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With more than 1.1 million children enrolled, the New York City public school system is the largest in the country.  More than one third of these students are Black. Roughly three quarters of all the City’s public school students receive free lunch, which indicates that their families are considered moderately low to low income. In one predominately Black school district in Harlem, 84.2% of the children qualified for free lunch in 2002. 

More than 50 years after the Civil Rights Era and the desegregation movement, the schoolchildren of New York, like those of many other large American cities, remain separate and unequal. The segregation within the public schools in the city is egregious.  The New York City public schools have for several decades maintained an abysmal dropout rate, low percentages of high school graduation, and dismal levels of student achievement. Of course, the numbers look worse for Black students, of whom only 44% currently graduate high school in 4 years, according to Raymond Domanico of the Manhattan Institute. The city’s schools have long been plagued with inadequate funding, poor teacher training, unproven curricula, and dilapidated and overcrowded facilities, amongst other problems.

To make matters worse, the new educational administration, led by the unscrupulous media tycoon, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, has effectively ushered in a new era of draconian domination, mis-education, and despair for a whole generation of Blacks.  Instead of using his new position as head of the city schools to make meaningful changes and improve the quality of education, and thus life, for the disenfranchised and powerless as he promised, Bloomberg has only exacerbated the problems while seeking to enlarge his pockets and base of power and those of his business buddies and political allies.  New York City is failing its Black children, and the failure is deliberate, calculated, and heartbreaking. If the rest of the country doesn’t pay close attention to what is going on in New York and prevent men like Bloomberg from carrying out their wicked intentions elsewhere, the next generation of Black children will surely face the harshest times we’ve seen in recent memory.

Michael Bloomberg, a billionaire without a hint of experience in the field of education, followed his Republican crony Rudolph Giuliani’s failed attempts to get his paws on the reins of the school system by dismantling the Board of Education and the Community School Districts in 2002.  With reckless speed, he consolidated the decision-making power that had been distributed, albeit unevenly, across a vast bureaucracy of parent, municipal, and community boards for decades into the hands of one unconscionable fraud, Joel Klein.  Another former businessman whose primary interests lie in self-enrichment and the accumulation of unchallenged power, Klein immediately banned the many curricula that were in use within the City’s schools to pave the way for the mass sale of our children to calculating investors, businesspeople, and corporations. At many schools, teachers were literally forced to throw their books, manuals, student materials, and other teaching tools into trash bags at the start of the 2003 school year, all to make way for the “uniform” curriculum that Klein and his minions imposed on nearly the entire school system.  This unproven curriculum, a motley mess concocted by Lucy Caulkins, students and shaggy haired professors at Columbia University’s Teacher’s College, and other inept “educators” from the ivory towers of academia, was prescribed for all of the schools in New York City, except of course, the top 200 schools, which were allowed to continue to implement their own curricula as they deemed appropriate for their students. (It barely needs to be stated that few of these schools serve predominately Black student bodies.  In fact, not one school in Harlem was exempted.) This of course, begged the question, if Klein was so impressed with the results obtained by these “exemplary” schools, why didn’t he make their curricula and materials available to all the other schools, instead of awarding the multimillion-dollar contract to Columbia University?

The 2003-2004 school year was, predictably, a jumble of confusion and uncertainty for teachers, who had to learn the new curriculum through a CD-Rom that was distributed over the summer, a thick red binder full of directives, and a couple of training sessions before the children returned from the summer break. With the teachers grappling to understand the new curriculum and its bizarre practices, such as requiring that children up to the sixth grade spend nearly half the day seated on vermin-infested carpet scraps on the floor and that teachers not make any corrections in children’s notebooks, it was understandable that a record number of valued veteran educators retired, according to the United Federation of Teachers union. They were replaced with inexperienced, often inept new recruits from programs such as the Teaching Fellows, Teach for America, and Teacher’s College.

Parents who had previously been able to seek redress and offer input concerning their children’s education at their local community school boards were now forced to search for remote “regional” offices, where unapproachable bureaucrats appointed by Bloomberg and Klein held the power that used to belong to the communities. The Special Education program was in practice, if not in policy, brought to a grinding halt with administrators cunningly outwitting federal mandates to provide services to newly identified students, with the elimination of the Special Education evaluators who tested children for learning disabilities, and with the immersion of many special needs children into the general population, where they now fail to receive the services they need and stagnate the progress of the other children.  While school personnel struggled to provide some meaningful instruction and continuity for the students under these strained circumstances, Bloomberg signed a backdoor deal with Snapple, awarding the company a multimillion dollar contract to peddle sugary drinks in schools, in violation of city regulations concerning independent contractors.  He also considered renting the schools’ unused rooftops to satellite cable companies, once again demonstrating his true intentions to use our children’s schools as his own private holdings to auction off to his corporate bedfellows.

The picture was dreary enough in 2003 when Bloomberg declared that he would institute the dubious and unsound practice of high stakes testing for young children.  Under his authority, all third grade children who did not pass the standardized math and reading tests administered near the end of the school year were held back last June. As if this policy did not do enough to strand struggling students within the system, he declared earlier this year that now fifth graders would also be held back according to their test results.  In addition to the fact that studies have shown that repeated holdovers correlate closely with dropout rates, there is no sound reason to measure a child’s mastery of ten months’ worth of school work with one high-pressure, frequently biased test. With only 39.3% of all students in tested grades meeting the state and city’s English Language Arts standards in 2002, this policy was certain to adversely affect a large number of children.  Why would the mayor want to hold back so many students?  The picture only makes sense when one understands the convoluted logic that now governs New York City’s schools.

The city and state implement a standards program that contains a rubric of four levels. It can be summarized as Level 4 representing mastery above grade level, 3 being grade level proficiency, 2 being slightly below grade level, and 1 representing a lack of proficiency.  Children who repeat a grade or who achieve a Level 1 or 2 on their standardized tests are eligible for Academic Intervention Services (AIS), which are most often outsourced to for-profit businesses and corporations such as Kaplan, Sylvan Learning, Platform Learning, and others who are making a killing off of our children, while the students are unknowingly being ushered towards failure in high school. In fact, many parents are not aware that their children’s elementary school performance can be a powerful indicator of whether or not they will graduate from high school.  However, this is well known to educators and those in charge of education. The picture becomes even clearer when one considers the high correlation between dropout rates and rates of unemployment, underemployment, and incarceration. Bloomberg and others like him want to grind our children into fuel for the industrial engines of corporate America. Every oppressive societal institution makes money when the Black child fails.

The numbers speak for themselves. According to the Department of Education’s own published statistics, between the school years of 2003 and 2004, the meager ranks of Black students in grades 3-8 who met the state and city English Language Arts standards at Level 3 or 4 fell from 33.1 to 32.5, a decline of .6%. This fact would not be troubling if it were not also true that Black students experienced the greatest test score decline of any reported ethnic group, or if the test scores for Whites and Asians had not simultaneously risen by .5% and 2.5% respectively. In fact, of all reported ethnic groups in 2004, Black students had the highest rate of failure (22.1% performing at Level 1) and were surpassed only slightly by Hispanics in the number of students performing at Level 2. (Many Hispanic students, however, are exempt from the harsh promotional policy by way of being labeled ESL, English-as-a Second-Language.  These students are not held over for testing or academic failure.) This means, of course, that with promotion being based exclusively on standardized test scores, Black children are at greater risk than any other group for repeating grades.  When they do repeat grades, they are ushered into corporate-run after-school programs (AIS), which frequently offer unstructured group tutoring, promotional items disguised as textbooks and workbooks, and some homework help.  This, unfortunately, is the fate of the lucky students, because many children, despite their “eligibility,” receive no additional assistance at all. While no one would argue that Bloomberg and Klein alone are responsible for these dismal statistics, their incompetent leadership of the schools and unwillingness to address the concerns of our community and parents are certain to continue to make things worse. Most importantly, the centralization of power over the schools has handicapped the people of the city from taking action to cauterize the damage that is being done by the inappropriate and barebones curriculum, high stakes testing, and mass exodus of qualified teaching personnel.  

The power to shape the minds of New York City’s children has been wrested from the hands of the people, and our future lies in jeopardy. Calculating corporations like Edison (a company that builds, bilks, and then abandons charter schools in failing districts,) Kaplan, Snapple, and others are, with the help of corrupt politicians, flexing their muscles to dominate the face of education all over this country. Before us lies a picture of the American educational system more bleak than anything we experienced in the last century. We are already seeing schools being bought and sold (like several charter schools in Syracuse, New York), politicians awarding governmental contracts under dubious conditions to preferred businesses, and multimillion dollar testing and tutoring corporations making money when our children fail. As has happened in New York City, when politicians with no real stake in the schooling of our children take control of the educational apparatus, our children’s futures are sold to the highest bidder. Corporations that operate for profit have no business running our children’s schools. Businesses do what is profitable, not what is right. While no one would argue that the current educational system is adequate for preparing our children for the changing demands of the workforce and global economy, the answer is not to allow powerful outsiders to mold our children into whatever form is most profitable for corporate America. The education, or indoctrination, of their own children is the prerogative of any group of people and a basic human right of all parents.

The truth is, there are no instant answers to improving the quality of public education in this country. African Americans have had a long history of disenfranchisement, in which the power to teach and shape our children has been wielded by those who would destroy them.  As we seek to improve the future for our children, we have many hurdles to overcome, but let us not in desperation hand over the little power we still have to ruthless men and women of means. It takes dedicated community involvement, parental empowerment, long-term planning, and collective resolve to turn around a failing school system. Any politician or corporation that tells us otherwise is selling something - let’s make sure it’s not our children.

Zahraa Abante-Hayes is a New York City public school teacher and multi-media artist.  She is conducting ongoing research on educational, linguistic, and developmental issues that specifically affect Black children.  Readers can contact her at [email protected].