The Dao of Leadership at Tweed, Or the Art of Healing Self-Inflicted Wounds

Education Next, a glossy and influential journal of educational opinion on the right published by the conservative Hoover Institution, has released their fall issue. The two lead articles in this issue — one by Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow Sol Stern and the other by New York Daily News education reporter Joe Williams – assess New York City’s public schools under mayoral control, and the leadership of Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein.

While he offers a few words of support for their ‘market oriented’ reforms, Stern mostly takes Bloomberg and Klein to task for the regime of educational micro-management they have instituted in the schools. He takes particular issue with both the constructivist pedagogy employed in the DOE’s ‘balanced literacy’ program and the top-down, autocratic way in which it has been implemented. In a remarkable conclusion for an outspoken critic of teacher unions, Stern finds that the clear and present danger in NYC public schools today lies with the leadership of Bloomberg and Klein. “In the balance between the teachers’ contract and the rules of Joel Klein’s pedagogical dictatorship,” he says, “there is now more harm in the latter… if Mayor Bloomberg is reelected, city teachers face four more years of relentless indoctrination in an unproved classroom methodology.”

By contrast, Williams finds more elements of the Bloomberg-Klein reign worthy of praise, albeit somewhat guarded and at times faint praise. Williams is most impressed by the leadership qualities of Bloomberg and Klein, and it is worth taking a few moments to consider the case he makes for their leadership. Exhibit # 1 is Bloomberg’s response to the wave of violence which swept the city’s high schools in the fall of 2003. What was remarkable, Williams tells us, is that Bloomberg took responsibility for the crisis, and moved to act on it. In Williams’ book, this was unprecedented.

Williams’ account tells part of the story of how this wave of violence came into being. He accurately notes that a decisive factor in the spiral of violence was the DOE’s elimination of the old system for handling the suspension of students who had committed violent offenses, without any working idea of how they were going to replace it. As violence prone students quickly figured out that there were no practical consequences for their actions, the situation rapidly deteriorated. But Williams misses other important elements in the crisis. For all of the Bloomberg-Klein rhetoric about “clear lines of accountability” which Williams finds so attractive, the Rube Goldberg administrative structure they created had left the key figures in the line of command — the regional superintendents and local instructional superintendents — proclaiming that they had no control over, and thus no responsibility for, student discipline, at the very time the situation was spinning out of control in the schools. Add to this mix the fact that the DOE had been creating scores of new small schools without any reasonable plan for where they would house them, and thus had been pigeon-holing them into already terribly overcrowded high school buildings. These overcrowded school buildings became tinderboxes of student on student conflict throughout the city. It was a disaster waiting to happen.

The most critical element missing in Williams’ account is an recognition of the fact that, at every step in this process, the UFT told the DOE that it was creating a very dangerous situation, and it needed to act quickly to redress the major flaws in its reorganization plan. And at every turn, the DOE ignored what the UFT told it — until front page newspaper headlines made it impossible to ignore what was happening in the schools.

Williams misses this critical element because he has bought, hook, liner and sinker,  into the first tenet of Bloomberg-Klein management philosophy — that the job of the supervisor is to deliver orders, and the job of teachers and others who actually provide education is to follow those orders. Williams approvingly quotes Klein to the effect that there was a “politics of paralysis” before mayoral control, a purported by-product of  “rampant opportunities [for unions] to influence (or veto) decisions.” This characterization manages to overstate the power of the unions at the same time that it fails to grasp the importance of their limited role in preventing the more egregious errors that might have emanated from 110 Livingston, the old headquarters of the NYC public schools. If only teachers really had the power to run this system through our union, as Klein preaches to his choir,  the schools would have worked a helluva lot better. Ask any teacher in any NYC school if we had that power.

What did exist were limited ‘checks and balances,’  some procedural, some informal, and a modicum of public transparency. It did not seem like much back then, especially in the context of the shortcomings of the school system. It was those shortcomings that convinced the UFT that we should not oppose direct mayoral control, in the hopes that more direct accountability would lead to improved governance, and improved governance to better schools. In retrospect, however, it has become clear just how important even modest checks and balances and public transparency are to a system of governance in a democratic society, as much for a system of public schools in a local jurisdiction as for the national government in Washington DC. It seems that the framers of the US Constitution, and the Federalist Papers arguments of Madison, Jay and Hamilton, have been proven prescient one more time.

Here is the crux of the problem. In a public school system as large as NYC, with its thousands of schools and employees, and over 1.1 million students, the central leadership is far removed from the classroom, with a number of intervening layers of bureaucracy between it and the teachers on the front line of education. Consequently, the ever present danger is that the central administration will devise initiatives which, however well-intentioned, have a counter-productive, negative effect in “the field.”

That danger became magnified a thousand fold when Bloomberg and Klein decided that a background in teaching in urban public schools was a disqualification for leading NYC schools, and began a purge of the central administration that rivaled the Cultural Revolution in scope. As the new system headquarters at Tweed became populated with a ‘Red Guard’ of twenty something MBAs who had never stood in front of a classroom for a single day of their lives, the chasm between the real world of the schools and the administrative world of Tweed grew wider and wider. And with a leadership intent upon asserting its “management prerogatives” at all cost, Tweed gave full vent to mandates and directives terribly out of touch with the reality of the schools. How else can one explain why a Chancellor would eliminate a vital administrative apparatus without having a replacement ready to take its place, or why he would establish a new administrative structure in which all of the key personnel decided that they had no power over, and thus no responsibility for, a key administrative function — even when he and chief subordinates were being warned by the UFT of the consequences of such actions?

I have done my best to apply the principle of ‘charitable interpretation’ to the case Williams makes for the leadership of Bloomberg and Klein, looking for the strongest possible argument. But try as I might, I have not been able to figure out how responding in a forthright manner to a self-inflicted, entirely avoidable crisis is a sign of strong leadership skills. To the contrary, I would think that a good, solid leader would have listened to different, even dissenting, voices, would have reflected on what they told him about his plans, and would have adapted those plans to address the problems they raised. In short, a good, solid leader would never have allowed this crisis to develop in the first place. It is not as if there weren’t enough critical issues on which a Mayor and a Chancellor could lead NYC public schools, without having to create unnecessary crises they can then solve.

And the worst feature of this situation is that Tweed seems incapable of learning from their mistakes — their autocratic management dogma must be followed, whatever the practical consequences. So the saga of self-inflicted wounds continues, with new chapters — and new wounds — being added every day. This article, which appeared in last Friday’s edition of Newsday, touches upon one of the more recent events in this vein. The article tells the story of how close to 1000 teachers and principals had not been placed in positions in schools, despite the fact that schools will open their doors to students in two days. The DOE was hawking this story to newspapers, in order to make the point attributed to Dan Weisberg, head of labor relations at the DOE, in the article. “We are forced to jam these people into schools based on seniority, regardless of whether they’re right for schools,” Weisberg told Newsday.

Last spring, the UFT asked for a meeting with the DOE’s top leadership to discuss precisely this issue. It was clear that a number of decisions they had taken — specifically, to close down and pare down a very large number of Bronx high schools at the same time – would result in a large number of teachers being without a position, and in need of placement. We were concerned that they were acting in ways which would unnecessarily exacerbate that problem, and not taking other prudent steps which could diminish the scope of the problem. These matters involve a great deal of ’inside baseball,’ but one illustration will provide a good idea of the problem we were facing. Under the collective bargaining agreement, the DOE has the authority to cap teacher transfers out of a school at 5% of the faculty; this clause is designed to prevent a situation where a school is stripped of a significant portion of its teaching staff in one year via transfer. The DOE was invoking this authority in schools which would be closed down altogether this September, where the reason for having such a cap was obviously inapplicable. It thus prevented teachers who are part of this group of 1000, but had found positions by themselves through the transfer process, from taking those positions. Worse, it had no real justification for invoking the cap, other then that it was their policy to always do so. So it increased the magnitude of the problem. When we raised this issue in the spring, the DOE officials said that they had everything under control, and that they did not need to take any extraordinary steps to abate the numbers of teachers without a position, since everyone would be placed without a problem. And yet here it is September, and they are waving the ‘bloody shirt’ of their self-inflicted wound, and pointing their finger at everyone else.

How much more of that ”leadership” will NYC public schools have to endure?

Tagged: Daily News, Mayor Bloomberg, Sol Stern

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