EDUCATION NOTEBOOK:
New Yorkers to Grade City's Public Schools
By Dan Lips
Credit Mayor Mike Bloomberg and Chancellor Joel I. Klein for
implementing an innovative education idea: giving parents the
chance to grade their kids' schools. Earlier this year, the city
government sent the first "Learning Environment Survey" to 1.8
million parents, students, and teachers in the public school system
to provide customer feedback.
"For any successful organization, finding out what customers and
users think works-or needs work-is key to improvement," explained
Mayor Bloomberg. "This is the most extensive effort in the history
of American education to solicit a community's ideas and views
about their public schools."
So what should New Yorkers expect when the survey results are
made public this fall? One likely finding will be that parents
desire better educational opportunities for their children. That
view is expressed in parents' history of seizing on opportunities
for their children to escape the public school system.
In 1998, financier and philanthropist Theodore J. Forstmann
raised $170 million to provide tuition scholarships to low-income
children to attend private school. In all, Forstmann's Children's
Scholarship Fund offered 40,000 scholarships nationwide. More than
1.2 million children across the country applied.
In New York, 168,000 students applied for scholarships-about 29
percent of the eligible children in the city. Families who applied
had to pledge to contribute about $1,000 annually for five years to
supplement the $2,500 scholarships. This means that New York's
poorest families pledged to pay $168 million annually to escape the
city's troubled public school system.
Unfortunately, only 2,500 New York students were lucky enough to
receive scholarships. Today, one wonders what happened to the other
165,000 children who were stuck in public schools, where the
graduation rate is only 50 percent.
Some New York leaders sought to meet the demand for better
opportunities by expanding options for parents. Former Mayor
Rudolph Giuliani proposed a pilot school voucher program for
disadvantaged kids in 1999. But the plan met with stiff resistance
from public school officials and was never implemented.
However, the city has made some strides in offering families
more choice. Today, New York has 58 public charter schools serving
15,000 students; another 12,000 children are on waiting lists to
enroll in charter schools. After years of political bickering,
state legislators in Albany have finally agreed to increase the cap
on the number of charter schools that are allowed in the state from
100 to 200. Approximately 50 new charter schools will be allowed to
open in New York City.
Unfortunately, this will only help a fraction of the tens of
thousands of kids trapped in the city's public schools, where, on
average, only one out of three 8th graders is reading at
grade-level.
More money is not the answer. New York City already spends more
than $12,600 on each student in public school every year, well
above the national average.
Mayor Bloomberg's "customer feedback" survey is a small step in
the right direction toward empowering parents. Yet he should
recognize that parents have been giving feedback for years in their
efforts to escape public schools whenever they have been given the
chance. The question is whether politicians will ever give them the
opportunity.
Dan Lips is Education Analyst at the Heritage Foundation,
www.Heritage.org.