Schooling Ferrer
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.
Poor, clueless Freddy Ferrer. Instead of trying to run away and hide from his Catholic school education (and then getting caught in another embarrassing campaign fib) he might more profitably have used the story of his own schooling to develop a serious critique of Mayor Bloomberg’s education record. After all, the quality of the education Mr. Ferrer received is an essential element in his rise from modest circumstances to possibly becoming the city’s first Hispanic mayor. Thus the Ferrer campaign could have credibly argued that the Catholic schools’ success provides lessons for our own public schools that the mayor and his schools chancellor Joel Klein are blithely ignoring.
Instead of unproven progressive education fads such as “balanced literacy,” “fuzzy” math and child centered classrooms – all enforced in authoritarian fashion by Bloomberg’s education department – Mr. Ferrer could have pointed to the Catholic schools’ formula for improved academic achievement, particularly for disadvantaged children. What made Mr. Ferrer’s Catholic schools work for him and what still makes them work is a content-rich curriculum, direct instruction by a knowledgeable teacher, and teaching children to read through explicit phonics and math through mastering basic computational skills. Of course, there is also the issue of order and discipline in the classroom, which Catholic schools enforce relentlessly, but which the Bloomberg administration still hasn’t managed to get a handle on.
In response to claims by the Bloomberg administration that recent test scores prove that Mr. Klein’s progressive instructional approaches are working, Mr. Ferrer could have pointed out that this year, as always, Catholic schools in the city scored on average 10% higher on state tests than their public school counterparts and graduated over 90% of their high school students, compared to a 50% graduation rate in the public schools.
But the real coup in this imagined mayoral education debate could have come when the Ferrer camp pointed out that the Catholic schools were able to accomplish all this while spending, on average, about $5,000 per student, compared to more than $13,000 a pupil spent by Bloomberg’s education department. Surely a mayor who prides himself on bringing business-like efficiency to the enterprise of education would be hard pressed to answer this seemingly glaring gap in classroom productivity.
As long as we are imagining Mr. Ferrer actually embracing the lessons of his own life and schooling, let’s also contemplate what would happen if he drew the logical and moral policy conclusions from the above comparisons between Catholic and public schools. Imagine Freddy Ferrer campaigning among public school parents in the South Bronx and Harlem, saying that he was blessed by the fact that his parents had a choice and exercised it wisely by sending him to a Catholic school that provided him with a solid foundation in the basic skills of math and literacy. You parents should have the same choice, he could then go on to say. And if I am elected mayor I will not only try to apply the instructional lessons of the Catholic schools to the city schools I am responsible for, but I will do everything in my power through vouchers or tax credits to allow more poor parents to have the same choices for their children that my parents had for my education.
Sure it’s a political fantasy. Sure, Mr. Ferrer remains the candidate of all the entrenched special interests that want to keep a permanent Berlin wall between the public schools and the parochial school sector. Still, the opening is there. If it isn’t filled, the education debate in the mayoral campaign will continue to be much ado about nothing.
This is not what mayoral control was supposed to be all about. It was premised on the idea that at election time there would be a reasoned discussion of the mayor’s education record, so that the voters could hold someone accountable for the schools. Instead we are getting a dialogue of irrelevancies and insults, of Mr. Ferrer’s laughable proposal to give all schoolchildren laptop computers and the mayor’s equally laughable claim that his progressive instructional approach is producing unprecedented improvements in academic achievement among minority children. And the children and the parents are the big losers.
Mr. Stern is a contributing editor to City Journal and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.