Bloomberg’s kids

It was almost painful to watch Mayor Bloomberg and city Department of Education officials trying to put a favorable spin on the most recent reading and math scores for city students on the National Assessment of Educational Progress test, the so-called national report card.

The NAEP scores for 4th- and 8th-graders released in early December are essentially flat, showing only slim gains since 2003, the year after the mayor was given control of the school system by the state Legislature.

Going over the numbers with reporters, the mayor and his spin doctors scavenged to find a few slim data points that cast their administration in a positive light. The press didn’t buy their arguments. And they were little comfort for parents and educators who have struggled under the administration’s test-prep myopia to help students improve.

That same week, the mayor announced plans to close another 19 schools and eliminate the middle grades of six others. Ten of the 19 schools targeted for closure were created by the Bloomberg administration. Also on the list was Grace Dodge Career and Technical HS, where students did not have regular English teachers for two months this year.

Grace Dodge and Washington Irving HS were in the first year of a three-year federal intervention program where the schools were at long last supposed to receive the resources and support that they have lacked. With the mayor’s announcement, neither school will get the up to $2 million each was to receive per year over the next three years.

The NAEP numbers reflect the performance of students during the mayor’s tenure, since the 80,000 students who entered kindergarten in 2003 are now in the 8th grade. These students are his responsibility and he has failed them.

It is the mayor and his appointees, fixated on test-prep to the exclusion of real teaching and learning, who decided to close the Department of Education’s Division of Teaching and Learning.

It is the mayor who has refused to deal with the need for smaller class sizes while pushing educators to fill out more and more meaningless paperwork.

It is the mayor who has deprived schools of desperately needed resources over the past three years. And it is the mayor who has left struggling schools to twist on the vine.

The mayor can’t blame his predecessors, nor can he blame the teachers who must struggle to help students with no curriculum and within the test-driven framework he has set out.

These students are indeed Bloomberg’s kids. But they are our responsibility, and we are going to continue to do our best to help them, no matter what.

Just as we always have.