Summaries, Chapters: 5-8: The Death and Life of the Great American School System

The New York City schools system during the time when Mayor Michael Bloomberg as in office was the beginning of what will soon be the market business model. Numerous drastic measures were imposed on teachers, unions, and school board members. Mayor Bloomberg did not want an independent school board during his time at the office, but instead wanted direct controls of the schools and no one undermining him. He wanted direct control so badly that he was relocated the Board of Education’s headquarters near the city hall. He sold the original building to real estate developers which they turned it into residential condominiums. The objective plan was to implement the plan CHILDREN FIRST which he announced in January of 2033 on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. The plan consisted the following parts:

1. Each school was assigned literacy and mathematics coaches to monitor and enforce the program.
2. Eliminate thirty-two community school districts and replace them with ten large regions and was headed by a superintendent.
3. Created a privately funded Leadership Academy to train principals and others that wanted to become principals to become more business-like educators.
4. Eliminated local school boards which reduced parental involvement

These reforms which Bloomberg imposed to the school’s district in New York City was a corporate model of tightly centralized, and hierarchical to run like a business and management consultants’ firm.

When you look at the NCLB and CHILDREN FIRST policies, they are almost the same. When President Bush took office in 2001, the NCLB policy was approved by Congress. One of the biggest issues of the NCLB was the standardized tests that teachers had to give to the students. Recent studies mentioned that the testing system caused a rising number of dropouts among Black and Latino communities. Other studies from Walt Hany of Boston College says that the standardized tests had a negative impact in the Texas districts.

   “As teachers spent more time preparing students to take standardized tests, the curriculum was narrowed such subjects as science, social studies, and the arts were pushed aside to make time for test preparation. Consequently, students in Texas were actually getting a worse education than before-one tied solely to taking the state tests.” ³ pg.146