Thompson outlines agenda for better schools in first policy speech

In the first policy speech of his campaign for mayor, Comptroller Bill Thompson announced a ten-point plan to improve the city’s public schools.

Simultaneously attacking Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s schools record and outlining his own priorities, Thompson outlined a plan focused broadly on changing curriculum and school environments, improving programs for under-served groups such as English-language learners  and special education students, increasing community participation in schools and improving transparency in the Department of Education.

Item number one on the mayoral hopeful’s list was appointing a career educator as chancellor, a position currently filled by Klein who is a trained lawyer and does not have a background in education.

“We need a Schools Chancellor with a solid and extensive education background,” he said, “who not only cares about children, but who understands fundamentally what goes on in the classroom and respects the tough work that teachers and principals perform on the front lines of our system every day.”

Many of Thompson’s proposals would represent a modest scaling-back of changes enacted under Bloomberg’s mayoral control of the schools. For example, he proposed restoring authority to school leadership teams and returning superintendents to their districts.

He also proposed a “Parent University,” modeled on a similar program in Philadelphia, to train and empower parents to work in their children’s schools. Thompson said this program would work with the parent training centers established under the new school governance law, though he did not specifically outline how the two services would differ.

Thompson contrasted his ideas to Bloomberg’s reforms, which he characterized as expensive and unsuccessful.

“The Mayor and Schools Chancellor Klein have trumpeted the benefits of a corporate model in their approach to education,” he said. “But after three reorganizations, a near doubling of the education budget and questionable improvements, it is safe to say that the new corporate model has failed its investors – the people of New York City – and it has failed our students.”

Many of the priorities outlined in Thompson’s plan echo policy recommendations he has made as comptroller. He continued his attack on the validity of state testing data and on the ways in which the Department of Education has spent money earmarked for class size reduction. Thompson has also previously announced his intention to replace Klein as schools chancellor.

And while many of Thompson’s plans would mean a significant expansion of city services, details on how the plan would be funded were almost entirely absent from the speech. Thompson proposed re-directing funds currently slated for prison construction to a class size reduction initiative, but he did not specify how the city would pay for other elements of his plan, including significant investments in services for special education and English-language students.

Chris Cerf, the former deputy schools chancellor who recently signed onto the Bloomberg campaign as a senior policy adviser, attended the speech and called Thompson’s proposals “very vague.” He also argued that many of Thompson’s proposals, such as increasing the length of the school day and the school year, would ring up costs in the “tens of billions of dollars.”

He added that many of Thompson’s other priorities aligned with goals he said the Bloomberg administration is pursuing now.  “It’s not so much that they’re bad ideas,” Cerf said. “These were articulations of many of the things that we are already doing.”

Cerf also echoed Bloomberg’s comments from earlier in the day, attacking Thompson’s record as president under the former Board of Education a decade ago.

Thompson did not take questions from reporters after the speech. But City Council Education Chair Robert Jackson said that it was misguided to compare the schools under the old Board of Education to that under Bloomberg’s centrally-controlled governance system. “You’re talking about apples and oranges,” he said.

But that objection didn’t stop Jackson from adding a jab at Bloomberg’s record.

“Quite frankly, mayoral control under Mayor Bloomberg has not worked,” Jackson said. “Their priorities are not in the right place.”

Here is the full text of Thompson’s speech, also posted on his campaign website:

Good evening and thank you for this opportunity to discuss a subject that is close to my heart. There is no question in my mind that our city’s greatest hope for the future is the successful education of our children. And yet while the current administration has spent unprecedented sums to promote an idea of historic progress, our education system is going in the wrong direction. The simple fact is that we cannot have a great city without great schools in every neighborhood. Our schools – and particularly our classrooms – are the door through which so many New Yorkers have passed on their journey to the American Dream. But schools are also the key to our creation of a new economy. The City’s emergence from these challenging economic times will demand well-educated people, with the necessary skills to take advantage of today’s new technologies and brimming with the entrepreneurial spirit that has always made us great. Students graduating in the 21st century face a world that is continuously changing and becoming more complex. To succeed they must acquire better academic competence, advanced technical skills and ever greater problem-solving abilities. As Mayor of New York, it will be my job to make this happen. To achieve this vision, the New York City School system must come to be synonymous with the ideals of excellence and equal opportunity. Fundamental to this goal are three essential truths: children count, educators matter and parents are partners. If we were to establish a set of principles that would underlie the kind of transformation of the school system that I see, it would start with these ten ideas: • One, hire an educator; • Two, fix the curriculum; • Three, demand accountability and transparency; • Four, reduce class size and eliminate overcrowding; • Five, create a community of schools; • Six, connect students to their futures; • Seven, design school choices that work; • Eight, invest in English Language Learners; • Nine, improve special education; and finally, • Ten, empower parents as partners. So, that all sounds good, right? But articulating principles is always easier than the part where we make it all happen. So, how do we get there? First, we need a Schools Chancellor with a solid and extensive education background, who not only cares about children, but who understands fundamentally what goes on in the classroom and respects the tough work that teachers and principals perform on the front lines of our system every day. Besides being a former president of the Board of Education, I am a New York City public school graduate, so I’ve seen that work my entire life. I also understand how hard our educators work because I grew up in an educator’s household. My mother was a public school teacher in Brooklyn. I saw on a daily basis how tired she was returning home from what is quite possibly our city’s most challenging job. I am proud to say that my daughter Jennifer continues that tradition as a public school teacher in Brooklyn. So a respect for educators and the tough work that they do every day is very much in my blood. As Mayor, I will not only hire a Chancellor who has an education background. I will also hire a Chief Administrative Officer, who is focused on the administrative functions of the system – from transportation to food services to construction. It’s time we had leaders who can lay out a vision of education that goes beyond helping our children to succeed on tests to creating the opportunity for our children to succeed in life. Creating those opportunities will require serious reforms to the school curriculum. Students have become expert test takers but many cannot retain or apply what they know in a context other than the test environment. We need to fix the curriculum so that we are not just teaching to the test but educating the whole child. Comprehension, creativity, critical thinking and teamwork, completely ignored in the current curriculum, must be given greater importance. For instance, while arts and music programs are critical to our children’s creative and emotional development, the Department of Education’s own survey of arts education showed that only 4 percent of children in elementary schools – and less than a third of those in middle schools – receive the arts education required by the state. And when the federal government tested science in 2005, two-thirds of New York City’s eighth grade students were “below basic”, the lowest possible rating. When the State tested science and social studies last year, most of our school districts were in the bottom 10 percent of all districts in the State. In a century in which technological change is transforming nearly every aspect of our lives, those results are not only unacceptable. They are an urgent wake-up call. Yes, we must ensure that our students graduate with necessary skills in math, reading, and writing. And yet how will future generations build greener buildings, resolve conflict and explore the farther reaches of our universe if we do not spark our children’s interest in science, civics and geography at an early age? To provide children with this enriched curriculum, the school day should be extended. Some students may require more time and assistance on certain tasks. The school week and school year should be extended for these students, including Saturday school. At the same time, let’s make universal Pre-K truly universal. As Mayor I will work with the State legislature to reform the compulsory education law so that children are required to start school at age 5, as most educators believe they should. Yet no plan to reform our curriculum and improve outcomes for our students will be possible without a renewed focus on accountability and transparency. The failure of the administration to tell the truth over the last eight years has undermined our faith in their claims of progress, while putting the school system at serious risk. These failures have allowed for the constant spinning of test scores and graduation rates; the proliferation of no-bid contracts; and the outsourcing of millions of dollars in contracts to private firms that should be performed by public employees. The Mayor and Schools Chancellor Klein have trumpeted the benefits of a corporate model in their approach to education. But after three reorganizations, a near doubling of the education budget and questionable improvements, it is safe to say that the new corporate model has failed its investors – the people of New York City – and it has failed our students. When it comes to education, it is critical that we measure how we are doing in order to make improvements and replicate our successes. We must not hesitate to acknowledge and reward good pedagogy where it exists, but we must also be able to quickly identify programs and policies that are not working. My office has a charter-mandated responsibility to audit allegations of mismanagement that are brought to our attention. In the exercise of that responsibility, we have discovered and reported on a pattern of brazen actions taken by the Department of Education that fly in the face of basic management standards. Audits this summer exposed shoddy oversight regarding high school graduation rates and standardized test administration. We found that the DOE has engaged in sloppy and unprofessional practices that encourage data manipulation and cheating. Measures to prevent cheating were also abandoned. Just this month, the Department of Education handed out self-serving school letter grades based chiefly on standardized test results. Incredibly, 97 percent of New York City elementary and middle schools earned an “A” or a “B.” Does anybody really believe that every school in our city deserves an A or a B? For too long, we have taken the DOE’s claims of academic improvements at face value. Our audits only reinforce the need for greater accountability. The State legislature addressed the problem this summer by giving additional oversight responsibility to the Independent Budget Office. As Mayor, I will go even farther. I will ensure that a high school diploma means something by ending the practice of credit recovery by which students may graduate without a proven mastery of their coursework. I will reintroduce protections against cheating on tests. And I will demand that our school system undergoes an accreditation-type review every two years so that we can restore and maintain credibility in our school system and its performance. The findings of such a report must – and will – be made public. Another critical reform we urgently need is to reduce class sizes in our schools and alleviate overcrowding. Class size matters. Particularly in the early grades, research has shown that class size reduction is one of the most effective strategies to increase student learning and narrow the achievement gap. Studies have shown that students in smaller classes between kindergarten and third grade perform better, receive better grades, and have better attendance records. Class size reduction in these early grades has shrunk the achievement gap by almost 40 percent. And yet, for the first time in a decade in New York City, despite an enormous increase in spending, class size increased at every grade level last fall. That is why I was appalled when a recent audit by my office discovered that in 2008, the DOE misspent or redirected over a quarter of class size reduction dollars – close to $50 million – that were dedicated for this purpose. My office also looked twice in recent years at the city’s school construction process – most recently this month – finding that the Education Department’s capital plan failed to keep pace with the need for physical space that has resulted from population growth across New York City. Public attention has been drawn increasingly to news reports of parents having to place their children on wait lists to attend their neighborhood primary school. Trailers in school yards across the city – intended to ease the burden of overcrowding – have themselves become overcrowded. Clearly, we are seeing the effects of poor planning. For many years I have advocated for a smart growth approach to economic development that balances new building with the necessary infrastructure to support it. That’s why as Mayor I will insist that all major economic development projects include school representatives at the planning stages. Incredibly, the current administration’s much-heralded PlaNYC, which examined city needs to the year 2030, has nothing whatsoever to say about school construction. That’s a mistake, and I will fix it when I’m Mayor. As Mayor, I will also create a citywide, school-by-school plan to ensure that class sizes begin to decline – and decline quickly. As part of this plan, I will improve our capital planning and enrollment projections, as well as our capacity and utilization reports to determine how and where additional classrooms are needed. This plan, which will reallocate capital funds now dedicated to building unnecessary prisons, will be made public and will be tracked by a Class Size Monitor at City Hall. And while small class sizes are important at the K-3 level, they are also important in the upper grades. With that in mind, I will channel additional funds to develop a small class size model at the 4-12 grade levels. Another cornerstone of a Thompson administration approach to education will be to create a community of schools where coordinated services are available. As Mayor, I will break down the silos of city government and develop linkages between our schools and city agencies. Libraries, parks, recreation centers, and senior centers must join together in the education of our children. And I won’t stop with just the government partners that must be connected to this system of schools. I will also build upon the rich human capital we have with our colleges, universities and hospitals, both public and private, as well as the social service and community-based organizations that make our neighborhoods strong. Especially in our most struggling communities, schools can address the urgent need for preventive care by providing on-site primary care clinics, dental clinics, and vision care services. As Mayor I will insist that physical education requirements be met as a means to confront childhood obesity. I also support expanded after school programs, day care services, and even senior services for the many grandparents now taking care of children. After school programs also help students to improve academic achievement, while reducing truancy and youth crime. To coordinate these efforts, I will appoint a Deputy Mayor for Children and Youth. If we really want to put children first, we must dedicate our resources to their future success. There are more than a million school-age children in our city and in my administration they will have a champion at the highest level. If we’d had someone in this position last Spring, we might have resolved the budget shortfall at the Administration for Children’s Services without shifting 3,000 kids from city-funded day care centers to public Kindergarten classes – a situation that caused unnecessary stress for students and parents alike. Education is a lifelong process and we must redirect our focus to the preschool through college years and beyond to help connect students to their futures. The creation of a pre-K to 16 continuum will help us to reorient our schools to have a vision of lifelong learning. We have some of the finest public and private universities in the nation. As Mayor I will increase funding so that every high school is linked with an institution of higher education giving students an opportunity to graduate with both a diploma and an associate degree. The information age and the global economy have created a greater demand for more sophisticated skills. But as the skills gap continues to widen, unless we act now, more and more of our youth will fall behind and we will place our city’s future competitiveness in jeopardy. The Community Service Society has estimated that there are as many as 200,000 New Yorkers between the ages of 16 and 24 who have both failed to graduate from high school and are not gainfully employed. These youths are disconnected not only from society, but from community, from school, and from family. And underlying this lack of connection is a lack of hope in the future. As Mayor, I will increase funding for Career and Technical Schools and programs, and expand academic intervention programs for students enrolled in CTE who may be in danger of dropping-out. I will expand our career and college counseling services. I will also seek to develop partnerships with employers in the City, as well as internships and apprenticeships that provide students not only with valuable skills and experience, but also with hope for what they can achieve if they stay in school. I will create a Youth Advisory Council to help young adults tackle the questions many of them have about their futures. When it comes to school reform, the current administration has adopted new programs and approaches, including small schools and charters, that ignore local neighborhoods and their needs. Instead we should be focused on designing school choices that work. While small schools provide a solid option for many students, a recent study by the New School found that they are no panacea. Of 30 Bloomberg-era small schools that have graduated at least two classes, nearly half have had graduation rates that declined sharply among students in the second four-year cohort. Some of our city’s lowest-performing schools are new schools created by the Department of Education, even as the Department has closed and dismantled scores of large high schools and neighborhood schools without making any sustained effort to improve them. There may be times when a school must be closed, but it should be as a last resort, triggered only after all other measures have been taken. As Mayor, I will dramatically reduce class size, mandate a research-based curriculum, provide intensive professional development, and supply prompt technical assistance to turn around schools that were once the anchor of their communities. As a part of that process, I will restructure Quality Review so that findings are used to develop collaboratively – with the principal, teachers and parents on the School Leadership Team – a comprehensive plan for school improvement based on each school’s specific needs. Likewise, charters can be an attractive choice for families, but we must ensure that Charter Schools are not destabilizing our neighborhood schools and leaving them without the resources they need to succeed. As Mayor, I will work with the New York State legislature to enact a new comprehensive Charter Law. Access to Charter schools must be made equitable and we should increase the cap on the number of Charter Schools that may be established. Charters must be reviewed as every other school is reviewed. Schools that are working deserve continued support. Those that are not should be discontinued. I will also require charters to accept and retain English Language Learners and Special Education students, who have for too long been neglected by the current administration. A majority of children in New York City’s public schools are from immigrant families. Many enter our schools with limited English language skills, having been raised with a different native language. The New York City public schools have failed to invest in English Language Learners, or ELLS. The system’s nearly 150,000 ELLS face huge obstacles to academic success. They must not only learn a new language, but they must also adjust to a new country and schools while trying to meet promotion and graduation standards. While graduation rates for ELL students have barely changed in the last four years, the gap between ELLs and English proficient students remains wide. The achievement gap is most pronounced at the 8th grade reading level, where only 5 percent of ELL students achieved learning standards as compared with nearly half of non-ELL students. And while the 4-year graduation rate for ELLs is barely over 30 percent, those in New York City who received bilingual or ESL instruction before the ninth grade actually have higher achievement rates than native English speakers. Sadly, the number of ELLs getting mandated bilingual instruction has dropped from a half to a fifth since 2002. This is a crisis that cries out for change. As Mayor I will refocus efforts on educating ELL students and invest in their futures. I will dedicate funding, provide the necessary supports to prevent dropouts, and recruit and train qualified teachers to increase the number of programs available to students. Students with Special Needs, who account for approximately 181,000 of the City’s student population, have also been left behind in the last eight years. We must make a bold new push to improve special education. There has been no serious effort to improve programs and services for students with emotional and behavioral problems. And there has been no strategy to provide preventive services that decrease the number of referrals to special education or that address the over-representation of students of color in special education classes. And there is serious, systemic non-compliance with students’ Individual Education Programs, or IEPs. Transferring schools is a common experience for many students with special education needs. Many schools do not take responsibility to educate these children or accommodate their needs, or even understand what is required by law for the schools to provide. Fewer than one in every five New York City students classified with special needs graduates in four years from high school. Black and Latino students continue to receive a disproportionately large share of the City’s IEP diplomas, which provide no access to college, the military or any job requiring a high school diploma. I embrace the recommendations of the ARISE Coalition to educate, include, and respect students with special needs. Their recommendation to create a Task Force to conduct a systemic study of instruction of students with special needs is a sound plan and as mayor I will launch such an effort immediately. I will also establish a Special Education Resource Center to help parents of students with special needs to navigate the complex world of special education, and provide direct access to individuals that have the knowledge and authority to help them with problems that cannot be resolved at the school level. None of the changes I have discussed this evening can be successful if we fail to empower parents as partners. Parents must have a voice in their child’s education and future. Families provide the foundation for learning and have a significant role in their child’s education. It has been well established that where there are strong school-home-child partnerships, children succeed. Parents must be able to have a place to go when they have questions or problems and know that they are being heard. Yet across the city, parents have felt shut out by the current administration. They are often unaware of Community Education Councils and School Leadership Teams, and how to become involved with them. As Mayor, I will create the city’s first ever Parent University. The City of Philadelphia has launched such an organization to assist parents and guardians in supporting their children to achieve academic success and providing them with the opportunity to achieve their own personal academic and non-academic goals. The University model goes far beyond typical parent training and serves as a parent education and resource center. Our Parent University will work in conjunction with the parent training centers to be operated by the City University of New York, as mandated by the new school governance legislation. To further support parents, we will return superintendents to their district and to their proper roles supervising their schools. I will also give parents a substantive voice on the Panel for Education Policy, or PEP, by including members on that body who are nominated by fellow parents. I will encourage those and my other appointees on the PEP to speak and vote independently. All of my appointees will provide their contact information to the public, and I will require them to hold regular meetings with parents and other advocates to listen to their concerns. Finally, at the school level I will restore the full authority to school leadership teams that they once had. Those teams, made up of half parents and half school staff, will have the authority to develop school budgets and comprehensive education plans that was stripped from them by the current administration. The ten principles I have described tonight are not only a blueprint for substantive change to address the educational needs of our young people. They align with and reinforce President Barack Obama’s own national education initiative, especially when it comes to addressing the challenges facing our highest need communities. Most importantly these principles establish an approach to education that is open, inclusive and accountable; where children count, educators matter, and parents are partners. Proceeding from those basic ideas, we can achieve real gains in a Thompson administration that are transparent and reliable. When achievement measures improve on my watch, it will be because we have taught children to think for themselves and master the content of their curriculum, not because they have spent day after day, week after week, preparing for exams in a spirit-crushing exercise that deprives them of the true wonder of learning. When class sizes go down on my watch, it will be because we have dedicated precious education dollars to the most important stake holders in our system – our students – rather than to expensive consultants and public relations experts trying to spin the failure of an administration to imagine and implement programmatic changes that work. When graduation rates improve on my watch it will be because our students are learning the skills they need to compete in the new century, not because we are kicking out poor performing students and pretending that they were never in the system in the first place. My friends, it’s time for change. The current administration has had eight years to get the job done on education. Eight years to bring transparency and accountability to management. Eight years to close the achievement gap. Eight years to end no-bid contracts. Eight years to put students first. And in each case they have failed. Ladies and gentlemen, eight is enough. As Mayor of New York City, I will fundamentally change our priorities on education. I will make parents welcome. I will support communities. I will respect teachers. And I will confront the challenge of providing all New York City children with a sound basic education. By insisting that such an education is a right, not a privilege, we can fill our young people with hope while at the same time securing New York City’s historic role as a thriving economic center long into the 21st century. Thank you very much.