More than a third of New York City’s public school principals embraced a challenge from Chancellor Joel I. Klein to free themselves as much as possible from outside oversight under a new reorganization and become full stewards of their individual schools, the city said yesterday.
But few took up the chancellor’s offer to work with a private nonprofit group. And a great majority chose to align themselves with veteran schools superintendents from the traditional schools bureaucracy.
The principals’ choices, revealed yesterday by the Department of Education, were required under the Bloomberg administration’s reorganization of the school system, which calls for the 10 regional superintendents’ offices that now supervise the schools to be abolished in September.
After months of deliberation, each of the city’s nearly 1,400 principals had to choose a “school support organization.” These organizations will provide resources like teacher training and curriculum development, but do not have the power to supervise schools or fire principals. Principals had a choice from a menu of different school-support groups: They could choose to be an “empowerment school” organized in nontraditional ways, as 481 principals did.
They could also choose to work with one of four “learning support” organizations, which are headed by former superintendents from the old regional system. A majority of principals, 750, took that route.
Thirteen percent of principals, 157, chose to work with “partnership support” organizations, led by outside nonprofit agencies and educational institutions like New Visions for Public Schools, a New York City group, and the City University of New York.
The new system is the cornerstone of an effort by Mr. Klein to promote accountability and transparency in the school system by forcing principals to shoulder more responsibility for their own schools.
In an interview yesterday, Mr. Klein said the new system would encourage “the transition of the principal as fundamentally an agent of bureaucracy in the school to the leader or the C.E.O of the school.”
“If the principal is the agent of bureaucracy in the school, then you have a model that will never survive,” Mr. Klein said.
The results of the principals’ selections were announced just one day after their union voted overwhelmingly to ratify a new contract that would allow significant bonuses and raise their average salary by more than 23 percent. By the 2009-10 school year, principals could earn two bonuses — $25,000 for leading a troubled school, and a $25,000 performance bonus — potentially pushing some annual salaries beyond $200,000.
But Mr. Klein has also emphasized the department’s new accountability standards, which will be put in place next fall. In September, nearly all schools will receive a grade from A to F, based on test scores and the results of citywide surveys distributed to parents, teachers and students.
Ernest Logan, the president of the principals’ union, the Council of School Supervisors and Administrators, said the role of the new organizations was enormous. “Their ability to assist school leaders will be a major factor in the success or failure of a school,” he said.
“They’ve made some serious changes that a lot of people may be uncomfortable with,” said John Scalice, the principal of the School of Diplomacy in the Bronx, a middle school. “But usually a lack of comfort goes along with change.”
