Bloomberg's Education Plan Is Working: Don't Ditch It
The Atlantic
Bill de Blasio, the likely next New York City mayor, has made a lot of promises about public education. No additional charter schools; no free space for many charter schools educating city kids; less reliance on student test performance to judge schools; and a moratorium on the closure of low-performing schools. Though these pledges have come piecemeal, together they would dismantle the reforms Michael Bloomberg implemented during his 12 years as mayor. Before this happens, it’s worth looking at what Bloomberg’s policies have accomplished and what is at risk if they are tossed out....
...New small high schools started during the Bloomberg administration are more effective than the schools they replaced. On campuses where new small schools replaced large underperforming high schools, the overall graduation rate increased from 37.9 percent to 67.7 percent. This translates to 2,056 more graduates per year. New schools have produced these results serving the same kinds of students — those living in poverty, with disabilities, learning English as a second language — as the schools they replaced. In fact, students who entered the new small schools with the lowest test scores benefited from them the most.
The new schools are demonstrably more effective. A series of studies by independent research firm MDRC uses the “gold standard” method of measuring school effects. (For a full description of the firm’s multi-year study of new small high schools in the city, see here.) They took advantage of the lotteries required to select at random among applicants to the new high schools. Because applicants are selected at random, students who win the lotteries and thus attend new high schools have the same characteristics, including motivation, as students who lose in the lotteries. Any differences in results — say, test scores or rates of graduation — can be confidently attributed to the one clear difference between the two groups: the school they attended. These studies are updated every year as results from a new cohort of students become available....
