You Gotta Have a Gimmick

It's now, it's wow. Let's give kids a few hundred bucks if they can do well on tests. Who knows? It might work. But there are those who feel differently:

Mrs. Windland wants Alexandra (her daughter) to do well for all the timeless reasons — to cultivate a love of learning, advance to more competitive schools and the like. She has on occasion bought her children toys or taken them out for dinner when they brought home pleasurable report cards, but she does not believe in dangling rewards beforehand.

I'll have to agree with Mrs. Windland. It's a kid's job to do well in school, and the rewards may not be immediate. Do we want our kids to expect 10 bucks an hour to practice the violin? To do chores around the house? To say "please" and "thank you?"

What about the kids who don't qualify?

“The kids who don’t get reimbursed are going to say, ‘Why should I bother!’ ” Mrs. Windland said.

Perhaps. But not everyone agrees.

There are parents who support the program. And Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein responds to skeptics by arguing that no one has figured out how to get more poorer children engaged in learning. Trumpeting the long-term benefits of education, the better jobs and lives well lived has not worked. Cash just might.

It just might. But good teachers, smaller classes and decent facilities might work as well. This, which seems to work well elsewhere, has been dismissed as prohibitively expensive not only by this administration, but by its predecessors as well. The CFE lawsuit, which promised precisely that, was rendered toothless by this mayor's absolute opposition to funding any part of it. Furthermore, in its most recent form, there's no oversight for this administration.

That's why we're throwing a few bucks at a few kids, rather than bettering the system for all.

Does Size Matter?

Here's a story that suggests small schools may not be the panacea that Mayor Mike and Chancellor Klein seem to think they are.

Like the teaching methods that are presented as the Ten Commandments, then discarded on an annual basis, small schools are just another way of doing things. I've seen a hundred writing books that treat five-paragraph essays as though they are the pinnacle of western civilization. Yet this week I'm reading a great book by Walter Mosley, and he doesn't seem to use them at all.

I understand that small schools can be fine. But they can be terrible as well. You could say the same for large schools.

It would be far better if we disregarded school size entirely, and focused on creating good ones.

Let's get good teachers.

And let's have small classes, because that is where size matters (though personally, I wouldn't want to be that guy in the red shorts).

Thanks to Schoolgal

Let's Experiment

Why not? We've already dismissed good teachers, small classes, and decent facilities as too expensive. And our union has directly enabled this experimentation.

UFT President Randi Weingarten supported mayoral control, and later co-wrote a column criticizing it. She then prominently sat on the sidelines, declining to endorse the mayor's opponent. While mayoral control is set to sunset in a few years, despite her previous words, Ms. Weingarten thus far declines to speak out against its renewal.

What would it take for Ms. Weingarten to take a principled stand? How about this?

Mayor Bloomberg will announce sweeping changes to the public school system next week, including a major push to turn over more management functions to private companies, sources said yesterday.

Rumors of the impending shakeup have swirled among public school managers for weeks, but City Hall officials refused yesterday to talk about any aspect of the plan, which Bloomberg is expected to outline during his State of the City address next Wednesday.

According to education sources who have been informed about portions of the plan, the mayor will propose:

Doubling the number of schools in Schools Chancellor Joel Klein's experimental "Empowerment Zone" from the current 300 to more than 600 - nearly half of all schools in the system.

Hiring private education companies as consultants or managers to oversee smaller networks of schools within the Empowerment Zone. They also would run some support services for the entire system.

Further reducing the 10 existing regional school districts into five superdistricts - one for each borough.

After Bloomberg won mayoral control of the schools during his first term, Klein tore apart the city's old community decentralization system, consolidating the functions of the original 32 district superintendents and redistributing them to 10 new regional superintendents.

"This is so reckless," said Randi Weingarten, president of the United Federation of Teachers. "We've been hearing all sorts of rumors about privatizing the system and a radical restructuring. How many more of these restructurings must we go through?"

Weingarten said she tried during the past few days to get City Hall officials to reveal their plans, but was rebuffed...

The only surprise here is that Ms.Weingarten expected to be consulted. As she's rendered herself (and the UFT) irrelevant by consistently declining to provide substantive opposition or creative leadership, this was to be expected. In related news, Mayor Mike has won his bid to build four schools on a contaminated site. This shows how much he cares about public schoolchildren.

Snookering the UFT President to enable his privatization of the school system shows how much he cares about business. And now, more than ever, we need leaders who won't let Mayor Mike give us the business anymore.

Death to Middle School

When we were in junior high school, my mom and her neighbor used to look at us and say, "They're at that %$@% age."

But what's changed? It's all over the papers--middle schools are a huge problem. Maybe a better way to get kids to learn algebra is to put on a cowboy hat and sing 'em a few tunes. Me, I hate cowboy hats. But middle school teachers who don't wear them are running away in droves.

Still, it seems no matter what you do, or where you do it, that's a problem age. Middle schools were the answer to junior high schools. How could you control those awful 7th, 8th, and 9th graders? It was thought the combination of 6th, 7th, and 8th graders would prove unbeatable. However, educrats now feel it may be beatable after all. They're trying new things:

At the Brooklyn Secondary School for Collaborative Studies, in Carroll Gardens, which includes grades 6 through 12, school does not start until 9 a.m., because the principal, Alyce Barr, believes adolescents are by nature not morning people.

I'm not a morning person either, but I have this job and all, so I force myself. I particularly dislike the 6-12 configuration, because I picture my little daughter (currently in fifth grade) wandering the same halls as that 21-year-old working on his fourth high-school credit. Also, my daughter's actually mastered the art of waking up in the morning, and she may need that talent in the future.

In New York City, about ten years ago they eliminated 9th grade altogether from the middle, junior high, or whatever they were calling those underutilized schools. They moved all the ninth graders to the overutilized high schools, and that's one of the reasons my building is now at 250% capacity (75% of NYC high schools are overcrowded).

Another thing they're working on is K-8 schools. Personally, I'd rather my child be around kids closer to her own age. Junior high kids, or middle school kids, or whatever you wish to call them are at a rough age, and even the very best districts have problems with them.

Moving them from school to school is not the solution. The solution is my standard prescription--good teachers, manageable class sizes, and decent facilities. There are no shortcuts.

Come to think of it, my mom and her neighbor said the same things about us when we were in elementary and high school (I'll bet they're saying the same thing now, as a matter of fact).

Selling the Schools

Here's something most public schools haven't had to worry about--an advertising budget. Bloomfield, Connecticut is spending thousands of taxpayer dollars promoting its public schools via radio and billboards.

'The world has changed,' said David Title, superintendent of Bloomfield schools.

'Families have more choices about where they go to school. It's a more competitive environment.'

Title and his staff want to retain Bloomfield students who can choose from charter, magnet, private and parochial schools in Greater Hartford. But they also want to get the attention of families and good teachers considering a move, so they've taken to radio with spots touting the school system during morning and afternoon drive time.

I pay about $8,000 a year (in Nassau County) in property taxes, and personally, I don't feel like paying more to get the word out. Can you imagine what Klein and Bloomberg would do? Dimes to dollars they'd promote charters and private schools and let the public schools rot (which they seem to be doing already).

Do you think people could be swayed by advertising? Or do home values pretty much speak for themselves?