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Call it early spring cleaning: the city’s Department of Education is planning its third official reorganization of how schools receive support services in eight years.

Support organization leaders say the new plan involves decentralizing the city’s large service centers, which offer schools assistance with writing their budgets and handling the mountains of paperwork that pile up. Since 2007, a Brooklyn principal would call the Brooklyn Integrated Service Center for help with these tasks; now, she’ll turn to a small group that’s assigned to work with her school through her support organization.

The groups, called Children First Networks, are part of a model that has been quietly piloted for several years by Eric Nadelstern, the DOE’s chief schools officer. About 300 schools are already part of the CFNs, an expansion that took place last year and is now being extended to all of the city’s public schools. The networks are small — each has a staff of 13 staff members — and are meant to personalize the way schools receive non-academic, logistical support. (more…)

A frequent criticism of the Department of Education under Schools Chancellor Joel Klein is that it is run by lawyers and businessmen instead of by educators. In fact, the number of educators reporting to Klein quietly doubled in the last few months.

A recent issue of City Limits carried a story under the headline, “Teachers Missing at the Top.” Indeed, at the end of the last school year, just one quarter of the people reporting directly to Klein — two out of eight people — had extensive experience in city classrooms.

Now, after Klein replaced one top administrator with a former principal and added a new top-level position, four out of nine top administrators have extensive experience in city classrooms. The remaining five hold positions, such as in finance and legal affairs, that are unlikely to be occupied by educators in any school district, according to a department spokesman, David Cantor.

Asked about the shift by GothamSchools, Schools Chancellor Joel Klein called the new numbers “an interesting observation.” But he said he had not changed the way he chooses his deputies. (more…)

Shael Polakow-Suransky, the city's new accountability chief.

Accountability czar James Liebman is officially leaving the Department of Education, but he isn’t going far. From his office at Columbia University, he will help the city win federal stimulus money to boost the very programs he pioneered during his three-year tenure.

In an interview today, Liebman said he’ll go back to teaching criminal law this fall. But he’ll also help the department put together “the most powerful proposal” for federal innovation funds, he said. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has said that New York City’s accountability and teacher pay initiatives are top candidates for a $650 million grant program meant to spur innovation.

Liebman is leaving behind an accountability system that has divided educators and parents. ”I think [he] has forever changed the way this public school system thinks about accountability and the way public school systems around the country will think bout accountability in the future,” said Eric Nadelstern, the department’s chief schools officer.

But some principals reacting to the news of Liebman’s departure this afternoon showed relief. One laughed joyfully when she saw the city’s press release at an event today. Another jokingly wrote to a fellow principal, ‘No more progress reports?’

Shael Polakow-Suransky, the former principal who is replacing Liebman, said the basic tools created by the accountability office would not change. (more…)

Chancellor Joel Klein. (GothamSchools via our Creative Commons Flickr)

A string of departures by top school officials is fueling speculation that Chancellor Joel Klein could be the next to go. But in an interview today, Klein laughed off the possibility. He said the departures — four since January — are actually evidence that his prescription for changing urban schools is catching on.

The latest official to leave is Garth Harries, the management guru who is in the middle of restructuring the city’s special education offerings. Harries announced today that he has accepted a job at the New Haven school system starting in July.

A teachers union vice president, Carmen Alvarez, said the exodus signals that even bigger changes could be brewing at the top. ”Read the tea leaves,” she said in an interview today. “People don’t leave like that unless there’s another change in the air.”

Some have speculated that Klein’s departure could be part of a deal that preserves the mayor’s control of the city schools: The head of the unpopular-amongst-elected-officials schools chancellor in exchange for continued power for the mayor. (more…)

Data from the Department of Education show which school support organizations are gaining schools and which are losing them.

Given the choice to switch to a new support organization, most schools are deciding to stay put, Department of Education data that I obtained today show. Eric Nadelstern, the city’s chief schools officer, confirmed the data in a short telephone interview.

Nadelstern said the information is “gratifying” because it indicates schools are happy with the level of service they are receiving. But he said that he hopes that in the future schools will make their decisions based not just on their own experiences, but also on data showing how well students inside each support organization’s umbrella are performing academically. (Data were released for the first time earlier this year.)

A large group schools next year will also join a trial organizational model known as the Children First Network, which tries to personalize the way schools receive non-academic, logistical supports. Twenty networks of schools will join the Children First Network next year, Nadelstern told me. Each network includes about 20 schools, suggesting that the total number of schools moving into the Children First Network is increasing to about 490, roughly a third of all city schools. (more…)

One thing that went under the radar during the nonstop news cycle of the last few weeks is a sizable data dump from the Department of Education, which for the first time released statistical reports about the 11 organizations that support the city’s schools.

The reports went online last week to inaugurate the period when schools can choose which organization they want to affiliate with. The organizations, called School Support Organizations, or SSOs, have provided support services to individual schools for the last two years in place of the traditional school-district bureaucracy. This is the first time that the DOE has allowed schools to change the affiliation they originally selected back in 2007.

The new reports include a chart (above) comparing the SSOs according to their schools’ progress report scores, quality review evaluations, and principal satisfaction survey results. The result is the public evaluation that Eric Nadelstern, the DOE’s chief schools officer who formerly ran the Empowerment organization, said back in January was being cooked up the department’s accountability office. The comparison, which takes into account school data from the 2007-2008 school year, shows that the SSO run by the City University of New York did the best, followed closely by the Empowerment organization.

The reports are available on the DOE’s Web site only in PDF format, and there is a different one for each organization. A DOE spokeswoman told me that the department had not made available a database compiling the data, so I went ahead and made one, available here or after the jump. I also went one step further and added some calculations of my own, based on the DOE’s data: The percent change in progress report and quality review scores from 2007 to 2008.

Among my first impressions: Schools either improved their internal operations significantly between 2007 and 2008, or else they figured out how to look like they had improved, because the percentage of schools receiving top ratings on their Quality Reviews jumped in every organization.

If you have more statistics knowhow than I do and some extra time on your hands (like during this school vacation), take a look and note what you see. Leave your observations in the comments. (more…)

A lineup of Department of Education officials challenged Assemblyman Mark Weprin's assertion that the public schools are overrun by excessive test prep. GothamSchools

Another snippet of Friday’s final Assembly hearing on mayoral control that’s worth highlighting is an exchange between school officials and Mark Weprin, the Assemblyman from Queens, over test prep.

Weprin has raised his concerns that the public school are doing too much test prep with Chancellor Joel Klein before. (He memorably hijacked a press conference that was supposed to be about Klein’s accomplishments.) This exchange gave school officials and Weprin a less awkward chance to duke it out. Weprin was incredulous when Eric Nadelstern, the chief schools officer, and a lineup of other officials told him that the Department of Education does not encourage test prep. “There’s an incredible amount of test prep going on. You know that, right?” he said.

When James Liebman, the chief accountability officer, told Weprin that only a tiny percentage of parents believe there is too much test prep going on in schools — about 1%, according to the department’s surveys — Weprin snapped back. “That’s unbelievably ridiculous,” he said. “You guys are either in denial, or you’re trying to pretend to be in denial. I thought it was just a given you knew how much test prep was going on.”

Officials clarified that they are in favor of testing; it just depends on which kind of testing. They said that giving diagnostic tests to assess what exactly students know and what they don’t is not test prep but a good way to help teachers educate children. “You will never find a serious educator who will say that merely teaching children how to take a test is a sufficient form of education or indeed a defensible form of education,” Cerf said. “To the extent people are being taught the content and then assessed on whether they have mastered that content by the milestone ages, that is not test prep.”

The five-borough tour by members of the State Assembly’s education committee to listen to public comments about mayoral control ends today with a marathon hearing in Brooklyn.

The hearing begins at City Tech at 10 a.m. and, like its predecessors, is likely to stretch long into the evening. Education committee chair Cathy Nolan says today’s hearing will focus on the Department of Education’s business contracts, as well as on academic achievement under mayoral control, reports Helen Zelon for Insideschools. One person who will testify on behalf of the DOE for the first time is Eric Nadelstern, the official who was recently promoted to “chief schools officer” for the system, Zelon reports.

Some mayoral control fans got an early start this morning. An e-mail sent by an intern at Learn NY, the group lobbying to preserve mayoral control, suggested that attendees arrive an hour early, at 9 a.m., “for visibility.” East Brooklyn Congregations, a coalition of churches, is also holding a pre-hearing rally to support mayoral control; David Brawley, a co-chair, said in a press release that the coalition is bringing 350 parent and community leaders to represent the roughly 350 new schools created under Mayor Bloomberg’s school leadership. Last month, Elizabeth met an EBC leader, Reverend David Haberer, and took this video of him explaining why he supports mayoral control:

Then, late in the afternoon, after they get off from work, parents who support changing the school governance structure will pour into the hearing, according to April Humphrey, who organizes the Campaign for Better Schools, which is calling for more community involvement in school governance. About 150 Campaign for Better Schools supporters arrived at last week’s Bronx hearing around 5:30 p.m., Humphrey told me.

Eric Nadelstern heads the Children's First Network, which is set to expand. (Via Cody Castro)

In a quiet project that has union activists gritting their teeth with concern, the Department of Education is once again moving to reshape its own bureaucracy — this time by offering about 300 schools the option to transform the way they manage basic back-office tasks, from busing to budget planning to monitoring medical vaccinations. The change, which principals are learning about this month and which is set to begin in September, would be the third time these schools have transformed the way they work with the system bureaucracy since Mayor Bloomberg took control of the schools in 2002.

The way operational services are handled has already changed several times since 2002. When Bloomberg first took office, 32 individual district offices — plus separate offices for high schools, alternative schools, and special education schools — managed school operations. Those were replaced by six offices serving 10 regions after Schools Chancellor Joel Klein’s first reorganization of the school system, and then by a single Integrated Service Center, with five borough branches, after Klein revised the structure again in 2006. During the 2006 reorganization, instructional services were also relocated, to a group of nine support organizations from which principals now choose one.

The new format would further personalize services by expanding a model that’s been quietly piloted for the last two years under the name of the Children First Network. Rather than leaning on the imposing ISC for help writing their budgets and managing paperwork-heavy responsibilities like special education, the 90 schools in the Children First Network bypass the ISC altogether. Instead, each group of about 20 schools — the configuration known in all of the citywide support organizations as a “network” — works with a team of 13 staff members who do the same tasks performed by the ISC, but on a smaller scale.

Because these staff members focus only on the 20 schools they are assigned to, principals in the program say they are less like bureaucrats and more like partners. “I know these people really, really well. They’re not some faceless bureaucrat sitting halfway across the city that I only know through e-mail and phone calls,” said a principal in the pilot phase of the network, Michael Soet of Brooklyn’s International High School. “These are people that I really know well.”

The close attention means principals can free themselves of much of the business of running a school day to day and focus instead on the business of educating their students. Before she joined CFN, Marisol Bradbury, principal at Bedford Stuyvesant Preparatory High School, said she spent hours managing tasks unrelated to instruction. “You would have to call one person, then call someone else, and then send that person to a different office, and then that person would have to communicate with someone else,” she said. “With CFN, it’s been such a better way of living.”

Chief Schools Officer Eric Nadelstern, who launched CFN when he headed the system’s empowerment schools program and is continuing to manage it, said the satisfaction has translated into better schools. Ratings of all the school system’s roughly 70 networks of schools indicate that the first network to join CFN has risen from about the middle of the pack to the No. 1 network in the city, Nadelstern said. He said the ratings, which are based on student test scores, graduation rates, and other measures included on the school progress reports, will become public in the next few months.

The ratings are one reason Nadelstern and Klein decided to expand the pilot, which in the first two years included just four networks and was funded by a private grant from the NewSchools Venture Fund. Starting next fall, the department will open CFN up to as many as 20 networks, an expansion that could bring more than 350 schools into the program.

While Nadelstern focuses on the instructional advantages he hopes will come out of the expansion, the news of the change has created something of a frenzy among some who worry it will cause confusion of the sort that accompanied previous reorganizations of the school system’s bureaucracy — and at the worst possible time, during a budget crisis. A teachers union source who is familiar with the plan pointed out that the expansion would mean moving as many as 128 administrative staff from the ISC to networks. He said that kind of change looks unmistakably like a third reorganization of the school system. “I don’t know how else you can look at it, because you’re going to be shifting support people across the city of New York,” said the source, who spoke on condition of anonymity because negotiations are still underway with school officials.

Though the DOE has insisted the project won’t carry any new costs, and that it could even save money over time, the principals union is not yet convinced. “There is a certain amount of automatic suspicion because the DOE has spent a lot of money over time,” said Chiara Coletti, the union’s communications director. “We want them to demonstrate to us why it is cost neutral.”

Nadelstern and department officials insist that the change is not a reorganization, but rather an expansion of options. Principals already choose which instructional support system they’d like from a menu of options; now, Nadelstern says, they can also choose how they’d like to have their back-office needs supported. “Choice and competition have proven effective on the instructional side of the equation,” Nadelstern said. “We think it’s going to prove equally effective on the operational side.”