Try try again
September 20, 2011
Walcott’s middle school plan puts new spin on old approaches
In his first major policy speech, Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott called for major changes to the ctiy's worst middle schools.
To shake middle schools from mediocrity, the city is turning to school reform strategies it considers tried and true.
In the next two years, the Department of Education will close low-performing middle schools, open brand-new ones, add more charter schools, and push more teachers and principals through in-house leadership programs, Chancellor Dennis Walcott announced today in a 30-minute policy speech, the first of his six-month tenure.
For 10 schools, the city will ask for $30 million in federal funds to try a new reform strategy set out by the federal government, “turnaround,” in which at least half of staff members are replaced, Walcott said.
The efforts — which the city plans to pay for with a mixture of state and federal funds — are meant to boost middle school scores that are low and, in the case of reading, actually falling.
“People have tried and struggled with the complicated nature of middle schools for decades,” he said. “But the plan I’ve laid out is bolder and more focused than anything we’ve tried here in New York City before.”
Experts and advocates who helped engineer the last major effort to overhaul middle schools, a City Council task force that produced recommendations but short-lived changes at the DOE in 2007, disputed Walcott’s characterization. They said Walcott’s announcement reflects a change in style but not substance.
“Much of what he said is not new,” said Carol Boyd, a parent leader with the Coalition for Educational Justice, which has long urged more attention for middle schools. ”There is a definite party line, except Joel [Klein] wasn’t able to deliver it with the same believability that Chancellor Walcott does,” she said. Boyd sat on the task force.
“There’s nothing new [or] interesting about this plan,” said Pedro Noguera, the New York University professor who chaired the council’s task force and has spoken out against school closures. “It sounds like more of what they’ve been doing, shutting down failing schools.”
In fact, a centerpiece of Walcott’s plan is the creation of 50 new middle schools over the next two years, roughly half of which will be charter schools. And Walcott said he would ask the City Council to redirect funds it has allocated since 2008 to 51 low-performing middle schools to help other schools that have “shown promise but need continued support to succeed.”
But he said schools that don’t make strides would be shuttered. “We will hold our middle school to the same tough standards we hold our high schools,” Walcott said. “If a school is failing its students, we will take action and phase it out.”
Walcott could have a tough time selling his plan to Council Speaker Christine Quinn, who convened the task force to improve middle schools in 2007. Her office reacted to the news with surprise and skepticism.
“We were disappointed that more of the reforms outlined by the Council’s Middle School Task Force were not incorporated into the Chancellor’s speech,” said Justin Goodman, a spokesman for Quinn, particularly its recommendations to extend learning time and training for current middle school principals and teachers.
Ernest Logan, president of the principal’s union, said Walcott’s initiatives could “breathe life” back into the campaign that Quinn started, which he said was “nearly abandoned.”
To operate the new schools, Walcott said the city will need to push more aspiring principals toward middle schools, which typically struggle to find qualified leadership more so than elementary and high schools, as well as create a “new class” of Teaching Fellows to work in middle schools.
Among other school improvement policies, Walcott noted two targeting poor literacy scores: plans to expand the Innovation Zone program to a group of middle schools using Race to the Top funding, and plans to purchase more non-fiction books aligned with the Common Core standards using $15 million from the State.
Walcott said he took inspiration from the reform efforts underway at several high-performing district and charter middle schools, which he has spent the past month visiting.
One school Walcott visited last week was Democracy Prep Harlem, a charter school co-located in the P.S. 92 building, where Principal Emanuel George said the chancellor toured classrooms and asked questions about what how the middle school trains its teaching staff and structures its school day.
“He walked into our World Percussion class, and poked into a reading classroom for 5 to 10 minutes. He said his focus was on meeting the leaders that drive schools,” George said.
George said Walcott left him with the impression that there would be more conversations, and opportunities to share best practices with other principals, to come. There is no formal principal advisory group on middle school improvement set up, according to Josh Thomases, the DOE’s deputy chief academic officer, who participated in some of Walcott’s conversations with principals last week.
But he said Walcott will be looking to principals for further guidance. “I imagine [the meetings] will continue with some regularity,” he said. “We may rotate principals. There are a lot of middle schools doing things right.”
Boyd said large-scale middle school improvements are necessary, but she did not think the widespread opening and closing of schools would be sufficient.
“Sometimes the culture of the previous school is so insidious in the neighborhood that even when you phase it out you still have the same host of problems because you are dealing with the same cohort of children and you haven’t addressed the underlying need,” she said.
-
Parent
-
enpassant
-
SickofBloomberg
-
http://rantingwoman.wordpress.com rantingwoman
-
old teach
-
reality-based educator
-
http://twitter.com/MaryConwaySpieg Mary Conway-Spiegel
-
Bronx Second Career Teacher
-
Fourth Year Teacher
-
guest
-
Anonymous
-
bee
-
bee
-
bee
-
bee
-
No surprise here
-
il flerpolo
-
teachteach
-
bee
-
bee
-
il flerpolo
-
Youratroll
-
QueenB
-
QueenB
Copyright Notice
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.