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Lots of Children Left Behind: Nearly a decade after Mayor Bloomberg’s school reforms, New York...
City Journal ^ | 9 December 2011 | Sol Stern

Posted on 12/09/2011 10:22:31 PM PST by neverdem

Nearly a decade after Mayor Bloomberg’s school reforms, New York City students show little progress.

The only reasonable conclusion to draw from this week’s report by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is that reading and math achievement by New York City’s students is dismal and has remained so for almost a decade. Known as the “Nation’s Report Card,” the federal test compares progress by fourth- and eighth-graders in 21 large cities. A mere 24 percent of all New York City eighth-graders read at the NAEP proficiency level (and only 12 percent of black and Hispanic students). In eighth-grade math, an identical 24 percent of city students scored at or above NAEP proficiency. That amounts to a modest 6 percentile-point increase from the 2003 NAEP tests; the average eighth-grade math improvement of all U.S. big-city school districts is 12 points during that period.

The disappointing NAEP performance of Gotham’s eighth-graders is particularly significant for our city’s future. We might usefully think of this cohort of about 80,000 students as “Bloomberg’s children.” That’s because they started out in kindergarten in September 2002, just two months after the state legislature voted to give Mayor Bloomberg total control of the schools. The mayor promised that new accountability measures would reform the previously “dysfunctional” and “sclerotic” school system and help newly entering students to improve their academic performance and achieve higher graduation rates. Bloomberg also assured the city’s taxpayers that he could produce dramatic improvements without a significant increase in school spending. In a January 2003 speech outlining his reform program, he noted that the city already “spends $12 billion annually,” which ought to be enough “to give our children the education they deserve.”

The city’s education budget this year is close to $24 billion, and Bloomberg’s children are now in their first year in high school. In three years, most of them will be expected to begin the college application process. It’s been well established, however, that reading comprehension is key to advancement in all other academic skills. Thus it’s likely that only the 24 percent of the cohort that can read at NAEP’s eight-grade proficiency level will be ready to do serious college-level work.

Up to now, the city has avoided dealing with this disturbing reality by ginning up its high school graduation numbers through dumbed-down Regents exams and “credit-recovery” abuses, in which students who fail courses required for graduation earn passing grades after attending a few additional Saturday sessions or turning in “extra” homework assignments. Thus, the city has been able to boast of an astonishing rise in four-year graduation rates, which currently stand at 65 percent. But the State Education Department poured cold water on the graduation-rate claim with a recent study that showed that only 22 percent of students receiving diplomas were “college ready.” It’s no coincidence that the state’s college-ready figure is nearly identical to the city’s eighth-grade proficiency rates in math and reading.

DOE officials are responding to poor NAEP results the same way they did to last year’s revelations that the city’s spectacular increases on state reading and math tests were due almost entirely to the deliberate lowering of pass rates. The DOE then explained that despite plummeting test scores on the revamped 2010 tests, New York still performed better than all other urban districts in the state. The DOE continues to use this “we’re better than Buffalo” defense, inadequate as it is. “Our students have made impressive gains [on the NAEP] since 2003—especially compared to their peers across New York State,” said Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott. DOE officials also promise that NAEP test scores will improve once the schools have “aligned their curricula and teaching with the Common Core Standards”—a requirement the city accepted in order to qualify for “Race to the Top” funds from the Obama administration.

But the solution to the city’s education problems won’t come from Washington, D.C. In fact, the federally imposed common standards will probably become one more failed reform. The real answer, at least for the city’s awful reading scores, is more likely to be found in a group of ten elementary schools participating in a pilot reading program pioneered by the brilliant scholar and cognitive scientist E. D. Hirsch. Over a three-year period, students in the schools using Hirsch’s Core Knowledge reading curriculum outperformed their peers from a control group of ten other schools by a huge margin on K–2 reading tests.

Unfortunately, though the DOE conducted the Core Knowledge reading study, it has made no move so far to bring the program to other schools. It’s well past time to do so.

Sol Stern is a contributing editor of City Journal, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and the author of Breaking Free: Public School Lessons and the Imperative of School Choice.


TOPICS: Business/Economy; Culture/Society; Editorial; Politics/Elections; US: New York
KEYWORDS: bloomberg; coolcoolkitty; gungrabber; naep; newyork; newyorkcity; rino; schoolreform
I feel bad for the kids, but at least Bloomberg can't claim any success with his expensive, useless school reforms. He could still run against Obama from the left.
1 posted on 12/09/2011 10:22:44 PM PST by neverdem
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To: neverdem

There are about 1.1 million students and a budget of 24 billion. That is about $22,000 per student per year. Half a million dollars for a class of 24 student, and they still can’t teach them to read.

Single payer education will NEVER work.


2 posted on 12/09/2011 11:12:29 PM PST by ALPAPilot
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To: ALPAPilot

Of course single payer education can’t work, but many here somehow think that their government schools are “different”, tht water runs uphill, that the law of gravity is optional....


3 posted on 12/09/2011 11:59:34 PM PST by achilles2000 ("I'll agree to save the whales as long as we can deport the liberals")
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To: ALPAPilot
Half a million dollars for a class of 24 student, and they still can’t teach them to read.

You can't teach kids who don't want to learn. As long as there are government jobs to hand out, though, no one will talk about that. The urban black and Hispanic cultures are destroying their children and I don't think there's anything we can do about it.

Asian and white children somehow manage to learn reading and math in those same schools. No one wants to talk about that, either.

4 posted on 12/10/2011 4:37:47 AM PST by BfloGuy (The final outcome of the credit expansion is general impoverishment.)
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To: neverdem

Break up families, liberalize and unionize “teachers” and supply them with an agenda to ensure failure and government dependence, and this is what you get. No need to work for a living = no need to apply oneself with useful academics.


5 posted on 12/10/2011 5:22:22 AM PST by trebb ("If a man will not work, he should not eat" From 2 Thes 3)
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To: BfloGuy

“Asian and white children somehow manage to learn reading and math in those same schools. No one wants to talk about that, either.”

No, they don’t. They learn to read IN SPITE of those schools. Asians take their kids to after school learning centers and whites (with successful kids) either tutor them, teach them themselves, or also use learning centers. The ones that are left at the mercy of the schools themselves, are, of course, Blacks and Hispanics.

Yes, in most cases, kids will EVENTUALLY learn to read, even at public schools, but YEARS LATE and never good at it, as they spend K through 3rd grade learning “Sight Words”, rather than phonics...and any normal (i.e., not retarded) kid can become a good reader in Kindergarten (at the latest), if simply taught phonics exclusively at that age.

The liberals know that they can ONLY keep their hold on power through uneducated people...and they FULLY take advantage of their control of public schools to achieve that end.


6 posted on 12/10/2011 5:45:56 AM PST by BobL ("Heartless" and "Inhumane" FReepers for Cain - we've HAD ENOUGH)
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To: BobL

Reading is the key to all subjects. If one can read, one can be relatively successful in history, science, and math. Of course math and science take some personal interest to truly grasp, but being able to read makes those subjects possible to pass at the middle and high school levels. The reading program taught in the system in which I teach is called SFA (ironically that stands for Success for All) and it is a word memorization program. There is much success at the elementary level but once students stop memorizing new words at the middle and high school levels, they become functioning illiterates. The reason that Asian and white students are doing well is because they have parents at home who will read with them and teach them how to sound out words. Phonics is the key to reading, and most public schools teach word memorization. It is criminal.


7 posted on 12/10/2011 5:53:51 AM PST by goodwithagun (My gun has killed fewer people than Ted Kennedy's car.)
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To: goodwithagun

“The reading program taught in the system in which I teach is called SFA (ironically that stands for Success for All) and it is a word memorization program.”

Unreal. When I read stuff like this it simply convinces me that this is all INTENTIONAL. There is simply no way that sight-reading can work with the English language. If a couple of bloggers can figure that out, one MUST assume that the educational establishment knows exactly the same thing.


8 posted on 12/10/2011 7:03:38 AM PST by BobL ("Heartless" and "Inhumane" FReepers for Cain - we've HAD ENOUGH)
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To: neverdem
I believe that since at least the mid 1970s, the only reason for public schools is to get leftist dems reelected by funneling public tax dollars into union coffers. Forget NYC... Take a look at the Kansas City, MO public school district. Billions (yes, billions with a "B") of dollars spent to desegregate the school district since the mid-1970's and now 36 years later, the district is MORE "segregated," graduation rates have dropped, and while the district lost state accreditation years ago, it was at least "provisionally accredited." Now it seems that it's even lost that, and the state is threatening to take over the school district.

The KCMOPSD has been nothing more than a way of handing out goodies to political cronies and creating little political fiefdoms. I guess since kids don't vote, while teachers and other union members do, there's no reason for the school district to give a damn about them. Which is also why the population of the school district has plummeted as well.

Mark

9 posted on 12/10/2011 7:05:26 AM PST by MarkL (Do I really look like a guy with a plan?)
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To: achilles2000

You’re right; I heard a relative once say that the public schools in her town were successfull, unlike in most places. And she truly believed what she said.


10 posted on 12/10/2011 9:47:00 AM PST by Theodore R. (I'll still vote for Santorum if he is on the March 6 ballot.)
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To: BobL

I have found that many of the American people don’t understand the difference in phonics and “sight” reading. They just think all of the “little people” have limited vocabularies.


11 posted on 12/10/2011 9:49:46 AM PST by Theodore R. (I'll still vote for Santorum if he is on the March 6 ballot.)
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To: Theodore R.

“I have found that many of the American people don’t understand the difference in phonics and “sight” reading. They just think all of the “little people” have limited vocabularies.”

Unreal, but true.


12 posted on 12/10/2011 11:11:08 AM PST by BobL ("Heartless" and "Inhumane" FReepers for Cain - we've HAD ENOUGH)
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To: BfloGuy
white children somehow manage to learn reading and math in those same schools

No they don't. My public school district is white upper middle class seacoast New Hampshire. Less than 50% test proficient in math and reading.

If parents had to write a check for tuition every month, quarter or year, their children would find some motivation.

13 posted on 12/10/2011 12:17:31 PM PST by ALPAPilot
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To: BobL

>>any normal (i.e., not retarded) kid can become a good reader in Kindergarten (at the latest), if simply taught phonics exclusively at that age.

Spot on. I read this passage from the article:

“The real answer, at least for the city’s awful reading scores, is more likely to be found in a group of ten elementary schools participating in a pilot reading program pioneered by the brilliant scholar and cognitive scientist E. D. Hirsch.”

and my immediate reaction was “I bet he’s teaching camouflaged phonics.”


14 posted on 12/11/2011 3:01:45 PM PST by FreedomPoster (Islam delenda est)
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To: AdmSmith; AnonymousConservative; Berosus; bigheadfred; Bockscar; ColdOne; Convert from ECUSA; ...

Thanks neverdem.


15 posted on 12/11/2011 3:17:38 PM PST by SunkenCiv (Merry Christmas, Happy New Year! May 2013 be even Happier!)
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To: FreedomPoster

Click through to the further article. He’s teaching phonetics and cultural depth. Those 10 elementary schools that are doing so well with it are certain to have plenty of minorities in their demographics.


16 posted on 12/11/2011 4:18:14 PM PST by 9YearLurker
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To: 9YearLurker

So without reading it, teaching “cultural depth” (whatever that is) gives him the cover he needs to teach phonics.

I’ll go look at it in a minute or four.


17 posted on 12/11/2011 4:45:27 PM PST by FreedomPoster (Islam delenda est)
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To: SunkenCiv

my kid’s first grade teacher would pull the shade on the door and then quietly teach phonics while the record player loudly played marching songs.

we all requested her for the following sibs.


18 posted on 12/11/2011 9:42:06 PM PST by bitt ( Obama's knowledge of history is limited to what is written on his teleprompter.)
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