Last week, Schools Chancellor Joel Klein parachuted into the northwest Bronx to promote and explain his ambitious overhaul of New York City public schools. Also known as the Children’s First Initiative, the plan has been met with national accolades, local opposition, and often, just plain confusion.
With all the system-wide changes being implemented, it’s difficult for even the most informed parent to keep track, let alone make sense, of it all. In fact, parent groups around the city have called for the chancellor to slow down and take time to listen to what the parents think and incorporate their input.
Despite this, Klein, with strong backing from Mayor Michael Bloomberg, is plowing ahead with his plan.
Most changes to the school system, major or minor, only require approval from the city’s Panel for Education Policy, which replaced the Board of Education in 2002. The panel is comprised of 13 members. Each borough president appoints one panelist, while the mayor installs the other eight.
The Final Chapter
The dramatic next step in the Bloomberg/Klein makeover comes July 1, when the new fiscal year begins. That’s when every school in the city will be reorganized by support structures (see sidebar), regions will be disbanded and new evaluation tools will be implemented.
It’s a sort of final chapter in Klein’s epic school system makeover – a risky bid to change what he calls “a culture of failure.” With that as a backdrop, Klein showed up at PS 37 in Kingsbridge last Monday to answer his critics and reiterate the Big Picture.
“We have two options,” Klein said, responding to critics of his plan. “Stay on the same course and pray for a miracle, or we can do the hard work and make changes.”
Buffered by a cadre of handlers, Klein strode to the stage and sat in the middle of a long table. He was flanked by other members from Community District Education Council (CDEC) 10, who were holding their monthly public meeting.
Klein, a product of Queens public schools who took over the country’s largest school system five years ago after gaining notoriety as the Clinton Administration lawyer who beat Microsoft in a landmark anti-trust case, started his pitch at the beginning.
He talked about how the system he inherited a half decade ago was in shambles: graduation rates plummeting, dropout rates skyrocketing and the achievement gap (between whites and minorities) growing.
More than 50 years after Brown versus Board of Education, the historic case that guaranteed equal education for all races, Klein said, minority students in the city were four years behind white students. He called this gap “shameful” and “unacceptable.”
He went on to say that although the gap remains wide, there are signs of progress. The city’s overall four-year graduation rate jumped another 3 percent to 50 percent in 2006, after rising 3.5 percent in 2005. Last year, 15 of the city’s new small high schools (part of Klein’s plan calls for smaller, more intimate academic settings) graduated 73 percent of its students. The Bronx Aerospace Academy, a small school on the Evander Childs campus, graduated an astounding 93 percent of its kids, all of them minority students.
Klein also boasted that New York City was again, for the third consecutive year, named one of the top five most improved urban school districts in the country by the Broad Foundation, a non-profit that focuses on public education.
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