Q. What would you say is the theme for this year? What can we expect?
A. I think the theme for this school year is “building on success.” Last year was the best school year this City has seen in anyone’s memory. Our graduation rate went up. Our students’ math scores, English Language Arts scores, science scores, and social studies scores all went up. Now we’ve got to build on these successes using our accountability tools, our achievement reporting system, and our link to parents so that they get the information they need about their children and so that we bring them in as really effective partners in educating our kids. In a tough budget climate, we’re going to have to learn to do more with less—but I think we can do it.
Q. This year marked your eighth first day of school. What is the most significant difference between your first day of school in 2002 and your first day of school in 2009?
A. I think a lot about the differences. I think the school system when I started was much more fragmented into separate districts. People really didn’t see themselves as part of the New York City public school system. In the beginning, for example, we had teachers go for weeks and weeks and weeks without getting their paychecks. We had lots of uncertified teachers.
Now, that has all changed. We now have five, six, seven people applying for every vacancy. Our teachers get paid immediately. We’ve got a new crew of principals who, I think, are much more powerfully committed to school leadership, committed to student achievement.
Overall I think there’s a sense of accomplishment in the system that I didn’t feel when I first got here. When I first got here, I thought there was a kind of resignation—he’s another chancellor, he’ll be here like the last few, a couple years, move on, don’t worry about it. Now I think people feel like they are part of something, which is a school system that’s been recognized as the best performing urban school system in America. We won the Broad Prize. It’s a school system that’s been highlighted by President Obama’s Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, who came to New York to give us a shout out on the work that we’re doing.
I think there’s really a sense of pride and a sense of renewed commitment. I’ve spent time with a lot of principals over the past several days, talking to them about the school year, and there’s optimism and a sense that we can do it.
Q. Let’s go back a little bit further. What are your first day of school memories?
A. It’s not a little further back: it’s a lot further back. I can’t say I remember all 13 of them, but I do remember, particularly in the earlier years, the enormous excitement. I remember thinking: “Who’s my teacher going to be? Which kids will be in my class? Which kids will be in another class?” When I was in fourth or fifth grade, there’d be six or seven different classes. In those days, there were a lot more kids in each class; fourth grade classes had 32 or 34 students.
I remember how proud I was that all my notebooks were new, and that they had that new notebook smell. And I had all of my pencils sharpened, and I remember having my sharpener. And I remember that as I got older, I’d get a compass so that I could draw circles.
But nothing was more important to me than who my teacher was going to be. Was she going to be strict? Or was she not going to be as strict? I remember in the first grade I had this teacher—her name was Mrs. Zimmerman, I think. Boy was she a toughie, I will tell you. I came home and told my parents there would be no fooling around that year.
So those are the things that stick out. As you get older, you know the kids in your high school so there’s not that same anticipation that you had when you’re young.
Q. How can parents stay connected to what’s happening at their children’s schools? What information is available to parents?
A. I think there are several key things.ARIS, which is short for Achievement Reporting and Information System, has a tool called ARIS Parent Link now. You can access more information about your children than ever before—how they are doing early in the year so that you can make sure they stay on track. You can find out attendance information. Particularly as your children get older, it’s interesting to check if they were actually in school, and you can now find updated information online anytime. You can look at what patterns are occurring, what skills your child is performing well and what skills she’s not. Also, when you go to meet with your child’s teachers early in the school year or even later in the school year, if you have the same information about your child that her teacher has, that can help you focus much more on building on her strengths and figuring out what challenges your child faces.
So ARIS Parent Link is a big new addition. Last year, we had hundreds of thousands of parents going online, and I urge them this year to get even more involved and to spend more time using these resources.
Q. What would your parents have thought if they would have had access to all the information that parents have access to today?
A. Everyone always says that ARIS Parent Link is good for parents, not so good for the kids. My parents may have found out about the conduct issues that my teachers might have raised that they otherwise wouldn’t have heard about until we had what we called “open schools week.”
They would have seen how I was doing on my preliminary exams. They would have seen how my penmanship was an area in which I could have improved. They would have seen which reading skills that I needed to develop. I was always stronger in math than I was in reading. And I think they would have found out things like that and maybe they would have focused more on reading earlier in my education. There’s a lot of information. I hope they wouldn’t have found any absences that they didn’t expect.
Q. What are you most excited about for this upcoming school year?
A. I think we’ve come through the discussion and debate on mayoral control, which the legislature reauthorized this summer. I think that’s a real vote of confidence in the work our teachers and our principals are doing. I think one of the great things about last year is—and we have a lot of data to prove this—that our schools are really getting good results.
We need to go a lot further, but it’s really important to celebrate the good results and to build on them. And I have the sense that our teachers, our principals, and our assistant principals feel like they know how to take this to a new level. They’re excited about the work. They’re happy about their progress reports because they reflect the progress they’re making. So, to me, this is a time when you say we’ve really focused on achievement, we’ve gotten achievement, now we have to build on achievement because we still have a long, long way to go for our children.