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The organizations that schools can choose to affiliate with for bureaucratic support, like New Visions for Public Schools, the Knowledge Network, and the Empowerment network, are being graded this month for their effectiveness. The Department of Education’s accountability office is writing the grades of the “school support organizations,” and Chief Schools Officer Eric Nadelstern said the outcome will eventually be made public.

“It will definitely be public before schools have to make the selection as to which SSO they want to affiliate with next year, so that parents and teachers and principals can make that decision on the basis of all sorts of factors,” Nadelstern said yesterday.

The school support organizations were created last year as part of an overhaul of the school system’s bureaucracy. Rather than being forced to report to the superintendent in their neighborhood, schools can shop around among a set of support organizations to decide which bureaucracy they prefer.

This is the first year that the support organizations will be graded, since they’ve now amassed a year’s worth of a track record in student test scores. Nadelstern said that the accountability office, headed up by Columbia law professor Jim Liebman, is basing its grades on both schools’ progress report cards and on their quality reviews, written reports about schools based on in-person interviews and observations.

The report cards have come under heavy criticism for being statistically problematic, if not meaningless. (more…)

Eric Nadelstern will take on expanded duties. (Via Cody Castro)

A top schools official who spearheaded the Bloomberg administration’s efforts to allow private control of some public schools is leaving the Department of Education, in a reorganization that could save the department a significant amount of money — and might or might not signal a new direction for the school system. Schools Chancellor Joel Klein announced the change to school leaders in a conference call this morning.

The official, JoEllen Lynch, oversaw the department’s transition to allowing schools to affiliate with private management groups like New Visions for Public Schools and CEI-PEA, in lieu of the traditional bureaucracy. The groups, known as PSO’s, were the closest that the Bloomberg administration came to emulating other urban school systems’ privatization efforts, like one in Philadelphia where for-profit management groups competed for control of public schools. Lynch’s office will be headed by another top schools official, Eric Nadelstern, who will maintain his current portfolio of schools affiliated with the Empowerment network.

The reshuffling elevates Nadelstern’s position in the department, a promotion that could elevate his gadfly ideas, too. Officials are selling the change as a way to cut costs amid ballooning concerns about the city’s fiscal prognosis. But some people who work at PSO’s are worrying the change could also be a signal that PSO’s days are numbered, and that the Empowerment network Nadelstern champions as a very lean way to run public schools will overtake them. (more…)

The City Council is about to review planned education cuts, but even if the Bloomberg administration is forced to make revisions, principals should absolutely plan for tighter days ahead. That will be difficult for the obvious reasons (who likes to spend less?) but also for this one: Many of today’s principals have never led through a downturn.

Earlier this week, I talked to a man who has: Eric Nadelstern, the head of the Empowerment network of schools and a Bronx principal from 1985 to 2000, a period that included a sharp fiscal downturn of about two years. In the last several months, Nadelstern has been offering advice to Empowerment principals on how to cut their budgets without making a dent in educational programming.

He shared three pieces of advice with me: (more…)