Corporate “Super Star” Out As Head of New York Public Schools

Cathleen Black Is Out as New York City Schools Chancellor

By ELISSA GOOTMAN and MICHAEL BARBARO NY Times4/7

Cathleen P. Black, a magazine executive with no educational experience who was named New York City schools chancellor last fall, stepped down Thursday, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg announced.

Mr. Bloomberg called Ms. Black into his office Thursday morning and urged her to resign, officials said, ending a tumultuous and brief tenure for the longtime publisher. Mr. Bloomberg said at a news conference that he and Ms. Black had agreed that a change was required.

The Milwaukee Journal Does The Usual Bi-Weekly Attack On the School Board and Democracy, While Using a Self-Congratulatory Voucher Comparison as Evidence

I ask, where’s the journalism? Where’s the critique of the business community and city government’s failure to create family sustaining jobs and economic development?

Jan. 11, 2011 Editorial MJS

Where’s the leadership?

Milwaukee School Board members wanted the community to give them a chance to lead. Recent decisions show the board is not up to the challenge.

The dearth of candidates for the Milwaukee School Board is another sign of how little democracy there really is in the current governance structure.

How little, you ask?

Five of the nine seats are up for election, but only one race will have a primary in February because three candidates are running. In three races, there will be only two candidates on the April ballot, and no one challenged School Board President Michael Bonds.

The lack of interest in School Board elections is nothing new in Milwaukee, of course, but it’s still troubling. And here’s something else that’s troubling: A new study shows voucher school kids are 17% more likely to graduate than Milwaukee Public Schools students.

MPS disputes the numbers. What cannot be disputed are the financial and academic problems looming over the district. And effective leadership is critical to turning MPS around.

A 70% graduation rate is not good enough. The 82,000 students who attend MPS deserve better, and the community as a whole depends on the district’s success because MPS is, essentially, the region’s biggest workforce development agency.

Financially, the School Board has shown it is not ready to make big decisions.

Milwaukee Common Council President Willie L. Hines Jr. and state Sen. Alberta Darling (R-River Hills) questioned why the School Board refused to sell empty buildings to its competition when the district is paying about $1 million a year to maintain those buildings.

Bonds’ response: Mind your own business.

“You are focusing on MPS issues while neglecting the problems that you were elected to solve,” Bonds said in a letter to Hines.

Not exactly the sort of leadership that inspires confidence.

That’s why we still believe a governance change is required. We have no confidence that this board will be able to address the mounting financial and academic crises.

A change in governance alone won’t fix MPS. Schools need to be safe; parents need to be involved. Each school needs effective, top-to-bottom leadership.

Superintendent Gregory Thornton is trying, but an ineffective board stymies effective leadership.

It’s time for better leadership.

Joe Klein Exit Interview: Gives Self High Ratings

Klein, like many “leaders” in education, thinks democracy is over-rated. He knows better than parents what is good for their kids. He now works for Rupert Murdock.

Departing Schools Chief: ‘We Weren’t Bold Enough’

By JAVIER C. HERNANDEZ Published: December 24, 2010

JOEL I. KLEIN invited me to breakfast last year at an Upper East Side haunt, one of those places where a bowl of yogurt goes for $23 and waiters circle the room sweeping up crumbs like pigeons at a feast.

was covering the New York City school system at the time and thought maybe Mr. Klein, the chancellor since 2002, planned to resign and was giving a little notice. We had come to know each other via e-mail, bantering about the news media’s coverage of education, his refusal to join Twitter (“I truly do have a day job,” he said) and which A-through-F grade he would give the latest production of “Tosca” at the Metropolitan Opera.

But when I asked Mr. Klein about his future on that summer morning, he said he was enjoying the job too much to leave. Instead, he wanted to talk about the city’s rising test scores, about his belief that reporters had not done enough to highlight the success of charter schools and about another favorite topic: love.

“I couldn’t survive if I didn’t have someone to go home to when I got beat up,” he said.

Last month, Mr. Klein, 64, did announce his resignation. After more than eight years in the job, he is one of the city’s longest-serving chancellors; his last day is Friday. Mr. Klein is joining Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation as an executive vice president in charge of educational ventures.

Before leaving, Mr. Klein sat for an exit interview of sorts, after a visit to the Urban AssemblySchool for Applied Math and Science in the Bronx.

Some parents and teachers have derided Mr. Klein as a tyrant, a political opportunist and a tone-deaf bureaucrat. When I asked if he had neglected them, he seemed insulted. He pulled a stack of greeting cards from his briefcase: “Thank you for being my advocate,” wrote a third grader at a charter school in Harlem.

Bloomberg Revives Mayoral Control Debate

Mayor Bloomberg under fire for choice of N.Y. schools chancellor

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s pick to oversee New York’s public schools lacks education experience. The ensuing firestorm has revived debate over whether mayoral control is a remedy for ailing schools. By Geraldine Baum, Los Angeles Times, 12/7/10

Reporting from New York —

At first, Cathie Black, the newly appointed chancellor of New York’s public schools, stuck out like a homecoming queen who’d been assigned to take over the math club.

She appeared as glossy as the Hearst magazine empire she long ran — camera-ready, exquisitely dressed and well-spoken. She was just what New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg thought he needed to further repair the nation’s largest public school system. The only problem: She hasn’t a whiff of education experience.
That has blown up into an unexpected firestorm not just over the quality of this city’s schools — which aren’t as repaired as many had hoped they would be by now — but over the essence of Bloomberg’s style after taking command of the 1.1-million-student system eight years ago. It also has revived debate on whether mayors and other non-educators can be a remedy for ailing schools.

“It’s the culmination and apotheosis of all the worst parts of mayoral control,” said Leonie Haimson, a longtime activist for smaller class size who is part of a movement to stop Black’s appointment. “In the end it’s one man who doesn’t listen to anybody and makes decision based on whim. Would Bloomberg put a non-doctor to head the health department or someone with no experience to run the police? I don’t think so.”

Black succeeds another non-educator, Joel Klein, an aggressive Washington prosecutor the mayor handpicked in 2002 as his first chancellor.

At her first public appearance last week, at two schools in Queens, Black, 66, showed up in a high-style camel coat more fitting for a fashion show than discussing a purple dog with schoolchildren. She also gave her first post-appointment interview to a tabloid newspaper gossip columnist, to whom she gushed, “I’ve already had an hour-and-a-half meeting with Joel Klein. He and I may be different people, but with eight deputies in the department, I’ll get up to speed quickly.”

On Sunday she granted a second interview, firing back at her and the mayor’s critics.

NY State Education Commissioner Caves to Bloomberg Pressure: Billionaires Win and Our Kids Lose Again

(Below are comments by Bob Herbert on class warfare.)

Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire mayor of New York,  chose Cathleen Black  as Chancellor of NY public schools without any public search — in fact, until minutes before the announcement, even some of his aides did not know that Mr. Klein was leaving or that she was being named to replace her.

The choice was met with skepticism and opposition from City Council members and some parent groups, who argued that the system needed an experienced educator. Because Ms. Black lacks the credentials required by state law, Mr. Bloomberg was required to seek a waiver from the state’s education commissioner, David M. Steiner.

In a deal between Mr. Steiner and the mayor to save Ms. Black’s faltering candidacy, Shael Polakow-Suransky, a career educator, was named chief academic officer to serve as Ms. Black’s No. 2. Mr. Polakow-Suransky was the school system’s deputy chancellor of performance and accountability before his appointment.

Mr. Steiner had expressed skepticism about Ms. Black’s ability to master the intricacies of the nation’s largest school system. Her cause was further undermined in November 2010 when six of the eight members of a panel Dr. Steiner appointed to evaluate Ms. Black’s background voted to deny granting an exemption.

Ms. Black is scheduled to take office on Jan. 1, 2011. She would be the first woman to head the nation’s largest school system, with about 1.1 million children, 80,000 teachers and more than 1,400 schools. She was the first woman to lead the Hearst Corporation’s magazine division and, way back in 1979, the first female publisher of a weekly consumer magazine, New York.

Mr. Bloomberg has argued that Ms. Black is a “superstar manager” whose expertise in cost-cutting and dealing with customers would be a boon to a school system in financial straits. The mayor contended that under the 2002 law that gave him control of the city schools, he should be able to appoint whomever he pleased.

(Read the truth about Bloomberg and his obscene choice for New York City’s public school chancellor.)

Winning the Class War By BOB HERBERT Published: November 26, 2010

A stark example of the potential for real (class) conflict is being played out in New York City, where the multibillionaire mayor, Michael Bloomberg, has selected a glittering example of the American aristocracy to be the city’s schools chancellor. Cathleen Black, chairwoman of Hearst Magazines, has a reputation as a crackerjack corporate executive but absolutely no background in education.

Ms. Black travels in the rarefied environs of the very rich. Her own children went to private boarding schools. She owns a penthouse on Park Avenue and a $4 million home in Southampton. She was able to loan a $47,600 Bulgari bracelet to a museum for an exhibit showing off the baubles of the city’s most successful women.

Ms. Black will be peering across an almost unbridgeable gap between her and the largely poor and working-class parents and students she will be expected to serve. Worse, Mr. Bloomberg, heralding Ms. Black as a “superstar manager,” has made it clear that because of budget shortfalls she will be focused on managing cutbacks to the school system.

So here we have the billionaire and the millionaire telling the poor and the struggling — the little people — that they will just have to make do with less. You can almost feel the bitterness rising.

Extreme inequality is already contributing mightily to political and other forms of polarization in the U.S. And it is a major force undermining the idea that as citizens we should try to face the nation’s problems, economic and otherwise, in a reasonably united fashion. When so many people are tumbling toward the bottom, the tendency is to fight among each other for increasingly scarce resources.

What’s really needed is for working Americans to form alliances and try, in a spirit of good will, to work out equitable solutions to the myriad problems facing so many ordinary individuals and families. Strong leaders are needed to develop such alliances and fight back against the forces that nearly destroyed the economy and have left working Americans in the lurch.

Aristocrats were supposed to be anathema to Americans. Now, while much of the rest of the nation is suffering, they are the only ones who can afford to smile.

A version of this op-ed appeared in print on November 27, 2010, on page A19 of the New York edition.

Joe Klein Out in New York; Bloomberg Picks a Jet-Setter to Replace Him

Bloomberg errs again with NYC public schools

By Valerie Strauss

There is unfortunate symmetry to today’s news that Joel Klein had resigned as New York City Schools Chancellor today to join Rupert Murdoch’s outfit, and that he was being succeeded by Cathie Black, chair of Hearst Magazines.Klein, who is becoming an executive vice president for News Corp., had taken the job as chancellor without any experience in education.

Now, Black, a former USA Today publisher who has been serving as chairwoman of Hearst Magazines, is becoming chancellor with no educational experience. The woman responsible for publications including Esquire; Good Housekeeping; O, the Oprah magazine ;and Popular Mechanics will run New York City’s public schools.

That’s twice that New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has deluded himself into thinking that success in business management is easily transferable to success in the public education system.

Klein had worked as head of the publishing giant Bertelsmann and as a federal anti-trust prosecutor when he took the job as head of the 1.1 million student-system in 2002. (He had to get a waiver from the state government to take the job because he hadn’t been trained as a professional educator. Black will need one too). Accustomed to breaking up monopolies, he apparently viewed the public school system as a monopoly and he worked to bust it up — attacking teachers unions and pushing for the expansion of charters, publicly funded schools that are not part of the traditional school bureaucracy.

It didn’t really work out so well for Klein.

Though he and Bloomberg talk about the Klein tenure as a success, the chancellor did nothing to narrow the gaping achievement gap, and it was recently learned that standardized test score improvements that the mayor and the schools boss had touted for years were phony. State officials recently revealed that scores had been inflated, and thousands of parents who thought their children were performing on grade level learned that they weren’t.

Bloomberg had the chance with Klein’s resignation to seek community input into the selection of a new chancellor but instead he chose, again, to ignore the people who elected him.

American schools today need better-trained teachers, principals who themselves have been exceptional teachers, and superintendents who understand that public education isn’t a business but a civic responsibility, and who know that great teaching can’t always be reduced to data points.

At a press conference with Black and Klein on Tuesday, Bloomberg said of his new chancellor: “There is no one who knows more about the skills our children will need to succeed in the 21st century economy.”

I’d bet a nice dinner that even Black knows that isn’t true. Bloomberg shouldn’t get away with such nonsense.
Follow my blog every day by bookmarking washingtonpost.com/answersheet.By Valerie Strauss  | November 9, 2010

 

New Study on Mayoral Control of Schools

New study out of Rutgers showing that mayoral control does not necessarily lead to improvements and often cuts out parent and community voices.

Governance and Urban School

Improvement: Lessons for New Jersey

From Nine Cities

http://ielp.rutgers.edu/docs/MC%20Final.pdf

 

Excerpts:

 

New York a group comprised of multiple advocacy groups within the city, the Parent Commission on School Governance and Mayoral Control, convened in June 2008 to make recommendations over whether to extend mayoral control upon its sunset in June 2009 and weighed in on a variety of issues, including increasing community involvement in decisions affecting neighborhood schools.525 While aspects of their recommendations were adopted in new legislation, the level of parent and community involvement so far has not increased to their desired level…., among the many recommendations to the New York legislature of the Parent Commission on School Governance and Mayoral Control, were recommendations to grant specific powers to the Community District Education Schools in the process over closing and opening schools and opening new charter schools.

 

…In Chicago, where Mayor Daley has touted his “Renaissance 2010” plan to close 100

poorly performing schools and replace them with new schools by 2010, parent activists,

including Parents United for Responsible Education, sponsored legislation that would

create an independent panel to design a new process for school closings.528 PURE

identified eight major problems with Renaissance 2010: 1) decisions are driven by real

estate development priorities; 2) students are displaced, which increases detrimental

mobility; 3) violence has increased in and around affected schools; 4) board members do

not attend hearings, yet vote unanimously for all recommendations; 5) teachers are not

being fairly evaluated; highly qualified, certified teachers are being displaced and the

percentage of African-American teachers is declining; 6) the newly-created schools do

not have Local School Councils, the subject of a current lawsuit; 7) new schools get an

unfair share of resources; and 8) the new schools and charter schools are not performing

better than other schools.

 

The most recent report evaluating strong mayoral involvement in

New York City raises serious questions about the claims of the Bloomberg

administration—and others—that the mayor’s leadership has resulted in significant

achievement gains in the New York City Public Schools. Although supporters of

strong mayoral involvement in New York City may argue that the authors of this report

have been consistent critics of mayoral control, the authors comprise a range of political

perspectives. For example, Diane Ravitch and Sol Stern originally had supported

mayoral control; sociologists Aaron Pallas and Jennifer Jennings have been analyzing

New York City achievement data for a number of years and generally have argued that

the Department of Education data often disguise problems in student achievement; and

Deborah Meier, one of the early progressive small school pioneers in New York City and

the founder of Central Park East Secondary School, has long been a critic of the negative

effects of standardized testing on teaching and learning. In August 2010, New York State

Commissioner of Education increased the cut scores for the 2010 state achievement tests

in response to charges that the low cut scores for proficiency gave an inaccurate portrait

of student abilities. These changes resulted in a significant reduction in proficiency rates

across the state, including New York City, casting doubt on the validity of the dramatic

increases claimed by the mayor and chancellor; and most importantly in the reemergence

of the race based achievement gap in New York City.309

 

Leonie Haimson
Executive Director
Class Size Matters
124 Waverly Pl.
New York, NY 10011
212-674-7320
classsizematters@gmail.com

New York City Schools’ Testing Under Fire

On New York School Tests, Warning Signs Ignored

By JENNIFER MEDINA Published: October 10, 2010 NY Times

When New York State made its standardized English and math tests tougher to pass this year, causing proficiency rates to plummet, it said it was relying on a new analysis showing that the tests had become too easy and that score inflation was rampant.

Daniel Koretz, a Harvard professor, oversaw the study of New York’s tests that led to the state’s conclusion that the exams had become too easy to pass.

Betty Rosa, a member of the Board of Regents, said the unprecedented high scores had seemed unbelievable.

But evidence had been mounting for some time that the state’s tests, which have formed the basis of almost every school reform effort of the past decade, had serious flaws.

The fast rise and even faster fall of New York’s passing rates resulted from the effect of policies, decisions and missed red flags that stretched back more than 10 years and were laid out in correspondence and in interviews with city and state education officials, administrators and testing experts.

The process involved direct warnings from experts that went unheeded by the state, and a city administration that trumpeted gains in student performance despite its own reservations about how reliably the test gauged future student success.

New York Success Charter Network: Bad Behavior and Out. Where are the Special Ed Students? Where are the ELL students?

This is an excerpt from a New York magazine article on Success Charter Network represented in the documentary Waiting for Superman.

“…when the schools are vexed by behavioral problems: “They don’t provide the counseling these kids need.”If students are deemed bad “fits” and theirparents refuse to move them, the staffer says, the administration “makes it a nightmare” with repeated suspensions and midday summonses. After a 5-year-old was suspended for two days for allegedly running out of the building, the child’s mother says the school began calling her every day “saying he’s doing this, he’s doing that. Maybe they’re just trying to get rid of me and my child, but I’m not going to give them that satisfaction.”

To read the full article go to the following link:

Patron Saint (and Scourge) of Lost Schools

DC Mayoral Election Could Determine Rhee’s Fate

Fate of Fenty, Rhee Before Voters Today

By Dakarai Aarons on September 14, 2010

Adrian M. Fenty’s bid for for a second term as the District of Columbia’s mayor is now down to the final hours as voters head to the polls today to decide between him and challenger Vincent Gray, who is the city council chairman.

The race has been closely followed nationwide for reasons more than familiar to regular readers: Fenty is the boss of D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee, whose ability to inspire both adoration and enmity among voters has played a significant role in this contest.

A poll released earlier this month by The Washington Post shows that while 41 percent of registered Democrats see her as a reason to vote for Fenty in today’s primary, 40 percent say she is a reason to vote against the mayor.

And as our Stephen Sawchuk recently wrote, the outcome of this race could have major implications on teacher policy. Rhee has created a teacher evaluation system and negotiated a teacher contract that are both widely seen as models for other “reform”-minded school districts to adopt.

Fenty received the endorsement last week of Democrats for Education Reform.

“Mayor Fenty pledged to make the tough choices that would benefit students, even if those choices weren’t popular with powerful special interests—and he’s done just that,” said Joe Williams, DFER’s executive director, in a statement. “Now those same special interests are desperate to roll back reforms and have lined up behind Mayor Fenty’s opponent. That support will compromise Mr. Gray’s education agenda to the point that the reforms that took so long to accomplish will start evaporating the moment he takes office.”

One endorsement the mayor did not receive was that of President Barack Obama. Jon Ward of the Daily Caller says the president missed a major opportunity in not giving his vote of confidence to Fenty because of his willingness to stand up for many of the education reform principles the Obama administration favors.

The Fenty campaign, which has trailed Gray in recent weeks, is playing hardball down to the wire, even saying yesterday that D.C. could lose its $75 million in Race to the Top funds if the Fenty-Rhee reform plans are changed.

Fenty himself cited some of the tough changes he and Rhee have made as a reason some voters are angry with him in a recent interview with the DCist, a local publication.

“The thing that has caused us to have an uphill battle more than anything is that we closed 27 schools, or that we fired half the central administration, that we made employees at-will, that we went against the taxicab drivers, we went against the unions and fired employees when they were doing wrong, and on and on it goes. This city isn’t completely used to that yet,” he said.

Gray has been endorsed by the Washington Teachers’ Union, which has sparred with Rhee regularly over the past three years, and is regularly praised in ads paid for by the American Federation of Teachers’ political arm saying he’s the right choice.

“The WTU strongly believes that Vincent Gray’s lifelong dedication to children, the community and most importantly, education make him an excellent candidate for Mayor,” the union wrote in an endorsement posted on its website. “In addition, his passion and commitment to students and teachers in the District has had a positive impact on the community, especially his advocacy in support of early childhood education.”

Gray’s education plans, like Fenty’s, call education D.C.’s No. 1 priority and call for the continuance of mayoral control but he’s refused to say whether he would keep Rhee if he becomes mayor.

What will happen if Fenty were to lose today? Despite the endless prognostication across the blogosphere for the past few months (including what Rhee calls the sexist assumptions she’s going to decamp to California to join fiancee Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson), the reality is no one knows for certain.

Win or lose, change is likely in some form.