The next battle in city school wars

New Yorkers, so often, ignore the old rules and change the game. But rarely without a fight. Over the past decade, our city has begun to prove what can happen when a school system focuses on putting great teachers in the classroom, on clearing bureaucratic bloat so principals can do their jobs and on creating quality school options for parents.

After decades in which fewer than half of the city’s public school kids graduated within four years, under Mayor Bloomberg the graduation rate has steadily climbed to nearly two-thirds of students.

In 2002, 16,000 city public school graduates enrolled at City University of New York schools annually; today, more than 25,000 do. And to preempt the naysayers: Remediation rates at CUNY were too high in 2002 and they still are. But our city should glow with pride over a huge increase in CUNY enrollment coming out of our public schools.

Of course, we’re nowhere near where we should be. But it’s easy to forget that, just 10 years ago, there was a commonly held view that our schools couldn’t do much to effect better educational outcomes for kids. The politicians, bureaucrats and unions whose interests were served by complacency about our public schools — what we call the “shrug-your-shoulders squad” — refused to acknowledge what parents experience ev- ery day: that a great teacher can make all the difference in the life of a child — and so, too, can a bad one.

The destruction of that complacency over the past decade is a sea change: a greater accomplishment, in many respects, than any statistic.

But given the 170-year history of public education in New York, the clock can easily be turned back. The folks who liked things the way they were before haven’t gone away. They’re hungry to reassert their authority.

Which is why we’re proud to be part of a new coalition of people united behind one critical goal: giving all our students the excellent public education they deserve.

Studentsfirstny, which launched last week, already counts 100,000 advocates, educators, parents and citizens across the state as members. These New Yorkers, and many more who will join them, recognize that we are approaching a critical moment in the fight for quality public schools.

The mandate is as simple as our name suggests: Put the students ahead of the bureaucracy, ahead of the unions, ahead of politics and parochialism and squeakywheel-gets-the-grease decision-making. What do our kids need to compete and learn most effectively? Focus on those things and deliver them.

Parents know what this means, and the data back it up: Great teachers. Quality school options and real choice for parents. Principals with the freedom to run their schools without being obstructed at every turn. School systems structured to keep politics out of decision-making.

To advance these goals, StudentsfirstNY will use the same tools — grass-roots organizing, communications and political action — as have been employed year in, year out by those who want to bring back the bad old days. But with public polls showing that the overwhelming majority of New Yorkers — and, particularly, public school parents — support meaningful reforms around teacher quality and school choice, the levers of democracy will be on our side.

We will focus on Albany, where state education policy is set and where the teachers union is the third-largest spender on lobbying overall. No surprise, then, that it’s also the place where, year after year, laws stay on the books that stand in the way of rewarding great teachers and removing ineffective (or even criminal) ones.

We will fight in New York City to keep moving forward even as the teachers union has made clear its intention to use the up- coming election of a new mayor to weaken City Hall’s control over the schools.

And we will work with parents around the state, particularly in those urban areas where the quality of some public schools is nothing short of tragic, to start turning the corner.

New York State has 2.75 million students in our public schools. That’s about 5.5% of our nation’s total. We spend more than $18,000 per student: greater than any other state, 60% more than the national average and three times as much as top-performing countries such as New Zealand and South Korea. Yet, despite gains in New York City, our state ranks in the middle of the national pack on student achievement, and languishes in the bottom third of the developed world.

We can and must do better. The education establishment and special interests will try to undermine us and the cause of educational progress. So be it. While we’d love to live in a place where everyone sits around a campfire and agrees, this is New York, where almost nothing worth doing happens without battle. StudentsfirstNY is here to stay, and to fight on behalf of parents to put our kids, and our future, first.