This essay was adapted from City Journal's 25th anniversary issue.
Over nearly three decades fighting to improve the nation's largest public school district, I have discovered a dispiriting but undeniable fact: The more things change, the more they stay the same.
“It was [beginning in 1987]... that I first glimpsed the harm done to children — particularly, poor children — by a retrograde teachers' contract and the dominance of progressive-education ideas in the classroom.”
I started writing about public education because of what I saw, up close and personal, at PS 87 on Manhattan's Upper West Side, the elementary school my two sons attended from 1987 to 1997. It was at this elite school, favored by the neighborhood's middle-class parents, that I first glimpsed the harm done to children — particularly, poor children — by a retrograde teachers' contract and the dominance of progressive-education ideas in the classroom.
Despite two decades of often turbulent efforts at reform and a doubling of spending under Mayors Rudy Giuliani and Mike Bloomberg, these two fundamental problems still plague Gotham's schools today.
I can still recall the shock I experienced one morning in September of 1991 after dropping my boys off at PS 87's schoolyard. I lingered for a few minutes, chatting with some other parents, when I noticed a bent man in dirty, tattered clothes wandering around the yard as if in a stupor. Wondering if a derelict had gotten into the schoolyard, I asked one of the parents if she recognized him. She responded with an ironic grin: "Don't you know? That's Malcolm, one of our new teachers."
Incredulous, I headed off to Principal Jane Hand's office. It was all true, Hand confirmed. Malcolm was now a teacher in good standing at our school. She was forced to hire this deeply troubled person because of the seniority-transfer clause in the labor agreement between the city and the United Federation of Teachers. The contract required principals to post half of their schools' teacher vacancies at the end of each year and offer those positions to applicants with the greatest seniority in the system.
The contract's abuses went far beyond seniority transfers, as I soon learned after immersing myself in the 200-page agreement. Bizarre work rules governed every aspect of the daily management of schools, creating significant obstacles to improving classroom instruction.
“By and large, it is still the UFT's school system; the mayor and schools chancellor just live in it. And when the mayor is Bill de Blasio and the chancellor is Carmen Fariña, they do so gladly.”
A lockstep pay schedule for teachers undermined teacher productivity while wasting taxpayer money. Teachers received automatic longevity raises for each of their first eight years on the job and then again at 10, 13, 15, 18, 20, and 22 years. I never met a single official from the union or the city Education Department who could give a rational explanation for the timing of these pay increases.
The outrageous seniority-transfer clause was finally removed in Bloomberg's 2005 negotiation with the union, but that was one of the precious few adjustments to the productivity-killing work rules. Principals are still hamstrung by arbitrary restrictions on the number of staff meetings they can call. Teachers need not show up more than one day before the new school year starts, limiting the amount of planning time.
By and large, it is still the UFT's school system; the mayor and schools chancellor just live in it. And when the mayor is Bill de Blasio and the chancellor is Carmen Fariña, they do so gladly.
I wish the union contract was the only obstacle our schoolkids were repeatedly running into. At PS 87, I also learned about the strange new instructional ideas that teachers were bringing into their classrooms — a toxic educational philosophy still with us today.
I knew that my sons' school adhered to the philosophy of "progressive education," but I had only the vaguest idea what that would mean for them. Initially, what I saw in the early-grade classrooms pleased me somewhat. The children seemed happy as they worked together in groups and moved around the room from one workstation to another. It was all very warm and communal.
But I soon began to wonder if the progressive-ed shibboleths I was hearing actually made sense.
Many of my sons' teachers were trained at Columbia University's Teachers College or the nearby Bank Street College of Education. At these citadels of progressivism, future educators were inculcated in the "child-centered" approach to classroom instruction. All children, in this view, are "natural learners" who — with just a little guidance from teachers — could "construct their own knowledge." By the same token, progressive-ed doctrine considers it a grave sin for teachers to engage in direct instruction of knowledge (dismissed as "mere facts").
Progressives also reject the old-fashioned American idea, going back to the Founders, that the nation's schools should follow a coherent, grade-by-grade curriculum that not only includes the three Rs but also introduces children to our civilizational inheritance.
And so, my kids' classrooms became a laboratory allowing me to observe the destructive effects of putting romantic theories of child development into practice. There was no common curriculum, no essential texts that students were expected to master.
My older son's third-grade teacher devoted months to building a Japanese garden alongside the students - the entirety of their math instruction for the duration. Apparently, this was an acceptable application of the progressive-ed principle of "constructivism" - meaning that kids learn best by doing.
A math homework assignment created by my younger son's fourth-grade teacher required him to calculate the exact percentage of Arawak Indians living on the island of Hispaniola who perished because of Christopher Columbus' depredations. The assignment ended by asking the students to answer: "How do you feel about this?" Indeed, urging children to express their feelings seemed more of an educational goal at PS 87 than building their knowledge.
I might have given up writing about progressive education, particularly after my sons moved on to high school, except for a new development. In June 2002, the state Legislature gave control of the city's education system to the city's mayor, then Mike Bloomberg.
I was an early advocate for mayoral control, arguing that the Board of Education was helplessly mired in bureaucratic inertia and incapable of bringing about needed reforms.
Now the billionaire mayor and his newly appointed schools chancellor, Joel Klein, had total authority and would start with a clean slate. Unfortunately, Bloomberg and Klein focused their early reform efforts primarily on the structure and management of a system of 1,000-plus schools — no small challenge.
That left classroom instruction in the hands of a small group of lifetime progressive educators, including the first two deputy chancellors, Diana Lam and Fariña (yes, the same Fariña who runs the whole system today). The DOE also awarded millions of dollars in teacher-training contracts to the Teachers College Reading and Writing Program headed by Lucy Calkins, a leader of progressive-ed pedagogy. Her instructional model, "balanced literacy," became the new buzzword in the schools. Classroom teachers were expected to follow Calkins' prescriptive lessons, based on the assumption that all children are "natural readers and writers."
Among other things, this meant that there was no need for explicit instruction in phonics, previously recommended by a congressionally mandated scientific study as the best way to teach reading to young children.
In truth, there was nothing "balanced" about Calkins' program; nor was there a shred of evidence that it had ever improved reading and writing for children in urban schools. But Calkins was a personal friend and colleague of Fariña.
A few years later, the Teachers College professor penned a testimonial to Fariña for her role in transforming the city's classrooms during the early years of the Bloomberg administration. It was a glorious time, Calkins wrote, "when sound practices in the teaching of reading and writing became the talk of the town — the subject of study groups and hallway conversations in every school."
In fact Calkins' ascent was disastrous for the city's poor children, who made little progress in reading or writing.
But a potential silver lining soon appeared behind the doors of the DOE. Klein, it turned out, had read articles I had written on E.D. Hirsch, the seminal scholar who urges schools to reject easy progressivism and use knowledge acquisition as the basis of education. Klein immersed himself in Hirsch's works and soon scheduled several meetings with the education scholar.
Klein has since acknowledged that leaving the instructional side of the Bloomberg administration's reform agenda in the hands of Lam and Fariña was the biggest mistake he made as chancellor. During his last two years in office, he made a remarkable and honorable effort to reverse course.
Working with the Core Knowledge Foundation, Klein set up a three-year pilot study, matching 10 schools using the Hirsch curriculum in grades K-2 against a demographically similar group of schools that followed the standard "balanced literacy" program. The core knowledge schools outperformed the Calkins-inspired schools by a statistically significant margin.
Klein, of course, left in 2010. I am convinced that had he stayed on through Bloomberg's third term, he would have used the pilot study's results to nudge more schools toward adopting the Core Knowledge curriculum. Even so, more than 70 elementary schools now use that program, mainly because the Bloomberg administration signed on to the new Common Core State Standards.
In a system of 1,700 schools, this, however, is not enough. Not nearly enough.
For the past two decades, New York City has been one of the nation's most important laboratories for urban school reform. I have written about most of the issues that provoked so much contentious debate here: mayoral control; the rise of charter schools and the unfortunate closing of many Catholic schools; the creation by the Bloomberg administration of hundreds of new small schools; the attempts to link teacher evaluations to student test scores.
I leave it to future education historians to decide how much the schools have actually improved because of these particular reform efforts. But there's no need to wait for the historians' verdict to know that the city has come up far short of fulfilling its historical mission to equalize opportunity through the public schools. Academic improvement has been negligible; the racial achievement gap has not narrowed. The city's eighth-grade reading scores on the gold-standard National Assessment of Educational Progress tests have barely budged over the past 12 years.
Looking back, I now see a causal connection between this overall education failure and the resistance to common sense that I first witnessed in the schools on two crucial issues: the counterproductive teachers' contract and the domination of progressive education in the classroom. The most important lessons I learned at PS 87 are that teachers matter and that the content they teach in the classrooms matters even more.
Teachers should be rewarded for the hard work they do and the knowledge they bring to the classroom. As for what teachers actually teach, it's hard to improve on the statement recently issued by the Campaign for Knowledge:
"Without a solid foundation of content knowledge built from the first days of a child's school experience — in history, science, the arts and more — the ambitious goals of raising academic standards and improving student outcomes simply cannot be met."
At the beginning of the new school year, de Blasio and Fariña announced their plan to get 100% of all second-graders reading at proficiency level by 2026. According to the administration, this miracle will happen because the Education Department will hire 700 additional "reading specialists" — one for every elementary school in the city. Farina didn't reveal what the reading specialists will know that the thousands of current reading teachers don't already know.
We can guess, though, that they will be expert at Calkins' balanced literacy and other progressive-ed fads. Progressives continue to betray the disadvantaged children whom they profess to champion.