Education Flashpoints

Fighting for America’s Schools

Alan J. Singer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415743846
• eBook ISBN: 9781317801436
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Drawing on his widely read Huffington Post columns—rated one of the top educational blogs in the United States—Alan Singer introduces readers to contemporary issues in education in the United States. The issues are presented with a point of view and an edge intended to promote widespread classroom debate and discussion. Each section opens with a new topical summary essay followed by a series of brief essays updated and adapted from Huffington Post columns. The book includes guest contributions, guiding questions, and responses to essays by teacher education students and teachers to further classroom discussion. Education Flashpoints is written in a conversational style that draws readers into a series of debates by presenting issues in a clear and concise manner, but also with a touch of irony and a bit of rhetorical bite. The topics examined in these essays read like the latest newspaper headlines in the battle to define public education in the United States.

1
WHAT SHALL WE DO WITH THE CHILDREN?

This group of essays drawn from my Huffington Post blog focuses on students, how they are educated, and what is happening to them in schools. I will introduce you to my twin grandchildren Sadia and Gideon whose experiences in New York City public schools helped shape my views on current events. They were both born in 2004, and in fall 2013 entered fourth grade. They are lucky to live in a community where students at the local elementary school come from an ethnically diverse mixture of middle-class, professional, and stable working-class families.

These essays were written while Michael Bloomberg was mayor of New York City and Merryl Tisch was chancellor of the New York State Board of Regents, the governing body for New York State’s public schools. Michael Bloomberg is one of the wealthiest individuals in the world. According to Forbes magazine he was worth $31 billion in September 2013, up $4 billion from the previous March. Merryl Tisch, who is not quite as wealthy as Bloomberg and is often his political opponent, is part of the family that controls the Loews corporation and owns important downtown Manhattan real estate. Other political figures who appear in this group of essays include Joel Klein, Cathy Black, and Dennis Walcott, who served as New York City school chancellors while Michael Bloomberg was mayor. In each case Bloomberg sought and received a special waiver from the Board of Regents that governs education in New York State because they lacked the basic qualifications for the position. Joel Klein later left the Department of Education to become an executive vice-president at Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, where he runs an education division called Amplify and promotes technology-driven instruction.

A major part of my argument in these blogs is that the school system in New York City, and schools in many parts of the United States, are controlled by the affluent and run to benefit them and their political and economic agendas. Their children and grandchildren attend private schools or are in special academic programs in public schools that serve the offspring of the elite. For example, President Barack Obama’s daughters both attend a very expensive private school in Washington, DC.

In New York City during the Bloomberg years (2002–2013), school policy was aligned with real estate interests to support gentrification. In world—renowned African American communities, such as Harlem in Manhattan and Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, real estate developers and affluent White home buyers were attracted by aging-but-elegant “brownstones” that could be renovated and transformed from multi-family rental apartments to multi-million dollar single family homes. According to a New York Times report,¹ the 1990 federal census showed only 672 Whites living in Central Harlem. By 2000 there were 2,200 White residents and in 2008 almost 14,000, 22% of whom had moved in that year alone.

But families have to have schools for their children to attend. The solution was to separate school from neighborhood. Affluent pioneers could purchase and fix-up homes in minority communities and displace longtime residents while their children attended themed mini-schools in other parts of the city designed to attract and educate “gifted” students who were often simply the off-spring of the city’s professionals and economic elite. Other people’s children in these gentrifying communities were left in failing schools or, when parents were more savvy and pushy, allowed to attend slightly better-performing charter schools and mini-schools.

Unfortunately, the issues discussed in these essays are not unique to New York City. Similar plans are being implemented in Chicago, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and Washington, DC, all in the name of “school reform.” In reality they are an effort to brand and sort children while ensuring that the economic elite have access to the housing and schools of their choice. Both Republican President Bush and Democratic President Obama said they were committed to an opportunity society. However, in a New York Times article,² economist Paul Krugman detailed how social mobility in the United States has come to a virtual standstill. For example, in Atlanta, Georgia, a child born into the bottom fifth of the income distribution has only a 4% chance of ever making it into the top fifth.

A. What’s Good for the Mayor’s Kids Is Good Enough for Ours

B. These Kids Don’t Have a Shot

C. Being Gifted Means You Get All the Gifts

D. Why Have “Specialized” High Schools?

E. Hempstead Freedom Walkers Challenge Long Island Segregation

F. Pablo’s Kids March on Washington

G. People with Guns Kill People and Children

H. The School-to-Prison Pipeline

A. What’s Good for the Mayor’s Kids Is Good Enough for Ours

Based on an essay published on the Huffington Post, December 6, 2011

www.huffingtonpost.com/alan-singer/whats-good-for-mayor-bloo_b_1128296.html

Questions to Consider

1. What is a good education and who gets to decide?

2. Should the highest-quality education be available to all children or just those from families who can afford to pay for it?

Cartoonist Al Capp added the character General Bullmoose to his “Li’l Abner” comic strip in 1953. Bullmoose epitomized the ruthless capitalist. His motto was “What’s good for General Bullmoose is good for the USA!” He was supposedly based on Charles Wilson, a former head of General Motors who testified before a United States Senate subcommittee in 1952 that “What is good for the country is good for General Motors, and what’s good for General Motors is good for the country.”³

Capp, who died in 1979, was being sarcastic. If he were alive and drawing his comic strip today he might rejoice in characterizing this generation’s latest Bull-moose, New York City’s multi-billionaire former mayor Michael Bloomberg.

In 2011, while a guest speaker at the Massachusetts Institute for Technology, Bloomberg said that if it were up to him, he would fire half the city’s teachers and double class size. He would also double teacher salaries, which would be a good idea if, as Bloomberg says, he wanted to attract and hold on to the best teachers. Bloomberg, who was involved in a prolonged legislative and public relations campaign to weaken the city’s teachers union, branded 50% of New York City’s teachers as ineffective, even though according to a rating system he endorsed and the union disputed, the number was less than 20%.

Bloomberg’s proposal was quickly and emphatically denounced by Leonie Haimson, executive director of Class Size Matters. According to Haimson, the mayor ran for office on a platform calling for reducing class size, but during his tenure New York City had “the largest class sizes in 11 years.” Haimson also disputed Bloomberg’s call for merit pay for teachers as an experiment “we’ve tried and it’s failed.” However, she was actually less concerned with Bloomberg’s proposal, which she dismissed as “idiocy,” than she was with similar proposals being floated by the Gates Foundation, the right-leaning Fordham Institution, and the supposedly more liberal Center for American Progress.⁴

But maybe Mayor Mike was on to something? Maybe New York City should fire half the teachers and double class sizes in its public schools?

His proposal made me curious. What kind of education did Mayor Mike choose for his daughters, now adults, before he became mayor and was only an ordinary multi-billionaire living on the Upper East Side of Manhattan? Michael Bloomberg has two daughters, Emma, aged thirty-four in 2013, and Georgina, thirty. Both girls attended the prestigious private all-girls Spence School in New York City.

The Spence School is located on ritzy East 91 Street between 5th Avenue and Madison. According to its website,⁵ for the 2011–2012 academic year, tuition was $37,500 for all grades K-12, about the tuition cost of an expensive private university. By comparison, the tuition cost at the elite public Stuyvesant High School is zero. I do not know if either Bloomberg daughter took or passed the test for admittance to selective New York City public high schools, although Emma was supposed to be a top student and later attended Princeton University.

Because Spence alumnae are routinely accepted by Harvard, Princeton, and Columbia universities, the school can afford to be very selective. It received 707 applications in the 2008–2009 academic year, and accepted 129 students or only 18% of the applicants.

Of course it does not hurt to be rich or well known when applying for a spot for your children. Among the celebrities whose children attend or have attended Spence are Sigourney Weaver, Kevin Kline, Gabriel Byrne, Revlon’s Ronald O. Perelman, Walter Cronkite, and Katie Couric.

In addition to its high tuition charge, the school has a “voluntary” annual fund, which because it is tax deductible, allows the wealthy to “contribute” even more money to the school while claiming a deduction on their local, state, and federal income taxes. According to Spence’s website, “the Annual Fund helps pay for everything from faculty salaries and professional development opportunities to new curriculum initiatives, from financial assistance programs to technology maintenance and upgrades, from the electricity needed to keep the lights on to supplies and books. It helps Spence attract and retain a talented and committed faculty and provides support for extracurricular activities clubs, sports, arts initiatives and other programs.”⁶

The Spence School had an endowment of over $25 million and very valuable property holdings, partly because of multimillion-dollar gifts from wealthy notables such as Bloomberg and Fiona Biggs Druckenmiller, a philanthropist who attended the school as a child.

If you can afford the tuition and the voluntary donation, there are many good reasons to have your daughters attend Spence. Its mission statement explains the school is a “diverse community of enthusiastic, scholastically motivated girls … taught by a devoted and passionate faculty.”⁷ In a world where public school students are forced to take an array of standardized assessments and test prep classes, a program enthusiastically supported by Bloomberg for everyone else’s children, Spence “students are encouraged to dig deep and ask questions, understanding that learning is a lifelong process, beyond an exam or diploma. Day-to-day, they aspire to their school motto ‘Not for school, but for life we learn.’”⁸

To facilitate this kind of learning, the average class size at Spence is limited to approximately sixteen to eighteen students and only fourteen students per class in the high school. Visiting artists, lecturers, and scholars have included Pulitzer-Prize-winning author Jhumpa Lahiri, playwright J. T. Rogers, Metropolitan Museum curator Joan Mertens, artist Barnaby Furnas, novelist Sue Monk Kidd, choreographer Doug Varone, and Tony-Award-winning director Julie Taymor.

At Spence, the extras are not considered extra. It has six science labs, six art studios and an art history room, two music rooms, a computer lab, a photography darkroom, two gymnasiums and a fitness room, two performance spaces, two dance studios, and two libraries. Spence also offers both international and domestic study programs to upper school (high school) students.

I kind of like what I read about Spence. I would like this kind of education for my grandchildren who attend public schools. And what is good for General Bull-moose, I mean ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface: Resistance without Jargon
• About the Author
• Introduction: Reclaiming the Conversation on Education
• 1 What Shall We Do with the Children?
• 2 Defending Teachers
• 3 Teacher Education
• 4 Teachers Unions
• 5 Business, Politics, and School Deform
• 6 Who Makes Education Policy?
• 7 Where Is the Chart for Charter Schools?
• 8 Common Core—What Is It Good For?
• 9 High-Stakes Testing
• 10 Curriculum and Instruction
• 11 Reform or Deform?
• 12 Resistance!