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Making The List


Dozens of New York City public schools have submitted petitions to the New York City Department of Education asking to be exempted from the uniform curriculum soon to be required for most of the city's schools. By the beginning of April, these schools should learn whether or not they will be added to the list of 209 successful schools allowed to continue with their own reading and math curricula. Schools not on the list must adopt the new, system-wide comprehensive instructional approach mandated by the Department of Education to bring coherence to the schools and to ensure that all the city's schoolchildren progress in reading, writing, and math. (See my February column, "Shaking Up the School System," for a description of the proposed curriculum changes and other recent reforms.)

Exemptions for the 209 schools were based on academic achievement, including improvements in student performance, and student need. Chancellor Joel Klein and the Department of Education looked at school results on city and state tests, but they also took into account schools' percentages of special education students, English language learners, and students in poverty. Schools not making the list as well as specific programs within schools wishing to be considered for exemption were permitted to petition for a waiver of either the literacy portion or the math portion of the new core curriculum or both. Those petitions had to be filed by March 3.

Anticipating objections to the consequences of creating a "top-200" list based only on test scores, Klein and the Department of Education factored in student need so as to bring diversity to the list of exempted schools. In spite of this, they have been accused of relying too heavily on test scores and, therefore, of skewing the list toward largely white, middle-class schools and leaving out schools that serve a more academically diverse student population. Parents and staff from some of the middle-class schools who thought they had been bumped from the list by lower-scoring schools serving higher needs students have also registered frustration and disappointment. Many of these schools have reportedly taken action so that they will be added to the list.

Drawing a line between successful schools and others in New York City is a risky enterprise, despite the clear logic and political necessity of saying that schools already achieving need not be forced to change. Nevertheless, there had to be some worry about the reaction of stakeholders in schools not put on the list, no matter how constructive the consequences. And that reaction has been sharp. Parents, students, and school staff from schools not selected have expressed anger and anxiety about the consequences of not making the list. Without the endorsement, parents and students worry about the quality of their school; and administrators fear they will lose the confidence of middle-class parents who bring valuable resources to schools but can opt to send their children elsewhere.

Though the now-required math, reading, and writing programs are similar to those already in use in a number of the city's successful schools, many school communities are concerned about the changes they represent. The Department of Education has not been able to avert fears about "cookie-cutter" classrooms and overly scripted teaching.

The new curriculum mandate is especially worrisome to those schools that identify themselves as "progressive" or "alternative" and see the programs as a threat to a specific educational philosophy and practices they consider successful. They believe that the imposition of this new curriculum will prevent their schools from offering the type and quality of education their students need and their families expect.

On March 26, parents and other representatives of schools throughout the city that are members of the Progressive Education Network of New York (PENNY) demonstrated in front of Tweed Courthouse, the headquarters of the Department of Education. Objecting to the narrow use of standardized tests and other statistics to measure schools' success, they advocated for the development of a new definition of "successful" schools which recognizes their schools' work with diverse populations of students. They believe that any imposed curriculum deprives teachers of the independence they require in order to develop their own curricula in response to the needs, interests, and abilities of their students. "We want autonomy that allows us to continue with small class sizes, bridge classes, parental and child involvement in all aspects of the school. This can't be boiled down to a single curriculum," said Carol Barton, a Muscota New School and Computer School parent. Few of the schools represented by the Progressive Education Network of New York were included on "the list," but they are hoping to secure waivers so that their schools' work can continue unimpeded.

Similarly, in the face of a uniform curriculum and district restructuring, parents, school staff, and administrators are fighting to preserve the alternative high schools superintendent position. The district that runs a number of high schools designed to meet the special needs of target populations of students -- gifted and talented, at risk, and special education students; drop outs; newly arrived immigrants; incarcerated youth, and pregnant and parenting teens -- is scheduled to be eliminated and its schools absorbed into regional superintendent districts.

OPPORTUNITIES FOR ACTIVISM

Adequate Funding for New York's Schools: A Community Conversation on What Our Students Really Need to Succeed.

On April 3, from 6:30 to 9 pm, at Campus Magnet High School Auditorium, 207-01 116th Street, in Cambria Heights in Queens, and on April 30 from 6:30 to 9 pm in the IS 44 Auditorium, 100 W. 77th Street, in Manhattan, the Campaign for Fiscal Equity (where I work) and the New York State School Boards Association will play host to public meetings as part of an independent costing-out study being undertaken to determine the actual costs of ensuring that all New York students can meet Regents Learning Standards. Come to learn more about the study and to provide input on the challenges of schools in your community and on the programs and services that children need to succeed.

Public Hearings of the Senate Task Force on School Governance

On April 4 from 11 am to 4 pm at Kingsborough Community College in the Leon M. Goldstein Performing Arts Auditorium, there will be another opportunity to have your voice heard on the not-yet-settled issue of what should replace community school boards. To testify, e-mail requests to Senator Frank Padavan: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

March for Public Education: Pre-K Through Post-Grad

Public education this year faces grave challenges to its ability to secure adequate funding so that the academic gains that have become evident in recent years can be sustained. If you're concerned about the future of public education, then mark your calendar for Saturday, May 3 for a march on Albany for public education. The event begins at 1 pm at the Empire State Plaza in Albany and is sponsored by the state Education Conference Board, the Higher Education Conference Board, and a host of others, including parents, teachers, school superintendents and administrators, school boards, college students, and community groups. The gathering is intended to be the largest event in support of public education Albany has ever witnessed. It comes two weeks before statewide school budget votes.

Jessica Wolff is a public school parent and Director of Policy Development at the Campaign for Fiscal Equity, a not-for-profit coalition working to reform New York State's education finance system to ensure adequate resources and the opportunity for a sound basic education for all students in New York City. The views expressed are her own.

The Governor's Proposed Budget And Its Effect On NYC Schools


In his attempt to plug looming gaps in the state budget, Governor George Pataki has proposed in his new executive budget a series of measures that, by the New York State Education Department's estimate, would cut state aid to New York City schools by more than $462 million. This is nearly nine percent of the city's state education aid. By contrast, the governor's proposed cut to the overall state budget comes to just three percent.

As nine-year old Israel Payero put it to the Daily News: "He's hurting my future."

Both Democratic and Republican members of the New York State legislature have expressed dismay in the governor's plan to balance the budget disproportionately on the backs of schoolchildren. Yet if the governor continues to refuse to increase revenue through taxes, it may be that at least some of the proposed cuts will go into effect. Since 45 percent of the New York City schools' budget comes directly from the state, any cuts in state aid to education would have an impact on city schools greater than it would on most nearby suburban districts, which raise much more of their school budgets from local taxes.

The governor's proposed budget (For more detail, see pages 18 to 30 of this pdf file) would eliminate funding for some programs specifically designed to benefit New York City and other poor urban school districts.

This includes universal pre-kindergarten, which currently provides a half-day of pre-school for some 43,000 four-year-olds in New York City.

It also would eliminate the class size reduction program, which currently keeps classes to 20 students or fewer for more than 120,000 New York City schoolchildren from kindergarten to the third grade. Class size would now be increased to 25 students.

It would eliminate the minor maintenance and repair program, which focuses on the kind of older and larger schools that especially plague New York City (where some school buildings still in use were built a century ago).

"Even as an initial negotiating stance, [we find] it objectionable that the governor should want to eliminate programs that work so well and to create such havoc," testified Martine Guirrier of the Educational Priorities Panel (where I also work), at state budget hearings.

Funding would be reduced for special education services, technology (computer hardware and software), and textbooks.

By changing the funding formula for nine specific aid programs, the governor would be in effect reducing their funding by hundreds of millions of dollars statewide. These include Extraordinary Needs and Operating Standards Aid (both going mostly to high-need districts); Gifted & Talented; Limited English Proficiency Aid; Summer School Aid; Academic Support Aid; Public Excess Cost Aid (which provides most of the funding for special education); and Operating Aid.

Pataki has also floated a proposal to make the governor himself the head of the State Education Department. Because the current system in which the education department is overseen by an appointed Board of Regents was specifically established in the state's constitution in order to shield the state's school children from the vagaries of politics, it is unlikely that the governor's proposal will be embraced. However, one attempt to limit the Regents authority may draw support because of its name: "Mandate Relief.

The higher Regents graduation standards led the way for school districts all over the state to argue for additional financial assistance from the state. While many welcomed the increases, some state leaders privately rued having to spend additional state funding on schools. The governor's proposed "mandate relief" is a thinly-veiled attempt to ensure that the educational needs of children not drive spending. Specifically, the Board of Regents would have to receive approval from the Governor's Office of Regulatory Reform for new regulations that would involve any costs.

Only one of the governor's education proposals might actually wind up improving the situation in New York City schools (at least relatively), by creating a fairer means of distributing school construction aid.

(Please read chapters six and 7 of the Educational Priorities Panel report, Castles in the Sand (in pdf format) for an explanation of how the current system of state aid for school building is skewed against New York City, and has had a negative impact on city schools.)

Currently, nearly all school building projects submitted by local school districts throughout the state receive some form of aid. The governor is proposing a single albeit complex formula that would put a priority on projects according to need and the resources of the district to meet the need (New York City has moderate resources but the highest student needs of any district), and would take into account the building's age.

Even here, though, there is a bitter coating. Ironically, even if the new school building aid formula has the effect of righting a previous imbalance, it comes as part of the governor's effort to reduce drastically the amount of money spent on school building in general. And the executive budget proposal explicitly limits New York City to between 40 and 60 percent of all state building aid. The only reason this may not matter in the near term is because building aid is already limited by the explicit budget deal made between all legislators each year: i.e., so much money will go to rural upstate regions, so much to small cities, so much — or so little — to New York City.

Sarah Arnold is director of research for the Educational Priorities Panel, a coalition of 27 civic groups working to improve public education in New York City.

Shaking Up the School System


Acknowledging that New York City provides an inadequate education to most of its schoolchildren, Mayor Michael Bloomberg in a speech on Martin Luther King, Jr.´s birthday announced a set of dramatic changes to the city's school system. Intended to bring educational opportunity to every child, these changes, part of the New York City Department of Education's "Children First" reform agenda, include restructuring the administration of the school system; adopting a uniform curriculum in all but the best 200 of the city's 1,200 schools; and creating new initiatives to improve parent involvement in the schools. (For more background and details, as well as initial reactions to the plan, see the Gotham Gazette's guide to the mayor's program.) The mayor also called for the whole city to take responsibility for the schools and to make the financial, moral, and political commitment necessary to improve them.

ADMINISTRATIVE RESTRUCTURING

Bloomberg's reform plan does away with many of the school system's current administrative structures. The city's elementary and middle schools are now divided into 32 separate community school districts, each administered by its own district office, superintendent, and community school board. This system, originally designed to give local communities a greater role in the running of their schools, has resulted in notoriously uneven educational opportunities for children from district to district. The city's high schools are run separately in five borough-wide superintendencies, and the lack of administrative continuity has been blamed for many rough transitions from middle school to high school. A separate administration, the Chancellor's District, manages the city's lowest performing schools. Under the restructuring announced, all of these administrative entities will cease to exist.

In their place, the mayor and his hand-picked chancellor, Joel Klein, have created 10 new "instructional divisions,". Each of these encompasses from two to four community school districts. Each of the 10 newly named regional superintendents, veteran educators chosen from within the school system, will supervise instruction in all the elementary, middle and high schools located within their assigned division. The regional superintendents will report to the deputy chancellor for instruction, Diana Lam. Within each division, there will be 10 deputy superintendents called "local instruction supervisors" in charge of instruction for a network of 10 to 12 schools.

School operations -- including budgeting, human resources, purchasing and the like -- will be handled separately by six regional operations managers in "back-office support centers." These managers will report to the deputy chancellor for administration, Kathleen Grimm. The mayor expects major savings from centralizing operations services.

Though they plan to close community school district offices, the mayor and the chancellor have not sought to dismantle the districts officially, a step that would require legislative approval. This move, though, did apparently not appease a group of Republican state senators from New York City. They have challenged the restructuring plan, saying that it violates state law.

CURRICULUM CHANGES

Stating a commitment to providing quality instruction in every city classroom, the mayor and the chancellor have also announced plans to implement a uniform curriculum in all but the 200 most successful schools. In place of the dozens of different approaches now being used in the city's schools, they plan a coherent, system-wide approach using reading, writing and math programs that they insist are not "cookie cutter" methods but will provide direction to teachers while still allowing them to be creative. Bloomberg and Klein have also committed to providing ongoing professional development for teachers with reading and math coaches in every school.

The new reading and writing curriculum, which includes extended periods of reading and writing every day, classroom libraries from which students can chose their own books and supplementary phonics instruction, will start in September 2003. The new math curriculum was chosen to balance basic math skills with "conceptual, problem-solving capabilities." Most schools are expected to adopt it by September 2004.

The Department of Education has not yet announced the top 200 schools that will be free to use their own curricula, nor has it revealed how it will choose them. This is a matter of concern to some education advocates who worry that, if choices are made on test scores alone, many innovative schools will be forced to compromise successful programs.

PARENT INVOLVEMENT

Finally, the mayor's reform package includes plans to improve parents' involvement in their children's education and to generally make schools more "parent-friendly." To this end, the chancellor has said that he intends to hold all principals accountable for engaging and being responsive to parents. Every school will have a "parent coordinator." Klein plans a parent academy that will do outreach and offer workshops a parent support center in each instructional division with extended and weekend hours to accommodate working parents. He has also pledged his support for strengthening school leadership teams, the school-based planning groups comprised half of parents and half of school staff.

To replace the community school boards, scheduled for elimination at the end of June but now expected to be extended for another year, the chancellor has proposed "parent engagement boards." Only parents of children in the schools could serve on these boards. Klein envisions a board for every community school district, though these districts will in practice no longer exist.

The duties and responsibilities of the boards have not yet been fully spelled out. The chancellor has said that the boards would serve an "ombudsman function" for parents and would "comment on" school and district educational planning and budget priorities, as well as on proposed changes in the geographic boundaries determining which children attend what schools. Parents and advocates have raised questions about the proposal. Some criticize the exclusion of community members other than parents, as well as the lack of independent authority it confers on the boards.

MAYOR TO FILE BRIEF IN SCHOOL-FUNDING LAWSUIT

Days after the introduction of his system-wide reform plan, Bloomberg announced that the city will file a friend of the court brief in support of the Campaign for Fiscal Equity's school funding lawsuit, CFE v. State, which will be heard on May 8 by the Court of Appeals, the state's highest court. According to the New York Times, the city will file its amicus brief this month and argue that the Court of Appeals should uphold the trial court decision (pdf) that found the state's school funding system unconstitutional for failing to provide all students with the opportunity for a sound basic education.

Jessica Wolff is a public school parent and Director of Policy Development at the Campaign for Fiscal Equity, a not-for-profit coalition working to reform New York State's education finance system to ensure adequate resources and the opportunity for a sound basic education for all students in New York City. The views expressed are her own.



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