bloomberg was said to have personally called for her head, despite Klein's public expression of support for Lam when the story broke. This was about the buck finally stopping with someone, Bloomberg aides said at the time.

Previous mayors have had the luxury of distancing themselves from the city's troubled school system, hurling insults at school chancellors and school board members from the comfort of their podium at City Hall. Bloomberg not only tied his fortunes to the schools in a symbolic way; he physically moved the system's headquarters from 110 Livingston Street, a sprawling old building in Brooklyn, to the refurbished Tweed Courthouse directly behind the mayor's office at City Hall in Lower Manhattan.

But in November 2005 Bloomberg will be held accountable for the state of the schools in a way that no one in the city's history ever has: at the ballot box. To be sure, this new accountability system has been difficult to swallow at times, not just for politicians, but for parents and teachers as well. Bloomberg took considerable heat in the spring of 2004 after he fired two appointees from his own advisory Panel for Educational Policy because they unexpectedly opposed his plan to retain poorly performing 3rd graders. But the clear message from Bloomberg at the time was this: let me do what I think needs to be done with the schools, and if it doesn't work, you can vote for someone else in 2005. Essentially, top-down management was virtually ensured by the fact that the person at the top was the one whose fortunes would rise or fall based on what happened in classrooms all over the city.

Klein has called the previous decisionmaking structure, in which unions and other special interests had been given rampant opportunities to influence (or veto) decisions, as the "politics of paralysis." Predictably, the unions were among the first critics of Bloomberg and Klein's reforms, complaining that they were being left out of important decisions. And while there have been many bumps along the way (Bloomberg himself suggested that the implementation of the new 3rd-grade retention plan made administrators look like "the gang that couldn't shoot straight"), the administration's reforms represent the first attempt to analyze the state of the city's education operation and to develop responses, all without having to get the blessing of special-interest groups that might have stood in the way, so far, regardless of the results.

It could be years before the world knows for sure whether the reforms launched by Bloomberg and Klein were the correct call. Klein has been clear that he wishes to be judged ultimately on his ability to graduate more students who are prepared for careers or college-level work. His controversial attempts to retain 3rd graders who aren't on grade level and the rapid growth in the number of small high schools both were designed to eventually address the city's high-school problem, where fewer than one in ten black and Hispanic students graduate with a Regents diploma. It will be another eight years before the 3rd graders who were subjected to the new retention plan will be high-school seniors, suggesting it could be a decade before that particular reform has been adequately evaluated.

In the meantime, the Bloomberg administration has some positive test scores under its belt already, including an impressive 9.9 percentage point gain for 4th graders on the state's most recent reading tests, the largest jump since the test was initiated in 1999. City tests in reading and math for 3rd, 5th, 6th, and 7th graders also posted the largest-ever one-year gains this spring. Because the single-year test-score increases raise as many questions as they answer about what is really happening in the schools, the administration is also boasting higher attendance rates in their new small high schools, a sign, they say, that students are more engaged in their schooling. In the violent schools that were labeled "Impact schools," reported crimes have dropped significantly, although concerns have been raised by teachers, principals, parents, and students about the increased role of police in schools.

These are the kinds of intrigues voters will likely consider as they decide whether or not the city's schools are better off now than they were in 2002 when the mayor gained control. It may be premature to judge Bloomberg on the results, or perhaps not. But he and Klein have surely wrestled with six big, seemingly intractable issues in the past three years:

Issue 1: Leadership

From day one, the administration has been beating the drum for the need to make sure each of the city's 1,300 schools is led by a competent and effective school principal. To start making a dent in a supply problem that plagues schools nationwide, Bloomberg and Klein turned their backs on old-school education administration programs at universities and instead opted to create a nonprofit leadership academy to train school leaders to be the kind of principals who can transform struggling schools. "Leadership is something that you have to study and train and work at," Bloomberg said in 2003, after city businesses pledged $30 million to the academy. All told, the academy set out to raise $75 million in philanthropic contributions to get the academy up and running. Former General Electric CEO Jack Welch was instrumental in creating the framework for the academy, and Klein claimed to be able to call Welch around the clock for advice on how to manage the massive school system.

The Leadership Academy enrolls about 90 aspiring principals for a 15-month crash course in school leadership. Some charge that the program, which pays those 90 future principals' salaries while they are in the academy, costs a lot considering that the city needs 300 new principals a year. But the city has also partnered with a Manhattan-based group, New Leaders for New Schools, which recruits and trains new school leaders, to add to the city's talent pool for new principals. "A little competition is good," Klein has said. The city has also worked closely with groups like Boston-based Building Excellent Schools, a nonprofit that recruits and trains charter school leaders.

Issue 2: Taming the System

How out of control were things in the New York City schools before the mayor took over? One of the first accomplishments for which Bloomberg claimed credit was delivering textbooks on time. In the past, principals said they were lucky if the books showed up by Christmas, if at all. Clear lines of accountability, from the top of the system to the classroom, were what mayoral control was supposed to bring to the city's school system, and Bloomberg recognized the symbolic importance of delivering the books on time.

Attempts to tame the system were complicated by Klein's dismantling the 32-district structure and replacing it with 10 regions. Despite considerable debate about the merits of this reorganization, particularly from parents and principals who found it difficult to get even basic information and answers from the new regional centers, Klein was emphatic that it needed to happen. "We weren't doing the job we should be doing for a large number of students," he said at the end of his first year on the job. "I don't think we have time to waste in that respect."

One way to get every school in the city working off the same page was the administration's insistence that schools scrap the hodgepodge of reading and math programs that dotted the city's landscape in favor of a common citywide curriculum. The selection of a "balanced literacy" approach for reading and Everyday Math has itself been controversial and will ultimately be judged by test scores and graduation rates years from now. Nevertheless, many educators said they found it helpful to be able to train and plan with other colleagues throughout the system who were learning to use the same new approaches. Far less popular was the administration's seeming insistence that teachers comply with silly mandates governing arrangement of desks, layout of classrooms, and the placement of their rocking chairs.

To help keep everyone on the same page, Klein added math and reading coaches to each school. Teachers at some schools reported that the coaches helped make their own professional development more meaningful and personalized, but even Klein was forced to admit too much pressure was being exerted on teachers to create perfect bulletin boards and to time their "mini-lessons" so that they didn't go beyond the accepted protocol under the new curriculum order.

Perhaps the most controversial effort to instill a sense of order in the system was Bloomberg's plan to end social promotion in 3rd (and then later 5th) grade. Bloomberg was pressured by prominent conservatives and editorial writers to keep students from leaving 3rd grade if they didn't know how to read and do basic math, and he complied by announcing the new plan in the middle of the 2003-04 school year. After some sloppy early implementation, the retention policy ended up being one of the most important reforms under mayoral control because it established a series of formalized intervention strategies for the lowest-performing students, including classes on weekends and holidays, and in summer school.

Issue 3: Contract Reform

Klein's independence from the teachers union has allowed him to be more outspoken than any other chancellor in the city's history about the adverse impact of the teachers' contract on school management's ability to run schools effectively and efficiently. Klein railed against what he called the three biggest problems contained in the contract and the culture the contract produces: lockstep pay for teachers, regardless of their skills or assignment; lifetime tenure, making it difficult to get rid of incompetent or abusive teachers; and seniority rights that dictate assignments based solely on a teacher's longevity in the system.

Klein has weathered a relentless barrage of attacks from the teachers union, even as he consistently called for major changes in the way teachers are paid and assigned, endorsing both merit pay and higher pay for teachers who opt to work in the most challenging schools. But the administration's micromanaging of basic classroom conditions was a turnoff to many teachers and did little to win their support for the kinds of changes Klein was seeking.

Issue 4: School Construction

One of the most shocking examples of corruption and incompetence in the city's recent school history is the mind-boggling cost of building new schools and the system's inability to do anything about overcrowding that was predicted years ago. The city's Independent Budget Office estimated in early 2002 that one reason billions of dollars' worth of school construction wasn't making a dent in the crowding issue was that it cost 400 percent more to build new schools in New York City than in other parts of the state and across the Hudson River in New Jersey. New Yorkers for many years were thus paying construction costs for four schools, but getting only one in return.

Peter Lehrer, chairman of a school commission appointed by former chancellor Harold Levy in 2001, found that it cost $425 to $450 per square foot to build a new school, far more than the $300 to $325 per square foot it takes to put up office towers, luxury condos, and hospitals in the same city. The commission noted that one reason the costs weren't lower was that no one at the School Construction Authority seemed to care how much things cost. Essentially there was no "customer" who would complain if things came in over budget. With no one keeping an eye on the cost, it was almost guaranteed that more would be spent than necessary and that efficiency was seldom an issue.

The School Construction Authority also seemed to go out of its way to be as unpleasant to work with as humanly possible. New York State's Moreland Commission in 2002 found that contractors routinely jacked up their prices by 20 percent as a sort of charge for this frustration. They even had a name for it: the "aggravation tax."

To his credit, Bloomberg made slashing school construction costs a priority once he got control of the city schools and the School Construction Authority. He insisted on better planning to reduce costly change orders and courted the biggest builders in the city, who had previously refused to work with the schools because of all the headaches involved. The result was that school officials were able to pare down the opening bids for new school construction from $433 to $300 per square foot, an important development as the city tried to make the case to state legislators that it deserved billions of dollars more each year as part of a school funding adequacy lawsuit (see Hanushek, "Pseudo-Science," p. 67).

Issue 5: New Schools

The administration has worked aggressively to increase the number of nonfailing school options for students and parents. Klein called for the creation of 50 new charter schools and raised $40 million in philanthropic contributions for his nonprofit New York City Center for Charter School Excellence. Previous chancellors tended to be outwardly hostile to competition, so the sudden embrace of charter schools surprised many supporters.

Bill Phillips, president of the New York Charter Schools Association, has called Klein "a home run for charters" and even invited the chancellor to appear as the keynote speaker for the state's annual charter school powwow in 2004. Rather than being shunned by the system, new charters have an opportunity to use underutilized space in public school buildings to get up and running. Bloomberg's five-year capital plan for schools even includes funding for new charter school buildings. In addition to supporting the movement, Klein has emerged as a strong voice in the effort to lift a cap on the number of charter schools in the state legislature.

Klein has also overseen the most rapid attempts in the nation to create new, small schools, often by converting larger schools into multischool campuses. Interestingly, these new schools, supported by grants from philanthropist Bill Gates (see Colvin, "The New Philanthropists," p. 34), have attracted considerably more controversy than the charter schools, in large part because they played a role in overcrowding and friction at high schools that were not small elsewhere in the city.

Issue 6: Graduation Rates

Bloomberg and Klein tend not to be apologists for a system even they acknowledge is failing. Klein has used the city's dismal graduation statistics to rally support for the urgency behind his reforms. He repeatedly notes in his public appearances that less than 20 percent of the students who begin high school in the city go on to graduate four years later with a New York State Regents Diploma, and only about 54 percent graduate at all. "Nearly half are leaving high school with nothing," Klein said. "Knowledge powers a global economy that is utterly unforgiving to the unskilled, uneducated young adult."

While observers will judge Bloomberg and Klein's tenure using standardized test scores--and even they agree those scores are important measures--Klein has made no secret of the fact that he wishes his team's work to be marked in the end by significant upticks in both the graduation rate and the numbers of students who pass basic tests in order to qualify for a Regents diploma. That, Klein aides argue, will show that major reforms in lower grades, like the citywide curriculum and the 3rd- and 5th-grade retention policies, will have combined with reforms to middle schools and high schools to produce their desired effects.

Voters will decide what they think of all this reform in November, but it could take years before the public can tell whether the foundation is as strong as Bloomberg and Klein believe.

"We're dealing with a huge, complex system," said Dennis Walcott, deputy mayor for education. "People who expect magic and change to take place in a simplistic way, I think, are fooling themselves."

Joe Williams is a staff writer on education for the New York Daily News. He is also author of Cheating Our Kids: How Politics and Greed Ruin Education.

BY JOE WILLIAMS