2002
MICHAEL R. BLOOMBERG
Founder of Bloomberg LP and Bloomberg Philanthropies, and three-term Mayor of New York
NEW YORK CITY DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION
One of the main reasons I ran for mayor of New York City was to turn its dysfunctional public school system around. With more than 1.1 million students, the largest district in the nation struggled with graduation rates that had been hovering around fifty percent for over a decade, leaving hundreds of thousands of young people without the skills needed to fulfill their potential and achieve their dreams.
Some people said we’d never fix education until we fixed poverty, but the truth was the other way around: We’d never fix poverty until we fixed education. New York City’s schools were a case study in mismanagement. Hiring was often based on political connections. Policies were decided through political horse-trading. Money flowed to the wealthiest districts instead of the neediest. Failure was tolerated. And poor children, largely from Black and Hispanic communities, suffered the most.
In 2002 we launched a comprehensive plan for reforming New York’s schools called “Children First.” Eli Broad was one of the first people we reached out to because of his success helping Los Angeles and school districts around the country enact major reforms to better meet the needs of students. The Broad Foundation provided financial support for some of our earliest initiatives, including the NYC Leadership Academy, to recruit and train the next generation of great principals. The Foundation helped us instill more accountability throughout the school system and develop stronger reading and math curricula. It helped us provide performance bonuses for great teachers. And it helped us give parents and students more choices by expanding charter school options.
That kind of private support enabled us to undertake new initiatives and experiments. As the school system began to improve, those reforms won more public support, which helped us expand them. It’s a great example of how public-private partnerships can spur innovation.
Over the course of our administration, graduation rates rose by nearly forty percent. In 2002, before we started, there wasn’t a single New York City school listed in the twenty-five top-performing elementary and middle schools in the state. By the year we left office, twenty-two of the twenty-five were in New York City.
There were many reasons for this success, but one of the most important was a strategy that The Broad Foundation played a pivotal role in shaping: creating new, small schools to give parents and students more choices. Over twelve years, we created more than 650 new schools, including over 170 charter schools.
A willingness to take risks and shake up the status quo has defined Eli’s approach in business and in philanthropy; that’s one of the things we have in common. In New York City, it helped us turn the school system around. Eli and I also agree on some of the areas where philanthropy makes the biggest difference. We’ve teamed up to pass common-sense gun laws that protect communities and to support medical research that finds cures and saves lives. We also share a passion for the arts. Bloomberg Philanthropies invests in the arts because we believe it can strengthen communities in many ways, including through economic growth and job creation, and The Broad Foundation’s support for the arts in Los Angeles has shown how true that is.
Eli and I agree that nothing is more important to the future of our country than providing every student with a great education. We still have a long way to go, and the challenge has only grown more urgent. A high school diploma is no longer a ticket to the middle class, and the skills required to succeed have grown more sophisticated. But we know that progress is possible, even for students who face the toughest odds. There is no excuse for hopelessness or inaction. We know how to improve schools. The only question is: Are we willing to do what it takes? With Eli, the answer is always yes.