3 & 27

by Dennis Green

Mayor Bloomberg of New York City is speaking about the dramatic improvement in that city’s public schools — especially in Harlem and the South Bronx. “Two numbers,” he says, “three and twenty-seven! That tells the whole story. Three percent of the public schools in the State of New York have shown improvement in the past two years. Twenty-seven percent of the schools in New York City have shown improvement.”

I’m watching MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” a program hosted by Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzyinzki that I usually can’t bear viewing, as it celebrates the radical reforms underway in American education. They also issue a challenge to their mostly conservative viewers to donate money, time, supplies to that effort.

An old friend, John McDonough, gets one of those schools named after him by donating 25 computers to that school. They flash a statistic on the screen showing that 1.2 MILLION American kids drop out of school every year. Starbucks coffee stores donates a percentage of its profits to the effort.

They show footage of the schools, and the kids, most of them wearing uniforms. “Discipline,” Bloomberg explains, “is absolutely essential to the reforms. If you can’t maintain discipline in the classroom, you can’t teach.” Others, including local congressmen, describe how the parents, and not just the parents but the entire community has to get involved, take a keen interest in public schools and feel they have some influence in how they are managed.

“For the very best teachers, we have increased their salaries by 43%,” Bloomberg goes on to describe funding. “But the people of New York are willing to pay higher taxes now that they see the schools becoming accountable, and improving.”

Others explain that seniority is being replaced by outcomes as a measure of a teacher’s worth. “No longer are we allowing the old rule of ‘last hired, first fired’ to dominate the process. If teachers must be laid off in the wake of declining enrollment, the least competent go first.”

Parents in Harlem and the South Bronx and other districts are also given a choice which schools their students attend, and any opening in the best schools has so many applicants they must run a lottery, and thousands sometimes apply. Bloomberg says, “People say that there will never be good schools until we eliminate poverty, but it’s just the other way around. We will never eliminate poverty until we have good schools.”

There is no excuse in America, he adds, not to educate every young American. “When a student drops out, never gets that high school diploma, right away his chances of staying out of trouble decrease, the odds that he will start using drugs, we proved, will increase, the chances that he will wind up in prison. Bad teachers are destroying young lives!”

Many of the schools in Harlem have gone charter, but the non-charter schools have also had to get better in order to compete. In some charter schools, 100% of the students graduate, and by the third grade achieve 100% proficiency in English, history and math.

So it can be done, and it would get done, all across America, but for that to happen, recalcitrant teachers and principles, school superintendents and trustees protecting the status quo are going to have to get out of the way. For the times they are still changing!

©2010 Dennis Green