by Femi Sobowale

Created on: August 19, 2008

For Mayor Mike Bloomberg, reforming New York City's education system is a political master-stroke. Over the past six years, the second-term mayor of the country's largest concentration of urban schools has made it his priority to ensure that a new system of education that revolves between decentralization-centralization-decentralization evolves. At the beginning of his first term, Bloomberg presented a system whereby all policies on city's education originated from many sources. At some point, he reversed back to centralization by appointing Chancellor Joel Klein to solely oversee education reforms in the city's 1,200 schools. Presently there are 10 superintendents appointed to oversee the running of the schools known as "network" at the regional level. Each regional superintendent oversees 10 to 12 schools with each "network" headed by a local instructional superintendent, "Lises". In this set-up, individual school principals report to the "Lises" and the 32 "Lises" are designated as Community School District (CSD).

As part of various efforts geared towards reforming school in the City of New York, the Bloomberg administration's reform agenda otherwise known as "Child First" embraces such reforms as system-wide reorganization, ending social promotion, school construction, and the new small secondary schools. According to Schools Chancellor Klein, "The innovative reforms we've made in our public schools have translated into real and measurable results." Analysts believe that such a blanket overview on education is not tenable in a city where divergent views are commonly expressed.
Characteristically, the 66 years old mayor has again reversed to decentralized system in running the City's schools. As it were, there is no gain saying the fact that, critics like the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) have taken stands against some measures introduced and taken by the City administration on education. As part of its criticism, the body feels that, the City's education system is more on restructuring rather than instructing. According to UFT, instead the third restructuring in five years, "would set schools adrift, privatize many essential educational services, cut funds from successful schools, limit parental input and make it even more harder from new teachers to voice their concerns for fear they will be denied tenure." In the body's view, the new restructuring is not better than what it replaced.
Perhaps, the strongest opposition to the administration's school

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