Chicago And New York City

A few folks have asked me to compare Chicago and NYC school systems, and even though I am much less familiar with New York than Chicago (and many of you are more expert in Chicago than I am) there are a couple of obvious things.

Some of the small things you notice include that everyone calls schools here by their number (ie, PS 9), not by their name (ie, Bergen School).  They call their AIOs "region superintendents."  And the kids aren't out on the street until later in the day cuz the school day is longer.

UPDATE:  On Wednesday, NYC Mayor Bloomberg announced a series of additional changes for the NYC schools.

Other differences include that New York's student population is still 15 percent white, which sounds like not much different than CPS's 9 percent but seems to make a difference in terms of how folks think about the schools (and may affect the results as well). NYC's scores are generally higher, at least according to the urban NAEP studies.

As we've been discussing below, Chicago has LSCs, while NYC gave up its community school district setup a few years ago.  However, NYC schools have a fulltime parent coordinator in each school, which is pretty amazing.  (I wonder how many folks would rather have a good parent coordinator or two than a middling LLT, for example.)

New York is much newer to mayoral control, and sometimes reminds me of what the early Vallas years were supposed to be like in terms of energy and talent (and hype).  Not that the hype has diminished much, of course.  Both cities are or have been run by non-educators -- in New York's case it's former prosecutor Joel Klein.  Both cities aren't getting enough state funding, though the fight is more legal than legislative in New York.

Both cities have a charter school cap that's an issue, but NYC has a union-run charter which is really interesting.  Chicago has the Consortium, though NYC is thinking about creating a similar entity.  Chicago has Catalyst, while NY has InsideSchools.org.  I think but don't know for certain that there's a much more centralized curriculum for elementary schools especially, though NYC like Chicago has an AAMPS type of thing. 

Comments

The union is more progressive.
The districts are equally disconnected from schools. Though the capacity of the top layers in NYC is better - on operations, curriculum, strategy and implmentation.

[Alexander]

good points. any other differences?

A NYC Golden Apple teacher once said to me, "everyone knows that Chicago has a failed system that it is trying desperately to revive; NYC is trying to prevent a still functioning system from failing." As a NYC public school graduate and a CPS teacher, I think that is a true characterization--not only of the actual state of things, but also of the rhetoric of the two systems. Our school reform efforts are destructive because they are based on the premise that anything new, no matter how hair-brained, would be better than what we have. NYC is more careful about disrupting things that exist. I'd lay this squarely at the feet of Mayor Daley's overly-aggressive campaign to take control of the schools. The exaggerrated language of the original push to sieze control carried over into a reckless approach to reform that every day leaves us with less and less. The system here is at a point of nearly total instability where no action can succeed because everyone knows the lifespan of initiatives is at most three-four years, generally less. That is not the case in NYC.

[George Schmidt]

Again, let's begin with a typical Chicago question:

30. Islam came to Africa as a result of:
A. missionaries
B. trade
C. war
D. ethnic unity

Again, see the end of this post for source and context.

I don't think anyone in New York would let something that dumb get into the curriculum of the public schools, let alone become one-thirtieth of a high-stakes test. (If you've guessed where it came from, you're right).

There are a few major differences between Chicago and New York, and they extend beyond public school traditions (I have have two siblings living in New York City and one who just moved to the Albany area after a long time in Brooklyn and have spent a lot of time following NYC school politics):

First, New York City (and the area, which includes Long Island and northeastern New Jersey, where I was born and raised in Elizabeth and Linden) has a truly competitive print media. A free press can't be overemphasized (and blogs that require someone else to gather "news" to comment on are not a substitute, as most here realize).

Chicago is now stuck with media monopoly, and things are getting worse. Even the Tribune is not certain to have a reporter gavel-to-gavel at each monthly Chicago Board of Education meeting anymore; the Sun-Times's Rosalind Rossi has not been at a Chicago Board of Education meeting in months. At budget time, the dailies in Chicago are stuck with playing "He said/she said" reporting, with nobody reading the numbers behind the Duncanian sound bites.

New York doesn't take risks like that.

Given the scope of things, Chicago should have dozens of reporters who are tracking what's going on in each of the 50 wards (especially now; Troutman was not the most crooked or mobbed up alderperson...). Instead, the average Chicago editor doesn't even know the names of half the aldermen, let alone where the wards are. And now that the aldermen have such massive influence on the public schools, that's a big problem. (Anyone want to update the stories on Curtis and Brooks, and their aldermanic perils, for example?).

The result of this lack of a free press is that the various propaganda departments of Daleyland (the two biggest are under Jacqueline Heard at City Hall and Peter Cunninghman at CPS, each with more than a dozen full-time staff) get an inside edge if pre-packaging "news" for the Chicago public. A lot of times the PR propaganda is simply given a by-line and put out as "news" over the name of the news organization printing it. We now all know the results of that on international policy when "Weapons of Mass Destruction" are being touted as a reason for going to war four years ago (how do you spell "Judith Miller"), but nobody has applied the same critique to Chicago.

I'm at the point where I don't even blame the spin meisters. They're just doing their jobs, and jobs are tight for people who want to get paid $90,000 or more a year. (Although Jackie Heard is a bit much at times).

Anyway, when a free society goes into a crisis, look at how free the press truly is. In January 1999, when we published the CASE tests -- a major document of public interest -- and didn't get support, it merely confirmed what I had suspected about the cozy relationship between the big media in Chicago and the main sources of news. Instead of at least asking what was up, the Sun-Times and Tribune took Paul Vallas's version, ignored what we had to say, and then editorialized (on the same day) that I should be fired from my teaching job for publishing CASE as part of my reporting job. At no point did anyone deny that those documents were authentic. Nor did anyone deny how dumb they were.

Second, the New York teachers union (United Federation of Teachers, UFT, Local 2, American Federation of Teachers) is, as noted, much more intelligent and progressive than anything the CTU has ever seen or tried. To reprise the previous point, get a copy of the New York teachers union newspaper and see the difference. Chicago is embarrasing by contrast. Even though the political party controlling New York's union (Unity Caucus) is as old-line and tightly controlled as the UPC in Chicago was, the difference in public presentation on the issues is enormous. Even when you disagree wtih her, Randi Weingarten (who has now revived the union's weekly column in the New York Times News of the Week section) is making a clear and unambiguous (and usually intelligent) case for public schools and public sector unions. The massive push for privatization that was done in Chicago has not happened in New York City because of these people.

Finally (for now) I agree with the blogger here who stated that Chicago is trying to defend itself from a generation of slanders and attacks, while New York is trying to prevent a slide into the problems Chicago has. But I disagree that Chicago was fundamentally different from New York. When the Tribune and the national Republicans slandered Chicago with that racist "America's Worst School System" 20 years ago (William Bennett actually siad the words; since his come down last year the quotes have been used without attribution), what we actually had in Chicago was a triaged system, with the majority of black ghetto schools firmly at the "bottom."

The top two thirds of CPS schools back then were far from the "worst" -- with some, then and now (like Whitney Young High School) among the best anywhere.

What Chicago was able to do by spinning that "America's Worst" nonsense was put all the public schools on the defenseive. Then Daley came into power (behind Republican plans, including massive privatization and charterization) with a "Great White Hope" strategy.

At some point, someone will write the complete history of Chicago's rulers' panic at the Harold Washington phenomenon and how the city's corporate leaders used the slanders about the schools to leverage a decade of dictatorship over more than just the schools. But that's a story for another morning.

Another thing is that New York City has never had a mayor as dumb as Richard M. Daley. New York would probably wouldn't tolerate that combination of ignorance and meanness that everyone who knows our mayor knows to be true (despite a generation of coaching since I interviewed him 23 years ago during his first run). Daley reads from scripts and is given a past by most of the media when he utters nutsy stuff (again, the New York media doesn't promote that kind of stuff as cut).

Only in the Bush family could that kind of succession have also been possible. Some day, the last 20 years -- and the Texas and Chicago education "miracles" that brought us to this point during those years -- will get a closer look by history. It will be fun to read and watch.

At some point, I've told friends, we'll know when Daley is finally finished. It won't come from FBI investigations, but when Chicago's TV stations begin airing hours of the Daley tapes they've covered up. I've been at dozens of media events where he's just gone off in some really ignorant way, and the final version that gets aired is almost the opposite of what was said and what happened.

That's probably why Jackie Heard has once again cut Substance off from the mayor's daily media calendar, which we were getting since I established Substance New Service and expanded beyond the schools. For some reason, after I reported that crazy stuff at Orr High School during the mayor's "Principal for a Day" stint, I stopped getting those daily media bulletins from City Hall.

Which gets us back to the first point, about media lap dogs.

Everyone should read Orwell's "Politics and the English Language" once a year and think about Chicago's "news."

And that Orwellean question?

It came from the Chicago Academic Standards Examinations (CASE) World Studies, Multiple Choice, Semester 1, Pilot Form B, Chicago Public Schools Office of Accountability, Gery J. Chicago, President Chicago Reform Board of Trustees, Paul G. Vallas, Chief Executive Officer, Chicago Public Schools. January 1999.

The "Multiple Choice" was half the exam, which was supposed to be a large part of the student grade in "World Studies." I wouldn't pretend to offer an answer to that question. Would anyone here, Phil?

Before the Board of Ed. goon squad wakes up and gets sent out to rough George up yet again, I thought it might be worth suggesting that anyone who posts to this thread should begin by answering the exam question and giving a one-two sentence justification for their choice. It could be like an ice-breaker to ensure a less uncivil conversation.

(9:11 again--what an auspicious time tag to get!) I think the correct answer would be trade if the question is about how Islam FIRST came to Africa--I'm guessing we are talking about North Africa. Arab traders in North Africa first brought Islam to the regions along their trade routes, although conquest (I guess that's war) became a much more important mechanism for trade later on. I'm a little vague on the details.

Alexander,

You are in NYC? What are you doing there?

[Alexander]

i am in new york to be closer to family (dad passed and mom relocated to boston) and to be closer to DC (where a lot of my work is from).

of course i miss chicago and get back every month or so for work and to see people. btw, brooklyn is so much like chicago it's amazing -- ethnic, friendly, energetic. that's something no one ever tells you.

[john]

We.ll being from Chicago, and now currently in the Bronx, NY. I think Chicago does have better system of teaching or something. After actually commmunicating with various people in NYC, I would immediately say that Chicago does have a better "teaching system" in my opinion. I did have a son that went to school here after transferring from Chicago Public school system and the teachers thought of him as being very smart compared to the others in the class. Not only that his friends look up to him as being smarter. I somehow get that same reaction and I run a business. Mnay of the guys that work besides me don't understand a lot of different things that a common chicagoan would pick up after a brief session. But, thats my opinion. Hello there Alexander, glad to see someone else from the Chi here