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Pre-Bloomberg, school names reflected the city's rich heritage of protest and social progress. Now, schools named after trade union leaders, civil rights leaders, democratic socialists, feminists and civic reformers have all had their names stripped from them, one by one, by the corporate reformers

Children in New York City who learned to read using an experimental curriculum that emphasized nonfiction texts outperformed those at other schools that used methods that have been encouraged since the Bloomberg administration's early days, according to a new study to be released Monday. For three years, a pilot program tracked the reading ability of approximately 1,000 students at 20 New York City schools, following them from kindergarten through second grade. Half of the schools adopted a curriculum designed by the education theorist E. D. Hirsch Jr.'s Core Knowledge Foundation. The other 10 used a variety of methods, but most fell under the definition of "balanced literacy," an approach that was spread citywide by former Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein, beginning in 2003.

The Bloomberg administration and the charter school operators always claim that in the rapid proliferation of charter schools across the city, they are merely responding to parent "demand" but this ignores the aggressive recruiting methods they use to build up their "waiting lists."  Eva Moskowitz has hired paid recruiters to "poach" students for her Success Academy charters, as in the video below, outside PS 261 in Brooklyn.  Not to mention her extensive and expensive advertising campaigns, in which she spent $1.6 million dollars on marketing efforts alone in 2009-2010, amounting to $1,300 per incoming student. This year, there is evidence that Harlem in particular has become so oversaturated with charters, that they have been forced to go far afield to solicit applications.  Parents as far away as lower Manhattan have receiving mailings from Democracy Prep and Harlem Link. 

Mayor Michael Bloomberg will meet his goal of opening 50 more charter schools before he leaves office at the end of 2013, but the future of charter school expansion after he leaves office is anybody's guess, Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott said Friday.

When Michael Bloomberg was elected Mayor of New York City in 2001, the unemployment rate was about 5%. Today it is 9%. That certainly qualifies as poor performance in office. Value decline rather than "value-added." Let's fire him. When Andrew Cuomo was first elected to state wide office as Attorney General in 2006, the unemployment rate was 4.5%. Today it is 8%. That certainly qualifies as poor performance in office. Value decline rather than "value-added." Let's fire him also.

Speaking at a panel on big-city school reform in Washington, D.C. on March 2nd, Mayor Bloomberg repeated a claim he's made before: "We have closed the gap between black and Latino kids and white and Asian kids," he said. "We have cut it in half." It's a claim that has never held up to serious scrutiny.

The UFT on April 3 filed suit in New York State Supreme Court to force the Department of Education to hand over copies of official emails, including exchanges about school closings and charter schools, that the union has been requesting since May 2010. The union cited a statement by Mayor Bloomberg that "to say that the parents shouldn't get what information is available is just an outrage," in arguing that the city's nearly two-year delay in providing the emails represents a "constructive denial" of the requests under the state's Freedom of Information law.

A recent report by the New York Civil Liberties Union exposed the escalating number of students who have been suspended since Mayor Michael Bloomberg took control of the city's schools more than a decade ago. Some believe one contributing factor may lie in the growing number of the public charter schools created during his tenure that develop their own discipline codes and have higher than average suspension rates. Advocates for Children, a nonprofit that represents the legal rights of public school children, believe that the rise in charters (77 in 2008 and 135 in 2012) has gone hand in hand with the fact that a number of them exclude children-particularly those with special needs-at higher than average rates.

Ms. Moskowitz is a brigadier in the charter school wars that could define the next mayoral election. Armies mass on either side. The teachers' union, parent groups and the organization New York Communities for Change oppose charter expansion. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has sent a trusted aide, Micah C. Lasher, to work with the hedge-fund-backed group StudentsFirstNY to push expansion. Ms. Moskowitz embraces life in wartime. She yearns not only to compete, but also to drive the teachers' union and some public schools into the East River. In e-mails several years ago to the chancellor at the time, Joel I. Klein, obtained by the columnist Juan Gonzalez of The Daily News, Ms. Moskowitz made clear her views. "We need," she wrote, "to quickly and decisively distinguish the good guys from the bad."

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and the schools chancellor, Dennis M. Walcott, often boast that student performance is improving in New York City, as evidenced by the percentage of students passing state exams and graduating from high school. But a new analysis finds that most city students are holding steady, getting very similar test scores between third and sixth grades.

"Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has made school choice a foundation of his education agenda, and since he took office in 2002, the city opened more than 500 new schools; closed, or is in the process of closing, more than 100 ailing ones; and created an environment in which more than 130 charter schools could flourish. No neighborhood has been as transformed by that agenda as Harlem. When classes resume on Thursday, many of its students will be showing up in schools that did not exist a decade ago. The idea, one that became a model for school reform nationwide, was to let parents shop for schools the same way they would for housing or a cellphone plan, and that eventually, the competition would lift all boats. But in interviews in recent weeks, Harlem parents described two drastically different public school experiences, expressing frustration that, among other things, there were still a limited number of high-quality choices and that many schools continued to underperform."

Maybe New York City should fire half the teachers and double class size in its public schools? His proposal made me curious. What kind of education did Mayor Mike choose for his daughters, now adults, before he became mayor and was only an ordinary multi-billionaire living on the Upper East Side of Manhattan? Michael Bloomberg has two daughters, Emma, now aged thirty-two, and Georgina, twenty-eight. Both girls attended the prestigious private all-girls Spence School in New York City.

Among the press releases that went flying after the city announced its first set of school closures earlier today, the one from principals union president Ernest Logan stood out for its stridency. In a statement the length of a short essay, Logan decried school closures as "a losing strategy" that traumatizes needy students, shuts out educators, and prevents scrutiny of the city's reform efforts. Adding eight months to mayoral control's age, he said twice that the Bloomberg administration has had a decade to fix all schools but has not.

While Dr. Tisch has frequently showered praise on Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg - in the interview, she extolled his "selfless" commitment to the city and said, "I don't like people trashing the mayor" - she just as frequently seems to go out of her way to qualify his successes in transforming the schools.

Philissa Cramer, managing editor at Gotham Schools.org, talks about disputes over teachers: principals are objecting to test scores for evaluations and Mayor Bloomberg has a modest proposal for class sizes. 

The conventional wisdom among many education commentators is that U.S. public school teachers "come from the bottom third" of their classes. Most recently, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg took this talking point a step further, and asserted at a press conference last week that teachers are drawn from the bottom 20 percent of graduates. All of this is supposed to imply that the U.S. has a serious problem with the "quality" of applicants to the profession. Despite the ubiquity of the "bottom third" and similar arguments (which are sometimes phrased as massive generalizations, with no reference to actual proportions), it's unclear how many of those who offer them know what specifically they refer to (e.g., GPA, SAT/ACT, college rank, etc.). This is especially important since so many of these measurable characteristics are not associated with future test-based effectiveness in the classroom, while those that are are only modestly so. Still, given how often it is used, as well as the fact that it is always useful to understand and examine the characteristics of the teacher labor supply, it's worth taking a quick look at where the "bottom third" claim comes from and what it might or might not mean.

Bloomberg acknowledged that his strategy would result in much larger class size, but he refused to back down. "The best thing you can do is put the best teacher you can possibly find and afford in front of the classroom and if you have to have fewer because there's only a certain number of dollars to go around, I'm in favor of that." I thought at first that the mayor's comments were meant to be taken in the same way as Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal." But then I realized he was dead serious because he obviously believes in Social Darwinism.

For 10 years Mayor Bloomberg and his aides have been playing a numbers game with the people of New York. When he took over the school system, things were to be magically transformed. Social promotion would be eliminated. Test scores would go up. High school graduation rates would go up. The 1.1 million schoolchildren would be in a better place. Well, it hasn't happened.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, directly confronting leaders of the teachers' union, proposed on Thursday a merit-pay system that would award top performers with $20,000 raises and threatened to remove as many as half of those working in dozens of struggling schools.

Regarding teachers' unions with a certain distaste, maintaining the belief that they exist to champion inadequacy, is now virtually required for membership in the affluent, competitive classes, no matter an affiliation on the right or left. Over the past two weeks, as Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg have aggressively pushed for phasing in a new, more rigorous teacher evaluation process - with tens of millions of dollars in state and federal aid to schools at stake - they have deployed a rhetoric of enmity, one meant to suggest that the state's teachers' unions are committed to keeping talentless hacks in jobs they can't handle. As the governor put it on Monday, "Our schools are not an employment program." What has been lost in these performances of reproach and imperiousness is the extent to which the city and state, and the related unions (the United Federation of Teachers in the first instance and New York State United Teachers in the second) are generally in agreement over how classroom evaluations ought to be held and what, in fact, constitutes sound teaching. As it happens, the state union was at work devising substantive evaluation reform more than a year before Mr. Cuomo even took office.