• Mayor Bloomberg Takes Control: The Launch of Children First
• Assessing the Impact of Children First on Latino Students
• The Impact of Charter Schools
• Conclusion: The Unfulfilled Promise of Children First for Latino Students
  
  

In this chapter, we begin by briefly describing the major reforms that have been implemented during the Bloomberg era. We follow this with an analysis of how Latino students have been affected by these policies. In presenting this analysis we draw upon data compiled by a variety of organizations, including the NYC Department of Education, the Parthenon Study on secondary schools, and the NYC Charter School Center, to show how Latino students have fared in New York City under Mayor Bloomberg’s reforms.

Mayor Bloomberg Takes Control: The Launch of Children First

Shortly after his election, Mayor Bloomberg appointed for US Attorney Joel Klein to serve as Chancellor for NYC public schools. Together, they unveiled the Children First reforms that launched a massive reorganization of NYC public schools. The reform eliminated community school boards, and established the Panel for Educational Policy (PEP) that took on the oversight of the City’s schools. The majority of the board members were appointed by Mayor Bloomberg, and early into his first term he demonstrated that PEP board members would follow his lead or they would be replaced. In addition, to further the goal of de-centralization, the Department of Education began to gradually dismantle the vast academic support system that previously assisted schools in the area of curriculum and professional development.

With central supports no longer available from the DOE or local school districts, schools were directed to purchase support services from newly created School Support Organizations (SSOs) or to become part of the “Autonomous Zone,” later renamed the “Empowerment Zone,”. The goal was to provide principals with more autonomy in the operation of their schools. In exchange for greater autonomy, principals were expected to meet specific performance standards (O’Day, Bitter & Talbert, 2011). The organizational changes were designed to transform NYC public schools into a competitive market for support services (Fruchter, N. & McAlister, S., 2008).

Assessment and accountability became the center of the Children First reform strategy. The reforms revamped the instructional structures in schools, established a common literacy and mathematics curriculum, required that every school have a literacy coach and a math coach, and provided schools with additional classroom materials. The reforms also established a parent coordinator in every school and placed greater emphasis on school security, designating several chronically unsafe secondary schools as “impact schools” where additional security personnel were deployed (Beam, Madar & Phenix, 2008). In an effort to increase transparency and accountability, school progress reports were released annually to the public, and letter grades were assigned to schools based on how well the school performed in comparison to schools with similar demographics. The reforms relied heavily upon state assessments, particularly the state English Language Arts exam (ELA) and State Mathematics exam for grades 3-8 and the Regents exams for grades 9-12, to measure and monitor the performance of schools. To insure that schools had access to student-level data, the DOE developed the Achievement Reporting and Innovation System (ARIS), an interactive online data tool that allows access to all stakeholders, including parents, to NYC DOE assessment data. Like several of the other measures that were implemented, ARIS was intended to significantly increase transparency and accountability system-wide.

Finally, Mayor Bloomberg and the DOE were committed to expanding school choice and creating a market place that would force schools to compete for students. To accomplish this goal, the DOE, the New York State Education Department (NY SED) and the State University of New York (SUNY) Board of Trustees were authorized to create several new charter schools. These schools received public funding and had access to public school facilities but were managed by private organizations, some of which had strong ties to hedge funds and Wall Street investment firms. Since 2002, the number of charter schools created has risen dramatically; the NYC Charter School Center (2012) reports that there are 136 charter schools currently in New York City. Additionally, approximately one hundred and forty (140) traditional public schools have been closed for failing to meet the DOE’s performance standards (Working Group Report 2012).

Assessing the Impact of Children First on Latino Students

Since 2000, Latino students in New York City have constituted the largest demographic subgroup in the City’s schools (NYC Department of City Planning 2003). They are also the fastest growing segment of the school-age population. It should be noted that the Latino student population is extremely diverse, consisting of representatives from every country and territory in Latin America, as well as a large number of US-born students. Dominicans, closely followed by Puerto Ricans, constitute the majority of the Latino youth in NYC (Figure 1a). What is more, the majority of Latino youth in NYC are US-born (Figure 1b).

In some respects, the news was hardly surprising because two years earlier CUNY (City University of New York) had reported that more than 50 percent of the city’s public school graduates at four-year colleges, and nearly 80 percent at community colleges, were required to take remedial courses after enrolling (Smith Jaggars & Hodara, 2011). In its 2011 Condition of College and Career Readiness report, ACT (2011) showed Latino students among the least college-prepared in the nation, with only 11 percent meeting college readiness benchmarks in four core subjects (see Figure 5). Moreover, despite the bold assertions by Mayor Bloomberg and the DOE, since 2003, there had been no significant reduction in the achievement gap separating New York City’s African American and Latino students from White students on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) testing program.

Conversely, 15% of Black and 16% of Latino students scored on Level 1 on the 2010 8th grade ELA assessments. This means it is twice as likely that a Latino student will be in this lowest scoring group than it is that an Asian student will be there, and three times more likely than a White, non-Hispanic student. Overall, 69% of the city’s Latino students are in the two lower levels of achievement on the Grade 8 English Language Arts assessment, while 60% of Asian and 59% of White, non-Hispanic students score at the two upper levels.

Why have such enormous disparities in educational outcomes persisted after ten years of reform? What the data suggest may be the underlying cause of these large gaps in performance is the link between test scores and the geographic residential boundaries of school districts. In a report entitled A Rotting Apple: Education Redlining in New York City, the Schott Foundation describes the cause of these disparities as being the result of “the corrosive impact of ‘redlining’” (Schott Foundation for Public Education 2012).

Recently, the New York City Independent Budget Office confirmed that students eligible for free and reduced-price meals, the city’s poorest children, do well in schools with relatively few poor students and students ineligible for any subsidized lunch program do not do well in schools that predominately serve students living in poverty. Sadly, only 16% of Latino students have the opportunity to attend schools where the majority of students do not qualify for free or reduced lunch. In contrast, 31% of Latino students are in schools where over 90% of students qualify for free or reduced lunch. What is more, schools that serve mostly Black and Latino students tend to attract teachers with the least years of teaching experience (Gandara & Contreras, 2010; Darling-Hammond, 2004). Gandara & Contreras (2010) found that in schools with the highest numbers of racial/ethnic minority students, a reported 88% of teachers scored in the bottom quartile for teacher quality; conversely, those schools with the lowest percentage of minorities had less than 11 percent of teachers who scored in the bottom quartile for teacher quality.

In addition to the lowered test scores and college readiness rates, the DOE’s policy of using school closure as a means to further its reform agenda has taken a particularly damaging toll on Latino students. Since Mayor Bloomberg took control of public schools, 140 schools have been closed or have been scheduled for closure (NYC Working Group on School, 2012). As the map in Figure 8a reveals, the vast majority of school closings have occurred in Harlem, Washington Heights, the south Bronx, and parts of Brooklyn, all predominantly Latino and Black communities. Furthermore, Figure 8b shows those schools closed during 2011-2012 school closings took place in those schools with a higher population of high needs students compared to the rest of the City’s schools, including special needs, poor, and Latino.

In his analysis of 19 transcripts from public hearings on school closures, Kretchman (2011) provides the example of a traditionally well-performing high school whose principal disclosed that there were “‘deplorable learning conditions [in his high school during the aftermath of a nearby school closure] as a result of overcrowding,’ and argue[d] that the school was not provided any additional resources to deal with the overcrowding” (p. 17). Since many of the schools targeted for closure are predominantly in communities of color as shown above, there is a domino effect that occurs and those school that previously performed well now deteriorate due to the influx of students phased out from schools. Fruchter (2011) describes the dilemma ,

If the DOE continues to invest in structural interventions while minimizing instructional initiatives, it will exacerbate the toxic cycle that closes struggling high schools instead of improving them, and sends their students to other vulnerable high schools[,] which then become additional targets for closure. As the current list of school closings indicates, new small high schools are also becoming vulnerable to this destructive strategy of musical chairs in which the losers are always the students who most need intervention and support to succeed
(para. 10).

The Parthenon Group, a Boston-based educational consulting firm, conducted an in-depth study on NYC public schools to determine the shortfalls, provide an improvement plan, and analyze the patterns of those schools that “beat-the-odds,” that is schools that have experienced academic success despite servicing a high-need student population. The 2006 study reported two major findings, those schools experiencing higher rates of failure had two things in common: they tended to be larger in size in comparison to other schools in NYC and had higher concentrations of low-level students (The Parthenon Group, 2006). Moreover, the study found that there were almost no secondary schools in New York City serving “high need” populations that were beating the odds.

In their improvement plan, the Parthenon Group suggested a system-wide reform that ensures a more equitable high school admissions policy to prevent the concentration of low-performing students in a few schools, and the creation smaller schools that can particularly service low-level students (The Parthenon Group, 2006). Another noteworthy finding was that Latino students accounted for the largest percentage in high school dropouts for the 2004-2005 school year (The Parthenon Group, 2006). Meade, Gaytan, Fergus, & Noguera (2009a) found a similar pattern in the 2006-2007 high school cohort. Although the percentage of high school dropouts in NYC has decreased since 1990, the percentage of high school dropouts is still alarmingly high, most notably within Mexican and Dominican youth (see Figure 9). Additionally, Latinos and Black students in secondary education were also more likely than their White and Asian counterparts to be over-age and off-track on the number of credits needed to graduate (The Parthenon Group, 2006). This is cause for further concern since those students who are more likely to drop out are those students who are overage (Meade, Gaytan, Fergus, & Noguera, 2009a).

As we mentioned previously, the number of charter schools in NYC has substantially increased since the reforms Children First were implemented. Their proliferation has been largely fueled by school closures in NYC, which has created the physical space in which to launch new schools, primarily charter schools. The charter school movement has seen its share of supporters, as well as its critics. Data compiled by the NYC Charter School Center provide an insight into the composition and character of charter schools. Since Bloomberg launched Children First, charter school student enrollment has increased from under 5,000 students in 2003 to an impressive 47,000 in 2012 (NYC Charter School Center, 2012). However, charter schools have consistently been criticized for enrolling a lower percentage of Latino students, particularly recent immigrants and English Language Learners (ELLs) in comparison with neighboring district public schools. Figure 10 shows that charter schools disproportionately serve Black students; NYC charter schools have a 62% Black student enrollment, whereas district public schools account for only 28.6%. What is more, charter schools serve 10% fewer Latinos than the surrounding district public schools, 30.9% compared to 40.4%. Figure 11 shows further disparities in the enrollment in the emergent bilingual student population, another critical subgroup of students. It reveals that district public schools in 2010-2011 were nearly three times more likely than charters to enroll emergent bilingual students, 5.8% compared to 15%. According to the latest NYC DOE Demographics Report (2011), 65% of emergent bilinguals are Spanish-speaking, thus, the majority of emergent bilingual students are also Latinos.

Figure 14 shows a revealing pattern of increasing proficiency rates as student enrollment decreases in four NYC charters.

Another study on small schools presented revealed a problem with their pedagogical approach, which according to some research, has frequently centered on test preparation. Shiller’s (2010) study reveals the case of a large Bronx high school that was divided into three smaller schools, which she refers to as Team, Vision and City High Schools. She found that there was an improvement in attendance and graduation rates (See Figure 16), a finding consistent to those studies cited above; nonetheless, she also found that teachers were engaging in minimum standards and test-centered pedagogical approaches (Shiller, 2010).

Conclusion:
The Unfulfilled Promise of Children First for Latino Students

Over, sixty years after the Supreme Court’s Brown decision, New York City continues to be highly segregated. Racial isolation is especially evident in the city’s schools where Latino students are concentrated. In fact, the rate of racial/ethnic concentration in public schools is among the highest in the nation (Schott 2012). In neighborhoods such as the South Bronx, Bushwick, East New York and Washington Heights, large concentrations of high-needs Latino students continue to be served by low performing schools. A study by Meade, Gaytan, Fergus, & Noguera (2009b) found that those schools with higher concentrations of Latino and Black students were also the City’s lowest performing schools (see Figure 17). This map (figure 17) also shows the patterns of racial/ethnic concentration across the city, revealing the high levels of segregation and concentration within the Latino and Black communities.

Footnote and References