Whitney Tilson's School Reform Blog: New York City's Education Battles

Here's the article itself. This seems pretty balanced to me!

Once elected, Bloomberg captured control of New York’s schools and introduced sweeping changes to the nation’s largest public school district, a huge, bumbling, and seemingly uncontrollable education bureaucracy of over 1,400 schools, some 80,000 teachers, 6,000 central office and regional staff, and 1.1 million students. And in 2007 the city won the coveted Broad Prize for Urban Education (worth $500,000) for raising student achievement, reducing the achievement gap, and helping greater proportions of African American and Hispanic students achieve at high levels.

Former Mayor Ed Koch calls Bloomberg “a colossus” for what he has done for the city’s schools.

Poppycock, say Bloomberg’s critics, a crew of education insiders, parents, and an assortment of others, including Betsy Gotbaum, the city’s elected public advocate. Despite massive increases in annual education expenditures, they say, improvements in student achievement have been modest at best. And they accuse the Bloomberg team of, among other things, cooking the test score books, flooding the system with inexperienced educators, handing out millions of dollars in no-bid contracts, shutting parents out of the school reform effort, spinning the facts, not caring about curriculum, and creating such constant institutional disarray that things may just be getting worse.

Indeed, since Bloomberg took the reins of the city’s school district in 2002, there have been two major organizational realignments and dozens of minor ones. One side calls this flip-flop; the other sees inspired mid-course corrections that ensure deep and systemic change.

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