¶ … business save New York schools?, Mike France describes New York City Michael R. Bloomberg's recent attempts to improve New York's public schools by applying business principles to public education. Bloomberg's reforms are sweeping, and focus on accountability, centralized control, revamping the culture of education, training principals, and keeping a tight rein on expenses. Among Bloomberg's reforms include a standardized curriculum, which may result in poorer education for students with special needs. Similarly, the application of business principles to education brings up some important philosophical considerations.
Bloomberg's reforms are "the most systematic effort ever to force capitalistic thinking into the insular kingdom of public education," according to education historian Michael Katz. Notes Katz, "Professional educators have been incredibly successful at fending off outside influences" (cited in France, 2003).
While the application of business principles is not an entirely novel phenomenon, it is one of a number of progressive trends in education. Further, the large scale of Bloomberg's reforms makes the New York 'experiment' especially interesting to those in education.
To begin his reforms, Bloomberg created an entirely new administration, based largely of top executives. These included BertelsmannInc. Chief Executive Joel I. Klein, Covad CEO Robert E. Knowling Jr., Ron Beller (a former CEO at Goldman Sachs), Jack Welsh (GE CEO) and Samuel...
Palmisano (IBM CEO).
To change create effective bureaucratic change, Bloomberg focused on changing the very culture of the Department of Education. This included centralizing authority, and changing training. This included a $75 million Leadership Academy for principals to allow creative techniques to be assimilated throughout the school system. This change in culture included initiatives for principals to adopt each other's best practices.
Bloomberg's changes to the bureaucracy have been physical as well as administrative and cultural in nature. Part of Bloomberg's strategy for corporate change was to physically separate supervisors from staff, move them to a new building with an open floor plan, and transfer staff elsewhere.
The challenges facing Bloomberg's ambitious experiment are serious. In 1998, only 16% of students who entered high school passed tests to earn Regents diploma. This represented a failure of the large majority of students to demonstrate basic competence in mathematics, history, and reading.
Despite many changes, Bloomberg has been stymied by union contracts. These contracts make it difficult for the innovators to raise teacher pay, replace outdated computer systems, or even built new schools. On top of these challenges, New York City's greater fiscal crisis forced Bloomberg to cut $175 million from the school budget.
Restructuring of New York's schools has included the standardization of curriculum.…
