The Schools at a Crossroads
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

It’s been a busy week for watchers of New York’s public schools. On Tuesday, Mayor Bloomberg went to the Yankees game with the president of the United Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten. On Wednesday, Mr. Bloomberg testified before a court-appointed panel that is overseeing the city school system. And yesterday, the City Council held a hearing at which city, state, and federal officials testified about whether the city’s policies on transferring out of failing public schools comply with the provisions of the 2002 federal law known as the No Child Left Behind Act.
It was a series of events that made transparent all the forces pulling and pushing on the city school system – the federal government, a state judge, the state education department that is controlled by Governor Pataki, the teachers’ union, and, at the city level, Mayor Bloomberg, his schools chancellor, Joel Klein, and the chairwoman of the City Council’s Education Committee, Eva Moskowitz.
For all the politicians and power brokers at Ms. Moskowitz’s hearing yesterday, the most compelling was a parent, Jessica Lopez of Queens. She told the council that her 5-year-old twin boys, Christopher and Dylon, were transferred into a failing school without her consent. She has been struggling to get them out since the beginning of the school year, but her children are still stuck in the failing school. “They’re not going to learn anything. It’s a failing school,” Ms. Lopez was quoted by our Julia Levy in Tuesday’s New York Sun.
At the hearing yesterday, the deputy U.S. secretary of education, Eugene W. Hickok, said that New York City’s Department of Education had “come a long way,” but “could be doing better.” Ms. Moskowitz said yesterday that with regard to choice, the city’s public schools have “taken a giant step backward.”
The city cites overcrowding and delays in reporting of test scores as reasons that the transfer process is less than perfect. Mr. Klein has taken a step in the right direction by calling on the state to lift the cap on the number of charter schools and by creating dozens of new charter schools in New York City. We wish him the best in his efforts and congratulate him on his achievements so far.
But the more we observe the maneuvering of the politicians and the disappointment of parents, the harder it is to escape the conclusion that the best way to provide choice and quality would be to unleash some market forces with vouchers. That would take educational decisions out of the hands of labor leaders or government officials, no matter how well-intentioned, and place them into the hands of parents.