Bloomberg Cleans House.
Social Promotion Limited
By Reconstructed Panel.

Henry J. Stern
March 16, 2004

The school wars continue. Yesterday evening's battle took place at Calvin Klein's alma mater, the High School of Art and Design. During the day, Mayor Bloomberg had replaced two of his appointees to the Panel on Educational Policy, the emasculated successor to the hydra-headed Board of Education. The Staten Island borough president, on cue, sacked his representative for one who would support his and the mayor's views on social promotion.
 
The emasculation had taken place two years ago in the Albany negotiations between Mayor Bloomberg, Speaker Joseph Bruno and Majority Leader Sheldon Silver. The outcome was a compromise between the mayor, who wanted the Board of Education totally abolished, and state legislators, who wanted to preserve some authority for a group which had borough presidential designees. The deck was then stacked, with eight to be picked by the mayor, and one by each of the five borough presidents.

The old Board of Education was hydra-headed because six different public officials appointed its seven members, so no one could be held responsible for any of its failures. The mayor was given two appointees, and the five borough presidents each had one, so Mayors Koch, Dinkins and Giuliani could easily be outvoted. In 1970, the legislature was so hostile to Mayor John Lindsay that they gave the mayor no voice in selecting any board members. This remained the law until after he left office. A generation later, this attitude appeared again on the issue of mayoral control of the schools; Speaker Silver would not agree to it until Mayor Giuliani's term had ended.
 
Perhaps equally important, the old board members were appointed for fixed four-year terms, expiring on June 30 after the mayoral election. So once a person was appointed, he or she had substantial autonomy. In three instances in recent board history, appointees broke with their borough presidents. Ninfa Segarra, appointed by Fernando Ferrer in the Bronx, disagreed on what to do with Chancellor Joseph Fernandez. Years later, Carol Gresser defied Borough President Claire Shulman. When Shulman was re-elected, she dropped Gresser (who later ran unsuccessfully for borough president herself) and appointed Terri Thomson. However, Ms. Thomson showed no more loyalty to Ms. Shulman than Ms. Gresser had, when she voted for Harold O. Levy for chancellor, who was strongly opposed by both Ms. Shulman and Mayor Giuliani. One reason Thomson could have preferred Levy is that they were fellow employees of Citibank, with Levy, a compliance officer, holding a higher position than Ms. Thomson.
 
As a result of these 'faithless electors,' it was proposed that the borough presidents sit on the Board of Education themselves, without having to surrender their authority to tenured surrogates of dubious dependability. That suggestion was not adopted, but the Board of Education itself was put out of its splendid misery by the State Legislature in 2002, when the mayor gained control of the school system.

With regard to the board's vestigial successor, the Panel on Educational Policy, there was no longer a loyalty issue because the panel members, by law, serve at the pleasure of their appointing authority. They do not have tenure—unlike federal judges, who serve for life, or state judges, who serve a fixed term (14 years for the State Supreme Court). This means that the elected official who chose the panelist, if he/she disagrees with him/her, has the right to appoint someone of a more malleable disposition.
 
From a public policy viewpoint, that is a totally reasonable outcome. If the mayor is praised or blamed for the success or failure of the public schools, he must be able to choose the key executives who run the schools and the major education policies that they follow. Why should responsibility be avoided because of a runaway train?
 
Mayor Bloomberg deserves credit for standing up for his policies, and using the authority intentionally given him by the Legislature to remove those of his own appointees who object to or obstruct what he is trying to do. For a person who has been accused of over-delegation, the mayor has shown surprising strength in the last week, making use of his powers more that at any time in the past. But his term is more than half over, and he will have to become more closely involved with the schools if the educational results he seeks are to be accomplished.
 
This article has not yet discussed the demerits of social promotion, which were laid out yesterday in the epic "Cereal Instead of Meat as Farina Follows Lam to School..." You can go to our website, www.nycivic.org, for all three columns on education, written about the nine days that shook Tweed.
 
It may well be that Chancellor Klein's proposal is imperfect. But there is time to correct its defects, if any, before June. Another question that has been raised is: Why just hold back third grade? I would hope that this is the first step toward minimal requirements for promotion to any grade. I do not believe this is a scheme to buttress fourth grade classes for testing next year, but this is New York, where conspiracy theories prosper. I just don't see Klein & Co. as masters of intrigue.

Several years ago, the City University faced this dilemma. Under the leadership of Benno Schmidt, Herman Badillo, and now Chancellor Matthew Goldstein, CUNY chose to set higher requirements for admitting and retaining students. The plan worked. Enrollment is up, minority percentages have remained steady, and City College degrees have become more highly regarded, including my own. To paraphrase Rule 2: Standards have value; that's why they became standards.

The central issue remains: Can schools legitimately require any level of pupil achievement for promotion or graduation? My answer: You bet they can. Like private and parochial schools, public schools must have reasonable performance standards, for the education of the students, the reputation of the schools, the inducement of parents to send their children there, and the worth of their diplomas. School is not just about self-esteem; it is about learning, and that requires work. A society that ignores that reality is in peril.