Successes and Failures in Education Reform

Abstract

This chapter discusses Mayor Michael Bloomberg's lack of experience about the city's educational system and the Department of Education. It recounts Bloomberg's disastrous appointment of Cathie Black as the commissioner of the Department of Education after he fired Joel Klein in 2011, as she was a publishing executive who had no experience in education. It also analyzes that Bloomberg's decision lacked fundamental logic as he believed in a market-based ideology, which infiltrated educational policy since the years of President Ronald Reagan. The chapter considers Bloomberg as a business person who was a believer in market-based reforms, not an educator steeped in conventional philosophies. It cites the market-based reforms that appealed to Bloomberg, which grew out of the school reform movement that began in 1983 with the publication of A Nation at Risk.