Chancellor Carmen Farina has taken on a massive challenge by stepping into a central office shaped by people who were mostly non-educators, who had a faith-based reliance on test scores, and who believed that the way to “reform” schools was to close them. This strategy didn’t work, by any measure. By the end of Bloomberg’s term, the overwhelming majority of parents were opposed to his “reforms,” and wanted smaller classes and better education, not just more testing. I wrote this report with the research assistance of Avi Blaustein, an independent researcher.

Here are some ideas for Chancellor Farina.

Next Steps in Reforming the New York City Public Schools

The media, politicians, and corporate sponsored think tanks will go on a no-holds-barred offensive against anyone who dares to challenge the sacred-cows of corporate education reform. We saw this response when Mayor de Blasio decided to preventing a charter school chain from evicting students with special needs from their public school. Evidence is irrelevant when special interests are at stake. It therefore behooves us to pre-emptively get the true numbers and accurate facts out there along with some ideas for fixing the damage done over the past dozen years in New York City.

Reform the district governance structures with an eye to creating community ownership. It is time to restore community school districts. These districts were dis-empowered and replaced by non-geographic networks as the organizing framework for management of schools. Although this was portrayed as an attempt to support schools, it actually centralized power at Tweed (the New York City Department of Education’s headquarters building) and silenced community voice. It has also proved to be an ineffectual way to support schools. 33% of the 55 Networks received ineffective or developing quality ratings. An audit by the NYC Comptroller’s Office found that “it is difficult to determine whether or not that support increased the efficiency of the school’s day-to-day operations.”

Disband the Networks and empower local instructional superintendents to oversee and support a group of 15 schools in the same neighborhood. This will re-build relationships and trust with the community, allow the development of deep school/community organization partnerships, and spread best practices throughout the schools serving the community. Back office functions should be run out of borough-based offices.

Reform and downsize the bloated central bureaucracy at Tweed. Over the past years central office headcount increased by 70% and the salaries by 79%. The number of non-pedagogues employed by the DOE increased to the highest levels since 1980. According to the Independent Budget Office, an ever increasing share of money budgeted to “total classroom instruction” actually went to central offices. In 2007 about $550,000,000 went to central offices and in 2012 about $793,000,000 went to central offices, approximately a 45% increase in total classroom instruction dollars going to central offices. This is an outrage, and it should end.

Cut the size of the staff at Tweed and return those funds to schools to reduce class sizes. Bring in pedagogical experts who can design and implement progressive education policy, which the current large crop of executive directors, CEOs, COOs, deputy executive directors, deputy CEOs, deputy COOs populating the cubicles at Tweed are both unable and unwilling to do.

 

Revise the “Blue Book” that determines how much space is every school so that every school has enough classrooms for its students’ needs. Once the Blue Book is revised, there will be fewer co-locations, and schools would have art rooms, dance rooms, rooms for special education classes, and other programs.

 

Prioritize class size reduction. New York City’s class sizes are at their highest point in at least a dozen years. Just as the research on preschool education is strong, so is the research on class size reduction, especially in schools that serve the poorest and neediest students.

 

Hold community hearings and listen to parents and the local community before agreeing to any future co-locations. This was a campaign promise that the Mayor made, yet he recently approved 36 new requests for co-location without any community. participation.

Reform the accountability process to create valid and reliable mechanisms for providing parents with information and providing schools with feedback. The Progress Reports that schools have been subject to over the past years give lower grades to schools serving higher proportions of Black and Latino students, English Language Learners, and students with disabilities. Progress Report scores remain correlated with many pre-existing risk factors, including poverty, 8th grade achievement, the percent of students who are ELLs, and the school’s admissions method.

Stop penalizing schools that educate the neediest students. Stop rewarding schools that get rid of challenging students. Develop clear, succinct, and accurate reports of each school’s program describing the academics, the extracurriculars, and the culture at each school.

Reform how students are matched to schools to increase equity. The data on all schools closed since 2003 shows that they had more special education students, more English Language Learners, a higher poverty rate, and 4x more students entering overage than the citywide average. Another report found that new schools accepted 9-10% more students proficient in reading and math, with 4% average higher prior attendance who were 15% less likely to enter overage, 6% less likely to be ELLS, 5% less likely to be students with disabilities, and 7% fewer males. The closing and opening of schools has done nothing to reduce the segregation of students by academic need. The DOE has deliberately sent the highest-need, “over the counter” students to a specific group of schools that then struggled and failed. Most small schools were not sent such students. De facto education redlining continues to exist in NYC with extreme inequities in educational opportunity across districts.

Establish a school matching process that ensures diversity and equity within and between every school.

Reform school funding to increase fairness in the distribution of resources. Although it is claimed that schools are funded based on student need, the dollars say otherwise. Schools are actually provided with different proportions of the funds they are entitled to by the funding formula. This results in schools in the same building being funded at rates that diverge by over 20%.

Give every single school the funds to which they are entitled by the funding formula so that they can educate their students.

Reform how principals are trained with an eye to improving the quality of leadership. Bloomberg’s Leadership Academy was a failure. It was created at great expense ($10 million per year) to fast-track people, often with limited teaching experience, into principal positions. According to the latest data, 32% of the 2011-12 cohort of Leadership Academy graduates did not find principal positions. Over 40% of Leadership Academy graduates from earlier cohorts are no longer principals in their original school after a mere 4 years. The market has spoken and these principals are not wanted, even with the pressure exerted to encourage their hiring.

The Leadership Academy should be closed and replaced by a career ladder of teacher leader to assistant principal to principal with on-the-job mentoring and training. Only the most successful educators at each level should have the privilege of leadership.

It is time for New York City to join districts such as Union City and San Diego, in implementing true education reform, built on the principles of professionalism and genuine community engagement. The evidence shows that this requires a coherent, cohesive strategy that involves collaboration, a focus on teaching and learning, development of engaging curriculum, and a quality pre-K program.