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.
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.