Mayor Bloomberg's Record on Schools Key Issue in Campaign: "Portfolio" Approach is Central Feature

Mayor Michael Bloomberg's record as an education reformer continues to be a central issue of the New York City mayoral campaign, a race in which his challenger is Bill Thompson, the president of the New York City board of education in the pre-mayoral control days.

One of the central differences in how the public school system is run now under Bloomberg with mayoral control (vs. how it was run under Bill Thompson under the old board of education) is the concept of viewing the school system as a "portfolio" of schools rather than as monolith of schools run centrally.

The idea of a "portfolio" of schools was popularized by Tom Vander Ark and Jim Shelton, both formerly the architects of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's education grant-making. Vander Ark, now a partner in Vander Ark/Ratcliff, remains an influential force in educational circles; Shelton joined the Obama administration to run the Education Department's $650 million competitive Innovation Fund, known by the shorthand i3.

A new study by the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington highlights New York City as the purest form of portfolio management among the four cities it studied: Chicago, New Orleans, New York and Washington, D.C. The study was funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Joyce Foundation.

The concept, borrowed from the private sector, had obvious appeal to Bloomberg. But it is hard to underestimate the tremendous psychic break it signaled from the prior way of doing business, which was widely viewed as overly political and too often corrupt.

The study, lead by Paul T. Hill, explains:

Creating a portfolio district requires a big and often wrenching change, from an emphasis on controlling inputs to an open search for better ways to use teacher skill, students' time, technology, and money. Many things traditional school districts were originally built to do (for example, centralize control of spending, hiring, and teacher assignments and make lifetime commitments to staff; and standardize instruction in all schools) are at odds with operation of schools by diverse providers and replacing schools and staff that do not perform.

Some critics of Bloomberg and Klein, most notably education historian Diane Ravitch, have faulted the dynamic duo for an almost obsessive focus on management reforms (to the exclusion, Ravitch would argue, of important curricular decisions). But, such critics underestimate the power of the paradigm shift that Bloomberg and Klein have executed.

The cornerstone ideas inherent in the portfolio approach embraced by New York City, according to the Hill study, include:

* The school, not the district, is directly responsible for instruction and must therefore have the freedom of action necessary to adapt its use of time, money, talent, and instructional materials to meet the particular needs of its students;

* Differences among schools are good and necessary as long as they represent efforts to meet distinctive needs of groups of students, take advantage of special teacher talents, or represent disciplined efforts to try out new ideas; and

* Schools' existence and freedom of action are contingent on performance, so that every school is under pressure to improve and the district as a whole is constantly searching for a mix of schools that will better meet the needs of the city's population.

None of the four cities studied have implemented these concepts perfectly, each making accommodations for local conditions and political constraints.

These four cities are not the only ones pursuing a portfolio approach. Other smaller cities include Denver, Hartford and Oakland. And Los Angeles, when it voted to put 250 schools out to bid to nonprofit charter operators and others, moved decisively in this direction as well.

The implications of the portfolio approach are significant. For example, a portfolio approach is not consistent with standardized master union contracts that limit flexibility and variability.

In New York, the "school-based option" within the master contract allows the faculties of individual schools to opt out of work rules of the master contract, but this is an imperfect and limited solution to a much broader problem with standardization, especially in a public school system as large as New York's.

Frustration over New York's union contract has fueled a dramatic growth in nonunion charter schools in the City. Because of a charter's greater flexibility, founders of new schools are more likely to pursue the charter-school option than the unionized alternative-school model birthed in the 1970s in New York City.

Klein has been especially aggressive, as part of his overall portfolio approach, in courting the highest quality nonprofit charter operators to open new schools in New York City. He also has encouraged highly successful operators of stand-alone charter schools to replicate their success within the City.

Mayor Bloomberg recently upped the ante by calling for a doubling of the number of charter schools in New York City and an ambitious goal of 100,000 charter-school seats by 2013. The Bloomberg administration has yet to figure out a mechanism to finance the construction of enough seats to meet that target, but few doubt Bloomberg's and Klein's determination.

Inevitably, a portfolio approach leads to controversial school closings -- it's not an approach for timid mayors or school chancellors. Swapping a lower performing school for a higher performing school is at the core of the portfolio approach -- but, as New York Schools Chancellor Joel Klein is intimately aware, often prompts intense union and neighborhood opposition.

The Hill study, largely descriptive of the new portfolio approach in the four studied cities, does not suggest the evidence is in yet on whether this approach will assuredly lead to higher results system-wide. And, in New York City, where the frenetic mayor and chancellor are implementing multiple improvement strategies simultaneously, it's hard to disaggregate the discrete impact of each reform.

Grade inflation in New York state tests has allowed critics to claim that the Bloomberg/Klein reforms have not made the advertised progress, especially with NAEP scores suggesting the state's overall progress is essentially flat.

But, statistical comparisons of City schools to public schools in the rest of New York State make clear that New York City's schools increasingly are outpacing schools in the rest of the state, and by widening margins.

What's indisputable is that increasingly school reformers are looking to New York as an example of the possibilities of change, instead of as an example of a big-city school system bogged down in political meddling and corruption. The shift to a portfolio model -- a paradigm shift often unremarked within the City -- is a big reason why.