Tuesday, April 17, 2007

NY Times: Klein Specifies Restructuring of City Schools...

Published: April 17, 2007

Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein unveiled new details yesterday about how the city school system will be organized once the 10 regional superintendent offices are abolished in September as part of the Bloomberg administration’s latest restructuring of the bureaucracy.

The reorganization is a sort of inversion of the city school administration. Instead of the traditional model in which principals work directly for a superintendent, each of the city’s more than 1,400 principals will choose a “school support organization” to work with their schools, and will pay these groups out of the school’s budget.

“Until now many educational decisions were made outside of the schools and classrooms,” Mr. Klein said during a news conference at Education Department headquarters.

Principals will have a menu of choices, at various prices, Mr. Klein said. At the low end, principals will pay $29,500 to join the so-called “empowerment network,” in which they are largely freed from oversight in exchange for agreeing to meet performance targets that include higher test scores.

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