New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg unveils sweeping school reform plans

In his state of the city address, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has unveiled sweeping new plans to overhaul the public school system by giving principals more power and autonomy, requiring teachers to undergo rigorous review in order to gain tenure, and revising the school financing system that has allowed more-experienced teachers to cluster in affluent areas. His plans also involve a larger role in the city’s schools for private groups. Most of the mayor’s planned education reforms can be undertaken unilaterally without the approval of the city council or the union. Mr. Bloomberg’s plans appear to focus on accomplishing structural changes to address inequities that plague troubled schools, in particular the imbalance in the quality of teaching and administration between schools in rich and poor neighborhoods. However, the president of the United Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten, questions the tenure proposal, arguing that tenure is "a vital protection for teachers to be able to do their job." She also contends the mayor should focus more on reducing class size and giving teachers more latitude on instruction. The mayor’s tenure proposal would eliminate the current system of near-automatic tenure for teachers after three years by requiring them to be more rigorously evaluated and actually recommended for tenure by principals. The mayor’s administration is seeking to extend the "empowerment school" concept across the system by eliminating the 10 regional offices and making principals far more responsible for hiring, teacher training, curriculum, and budgets. By focusing on accountability, Mr. Bloomberg says principals will also be evaluated more thoroughly, with public letter-graded reports based largely on their students’ annual standardized test scores. In addition, he would change the way money is distributed to schools to ensure that funds are based on the number of students and their particular needs, in order to close gaps in per-student spending in different schools that he says can run as high as $2,000 per child. Under current procedures, each school is given enough money to cover the salaries of all its teachers. If a school has many long-time teachers, who earn more, its per-pupil spending is greater. The mayor’s office insists the changes will make the system fairer and help improve schools that often lack resources and to allow administrators to use those resources as they see fit. The shift is partly designed to help schools that serve large numbers of poor students to attract more experienced and highly paid teachers, who often gravitate to affluent areas.

New York Times
By Diane Cardwell
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