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Tag Archives: Michael Bloomberg

What Geeks Can Teach Government

August 17, 2011
Accountability, Affordability, Education, Education Reform, Jobs, Technology
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Technology development works very differently from the way government programs are launched, managed — and ended. There are lessons for government in the way the gadgets we use are created.

BY: William D. Eggers,Devon Halley

Most of us expect increasing sophistication in our technology. And generally, over time, we’ve gotten it. We’ve gone from large mainframes to today’s smartphones, which carry more computing power than NASA used to send a man to the moon.

In getting to this point, we’ve abandoned outdated technologies. Music is a perfect example: We abandoned eight-tracks for cassettes and cassettes for CDs, and then left CDs behind for MP3s.

This sort of pruning comes naturally in free markets, through what economist Joseph Schumpeter called “creative destruction.” It helps technology evolve and provide the services and functions we expect.

But what if markets didn’t evolve in this way? Imagine a world in which a new smartphone is delayed because it has to integrate with a mainframe computer from 1980. It sounds ridiculous, but that’s essentially how government too often works.

Promoters of innovative models in government must battle antiquated regulations and bureaucratic inertia. Governments almost never do the pruning needed to make room for new growth.

What would happen if we applied the principles of technology development to government programs? How might government operate differently?

Plug and Play

Today, all too many programs outlive their usefulness. Dismantling or redesigning large government programs is a Herculean task — one that prevents an efficient response to rapid shifts in society, technology and the economy. What we need is a way to rapidly disassemble and rearrange elements of government programs that no longer make sense.

The software world calls this “modular development.” All the parts work together, but at the same time any piece can be added or removed without rendering the full system unusable. Salesforce. for example, is a customer-relationship-management software system that offers more than 3 million customers different product modules to help them boost sales. As the customers’ needs change, they can add and remove the different modules quickly and easily, without handicapping the other modules. Read More

Plan Funded at 11th Hour

August 11, 2011
Accountability, Education Reform
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By MICHAEL HOWARD SAUL

Mayor Michael Bloomberg inserted $22.5 million into the city budget to pay for his high-profile initiative to help black and Latino youth just days before the City Council voted on it, essentially avoiding public scrutiny of the plan and its use of taxpayer money.

“I was shocked,” said Council Member Gale Brewer when she learned about the funding last week. She fired off an email to the council’s budget officials asking, “Where the hell did this come from?”

The mayor officially announced the initiative one week ago, more than a month after the council approved the budget. None of the mayor’s commissioners testified before the council about the program during months of painstakingly long budget hearings, and council members didn’t receive a written briefing. It wasn’t included in the mayor’s February or May budget proposals.

Marc LaVorgna, a spokesman for the mayor, defended the process, pointing out that the line items were specified in budget documents that council members received the day they voted.

“It’s printed clear as day in the budget all the members voted on,” Mr. LaVorgna said. “In fact, the program is specifically spelled out, which is above and beyond City Charter requirements.”

Many council members and good-government experts lauded Mr. Bloomberg for trying to address the many problems facing young minority men. He donated $30 million of his personal fortune to the three-year, $127 million initiative, which also draws on the city giving $22.5 million a year and $30 million from billionaire George Soros.

But some said the mayor exercised poor judgment in slipping the taxpayer funding into the budget at the 11th hour without any public scrutiny. Read More

Quiet Riot: Insurgents Take on The Teachers’ Unions.

August 11, 2011
Accountability, Affordability, Education, Education Reform
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By Andrew J. Rotherdam.

Quick: which group consistently tops the list of U.S. political donors — bankers? Oil barons? The Koch brothers? Nope. Try school teachers. The two major teachers’ unions, despite all the rhetoric about how teachers have no influence on policy, collectively spent more than $67 million directly on political races between 1989 and 2010. And that figure doesn’t include millions more spent by their state and local affiliates and all kinds of support for favored (read: reform-averse) candidates.

For years, union leaders have lambasted as anti-teacher pretty much every proposal to expand charter schools, improve teacher evaluation and turn around low-performing schools. Yet these reform issues have moved to the mainstream as even the Democrats, traditionally labor’s biggest allies, have gotten fed up with union intransigence to structural changes to improve America’s schools. Meanwhile, states as diverse as Massachusetts, New Jersey, Florida, Ohio, and — you guessed it — Wisconsin are attacking union prerogatives such as valuing seniority over on-the-job performance or collectively bargaining for benefits. At the same time, black and Latino parents are growing increasingly impatient with lousy schools and are organizing in an effort to provide a counterweight to the unions. Just last week, the nation’s second biggest teachers’ union, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), was embarrassed when a PowerPoint presentation surfaced on the web outlining strategies for undercutting parent groups. Sample quote: “What Helped Us? Absence of charter school and parent groups from the table.”

But perhaps the biggest strategic pressure for reform is starting to come from teachers themselves, many of whom are trying to change their unions and by extension change their profession. These renegade groups, comprised generally of younger teachers, are trying to accomplish what a generation of education reformers, activists and think tanks have not: forcing the unions to genuinely mend their ways. Here are the three most talked about initiatives: Read More

Bloomberg Investing $30 Million of His Money in Program to Aid Minority Youth. By Michael Barbaro, Fernando Santos

August 4, 2011
Accountability, Affordability, Education Reform
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By and

The administration of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, in a blunt acknowledgment that thousands of young black and Latino men are cut off from New York’s civic, educational and economic life, plans to spend nearly $130 million on far-reaching measures to improve their circumstances.

The program, the most ambitious policy push of Mr. Bloomberg’s third term, would overhaul how the government interacts with a population of about 315,000 New Yorkers who are disproportionately undereducated, incarcerated and unemployed. Read More

San Antonio’s High-profile Mayor Content With Job

July 10, 2011
Accountability, Affordability, Education Reform, Jobs, Minorities
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By PAUL WEBER

SAN ANTONIO — San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro, the rising Democratic star whose White House potential is already the stuff of political forecasting, co-headlined a recent gathering of Hispanic leaders and blasted the immigration agenda of Texas Gov. Rick Perry and Republicans as the most “anti-Latino” in a generation.

Shortly after, the event’s other headliner took the stage: Perry himself.

“That was me basically saying, `Look, you’re not going to do all these things and act as though everything’s fine,’” said Castro, days after his June address to the National Association of Latino and Elected Appointed Officials.

Having already climbed among the country’s most prominent Latino politicians, the 36-year-old Castro is starting his second terms as mayor of the nation’s seventh-largest city more at ease with both his celebrity and speaking out. His NALEO appearance railed against Perry-backed efforts to target so-called “sanctuary cities” of illegal immigrants and GOP lawmakers prioritizing new voter ID laws, and was a possible glimpse of speeches to come if Perry enters the race for president.

Since taking office in June 2009, Castro has made more than a dozen trips to Washington. Not all have been for meetings with President Barack Obama’s administration, but the third-year mayor has nonetheless talked immigration and energy policy in the White House, alongside other invites such as former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

Castro backed Obama’s fiscal policy speech in April and joined a presidential delegation to Mexico City. First lady Michelle Obama even lauded Castro and fitness initiatives in San Antonio — despite about two-thirds of the city being obese or overweight, which ranks the area among the nation’s fattest.

The exposure has driven speculation about Castro’s political future; the governor’s mansion, Congress or a cabinet-level post swirling as the usual rumors. In San Antonio, a mayor can serve four two-year terms.

Castro said he’s likely not going anywhere until 2017.

“This was a job I really did look forward to growing up, when I thought about politics,” Castro said. “So I’m not in a hurry to leave.”

His identical twin brother, on the other hand, is already making his next move. Texas state Rep. Joaquin Castro will challenge nine-term Democratic U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett in 2012 for his congressional seat, which the Republican-controlled Texas Legislature redrew this past session. Read More

The Battle Over School Reform Has Turned Dangerously Vitriolic

July 5, 2011
Accountability, Affordability, Education, Education Reform, Excellence, Higher Ed, Jobs, Transparency
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For years, education politics were noteworthy mostly for their earnestness. Today, that’s mostly gone.

Bad Education

Who is to blame for the problems within our education system?

Less than a year ago, as I was finishing a book on Michelle Rhee, the combative former chancellor of schools in Washington, D.C., the time arrived to set up a website for the book. The website designer asked if I wanted to include reader comments. It was a sensible suggestion, but I said, no, thanks.

While reporting the book, I had monitored the comment sections in other publications as reporters wrote about hot-button education topics, including Rhee. These commentators were nasty; I’m talking abortion-debate-level nastiness.

How did that happen? For years, education politics were noteworthy mostly for their earnestness. Sure, there were flareups between “reformers” and teachers unions, but generally the tone of the discourse was civil and there was genuine curiosity in understanding opposing views. Today, that’s mostly gone.

As an author writing about the polarizing Rhee, one might expect I would experience this vitriol. But I’m hardly alone. Time contributor Amanda Ripley is a relative newcomer to education issues. “I spent my career writing about everything from abortion to terrorism to prisons, but none of these things compared to education,” Ripley told me. “The nastiest emails I’ve ever gotten have been about education.”

Last year, Ripley wrote a lengthy Atlantic piece about the research Teach for America conducted on which teachers turn out to be the most effective in the classroom. Interesting stuff. Read More

In Classroom Accountability Battle, Cuomo Will Take the Unions to School

June 15, 2011
Accountability, Affordability, Education, Education Reform, Excellence, Higher Ed, Innovation, Technology, Transparency
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The teachers’ unions continue to resist the notion of accountability in the classroom, even as it becomes more and more clear that teacher performance is just as important as financial resources and parental involvement in creating a true learning environment in our public schools.

Earlier this month, Governor Andrew Cuomo introduced a series of proposals designed to foster a greater sense of accountability in the state’s schools. Test scores will now count for as much as 40 percent of a teacher’s evaluation score, up from 20 percent.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg and other voices for education reform hailed the new formula as another step toward accountability in the classroom. Predictably, however, union leaders objected. Now they are threatening to sue the state in a sad effort to block the new evaluation scheme.

Mr. Cuomo basically has dared them to bring it on. During a recent radio interview, the governor said that he was going to “persevere” and that he intended to “accomplish the goal.”

“If there are lawsuits,” he continued, “there are going to be lawsuits and we’ll win the lawsuits and we’ll prevail.” Read More

Unless There is Accountability, We will Never Get the Right System.

May 10, 2011
Education, Education Reform, Higher Ed, Innovation, Technology
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The Failure of American Schools By Joel Klein, The Atlantic

Joel Klein in Brooklyn on the first day of school, two months before he resigned as chancellor.

Who better to lead an educational revolution than Joel Klein, the prosecutor who took on the software giant Microsoft? But in his eight years as chancellor of New York City’s school system, the nation’s largest, Klein learned a few painful lessons of his own—about feckless politicians, recalcitrant unions, mediocre teachers, and other enduring obstacles to school reform.

Three years ago, in a New York Times article detailing her bid to become head of the American Federation of Teachers union, Randi Weingarten boasted that despite my calls for “radical reform” to New York City’s school system, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and I had achieved only “incremental” change. It seemed like a strange thing to crow about, but she did have something of a point. New York over the past nine years has experienced what Robert Schwartz, the dean of Harvard’s education school, has described as “the most dramatic and thoughtful set of large-scale reforms going on anywhere in the country,” resulting in gains such as a nearly 20-point jump in graduation rates. But the city’s school system is still not remotely where it needs to be. Read More