Good afternoon. I am grateful that so many of you were able to be here on such short notice to learn more about the significant reforms we are launching to improve the lives of the 1.1 million children we serve every day. These are indeed profoundly important changes that will shift the way we think about education in New York City, changes that will allow us to provide our students with the kind of education they need and deserve.
But, before I elaborate on the particulars, I want to put them in their appropriate context.
Most importantly, everything we do, every reform we undertake, every initiative we pursue is a means to an end, and that end is giving every one of our students, regardless of personal circumstances, a fair chance at a successful, fulfilling, productive life in a world that increasingly demands unprecedented levels of knowledge and competence.
Four years ago, we called our plan “Children First” for a reason. We inherited a system too often characterized by bureaucratic inertia and special interest politics. It was unstable, chaotic and, far too often put the needs of adults ahead of the interests of children. We set out to reverse that – Children First -- and we did. We created systemwide coherence and stability with a new streamlined management structure, set tough academic standards, developed a core curriculum in reading and math, built the nation’s finest Leadership Academy, put parent coordinators in every school, ended social promotion, opened almost 200 well-functioning secondary schools, launched the first wave of Empowerment Schools, and began holding everyone in the system accountable for results.
And it worked, thanks to the extraordinary efforts of our great teachers, principals and administrators. By every objective measure, our students have made real progress. As we had hoped, it worked in a second way as well. By bringing order and stability to the system, we created the necessary conditions from which to move forward – the solid platform from which we can now launch the next phase of reforms that promise not only continued progress, but progress at the accelerated pace and still higher levels our children deserve.
Our efforts, then and now, have been built around four simple beliefs.
First, from the very outset of our work five years ago, we fundamentally rejected “incrementalism” as a strategy – a better program here, a little tinkering there. Across this great country, we’ve been doing just that in education for at least 30 years. And it has failed -- to our shame as a nation. By any measure, we have made strong gains since Mayor Bloomberg exhibited the uncommon courage of asking for control of – and accountability for – New York City’s schools. But how can we be anything other than bold when 140,000 of our 16-21 year old students have dropped out or are about to, when more than 60% of our eighth graders are still not reading or doing math at grade level, or when the average African American, Latino and low-income high school student performs several grade levels below their peers and end up with only one in four getting a Regents Diploma?
Second
, I fundamentally reject the notion that the challenges of urban education are insurmountable in light of failures endemic to our society or the difficult circumstances surrounding the lives of many students. That argument, put forward by many, serves only to breed low expectations and a culture of excuses. It allows educators at all levels to say “we did our job” even if children fail – on the perverse theory that it is the children who are the problem. It is also flatly incorrect. I invite anyone to visit Bronx Aerospace Academy or the Patrick F. Daly School in Brooklyn or any of our charter schools run by KIPP, Achievement First, Uncommon Schools, Village Academies or Carl Icahn. These and other schools are a powerful rebuff to those who would maintain that schools serving economically disadvantaged children are destined to fail.
Third, I fundamentally reject the notion that we should ask our great educators to succeed with children but deny them the authority and resources to craft the most effective path to success. A system that spends countless millions “on behalf of” schools rather than letting educators spend it as they think most effective; a system that restricts their discretion at virtually every turn, and then holds them responsible for failure – ultimately will not and cannot succeed.
Fourth, I fundamentally reject the notion that education, unlike every single other domain in American life, is not compatible with serious and meaningful accountability at every level. Among the most profound of all the many tragedies that have befallen American public education over the decades is the view that education is somehow different, that compensation must be lock step, that the enterprise of teaching is not amenable to financial rewards, and that virtually every poor performing adult is remediable.
These then are the four principles that provide the connective tissue of the Children First reforms as they have evolved and as they will continue to evolve.
And they are working. Since Mayor Bloomberg and I took responsibility for the City’s public schools:
· The percent of fourth-graders passing state reading exams has increased by about 12 percentage points, compared to 4 points in the rest of the state.
· The percent of fourth-graders passing state math exams has increased by 19 points, compared to a 5-point gain by students in the rest of the state.
· Our graduation rate has increased by more than 7 percentage points to the highest level it’s been since we started recording it.
This is all good news—and I thank and congratulate the teachers, principals and parents who helped us achieve these real gains. We’ve turned the corner, and are eager to move forward.
But we have a long way to go. Too many of our children still are not receiving the education they need to succeed—or even survive—in the 21st Century economy. When one in four African American and Latino students receive a Regents Diploma, we cannot be content with the status quo.
And we must always, always remember that delay is measured in human lives. The mission of public education is not an abstraction to be judged in theoretical debates. It is measured in the real lives of real children. This nation is premised on the ideal of “equality of opportunity,” and public education is indeed the great equalizer. Every child -- rich or poor, black, Latino or white, native born or not -- that we fail to launch into life positioned to participate in the American dream gives lie to that ideal. The human stakes are too high for complacency or self-congratulation.
We must move forward with resolve, knowing that it is far easier to criticize from the sidelines than to actually move an organization; knowing that all transformations meet with powerful resistance from those who have a stake in preserving the old order; and, knowing that it is as certain as the sun will rise tomorrow, that we will make mistakes along the way, and that adjustments will be necessary and appropriate as we go forward.
But we cannot be daunted by any of this. The challenge is too urgent. The need too great.
With this as background, let me then turn to the reforms announced yesterday. While each is part of an integrated whole, it is helpful to discuss them in three “buckets,” which I will call: 1) Empowerment; 2) Accountability; and 3) Fair Student Funding.
EMPOWERMENT
Last year 332 principals stepped up to a very simple challenge: In exchange for agreeing to become accountable for significant gains in student achievement, they would be given substantially greater authority over their schools: In essence, we stripped dollars from the bureaucracy, gave it directly to the schools, and said to them, “YOU decide how best to spend it. YOU are in a far better position than distant administrators to make the 1000 decisions that add up to making a great school. So long as you agree to be strictly accountable for your students’ success, YOU are in the driver’s seat.”
We called these schools “Empowerment Schools,” and I am pleased to report that they are off to a strong start.
Yesterday, the Mayor announced a significant expansion of Empowerment in three important ways: First, starting next year ALL of our schools will be given the power to select the support system that they believe will best enable them to succeed for their students. Second, we are accelerating the process by which we are reducing the size and cost of the central bureaucracy and providing those resources directly to schools. Third, we are providing additional supports to enable principals to select and retain the best teachers possible for their students.
Starting with the first:
All schools need support and assistance from people outside their building, with professional training, for example. Schools are by far in the best position to know what supports they need to serve their students. Some will want high levels of support – intensive professional development or mentoring for their teachers, for example. Some will want support tailored to a particular focus or need, their theme, curricular offering or culture. For example, a Communications or Arts oriented school may need have highly focused and particularized needs. In order to ensure that the support from outside the building is consistent with the priorities and focus inside the building, school leaders need the ability to choose the kind of support they need.
And that is exactly what we will do.
Starting in the 2007-08 school year, all principals, not just those leading Empowerment Schools, will have the power to partner with the support organization that, in their judgment as leaders and educators, will put their schools in the best possible position to meet their ambitious student achievement goals.
Leaders will have three options.
They can become an Empowerment School, which features:
- Greater authority over key educational decisions
- More resources and much greater discretion over their budgets,
- Fewer administrative requirements – less reporting and paperwork
- A leaner administrative support structure.
They can choose to partner with a Learning Support Organization (LSO)
In place of the 10 Regions, four of our most accomplished Regional Superintendents will develop customized support organizations with which any school – regardless of location – may elect to partner.
These great leaders have been given the funds and the discretion to build support organizations that they believe will be most attractive to schools or even a particular subset of schools such as high schools.
I am pleased to announce the appointment of Kathleen Cashin, Judy Chin, Marcia Lyles, and Laura Rodriguez to the critical leadership positions of designing, building and leading these new Leadership Support Organizations.
Lastly, principals can choose to partner with an external Partnership Support Organization (PSO). We know from our experience that these groups have much to offer. They are unafraid to innovate and willing to challenge orthodoxies. So . . . , if principals believe that bringing in support and expertise from outside the DOE is the key to their students’ success, why in the world shouldn’t they have that option as well?
Partners might include any of the non-profit intermediary organizations that are already working with many of our schools.
They might also include other non-profits or colleges and universities.
Through a Request for Proposal Process, we will screen prospective partners and develop a menu of DOE authorized Partnership Support Organizations from which principals may choose.
Under all the support options from which our principals may now choose the following will apply:
The Department of Education will continue to set and enforce academic standards, develop rigorous curricula, and hold schools to a common and demanding set of accountabilities.
All employment decisions, including whether to hire or terminate principals, remain with the DOE, and all collective bargaining agreements continue to apply.
32 Community Superintendents will retain all the rights and authority required by law and will report directly to me.
All schools must comply with city, state and federal law.
I will retain the right to intervene in a school, regardless of its choice of support partner, if things are headed in the wrong direction.
And we will continue to provide the basic systems (financial, human resources, data and communications) to serve schools so they don’t have to reinvent their own infrastructure or lose the advantages of scale.
In sum, no longer will we tell principals what we think they need – whether they want it or not. Let’s instead unleash the creative power of our great leaders and educators by letting them select the tools and support they want to do great things for students.
The second feature of Empowerment is measured in Dollars and Cents.
Money matters. To be sure, in public education, as elsewhere, it must be spent wisely to make a difference. But let’s not let that obvious qualification obscure the basic point. It follows that the more resources schools control, the greater ability they have to craft and execute a customized plan to raise student performance.
That is why, in Mayor Bloomberg’s first term we redirected more than $200 million from the educational bureaucracy to schools and classrooms. Last January, the Mayor promised to similarly cut and redirect an additional $200 million. And we are well on our way to meeting that goal, with another $89 million achieved this year alone -- and $40 million more identified for next year. The process continues aggressively.
The third feature of Empowerment concerns the single most important factor that makes a great school great: The quality of its teachers, the extraordinary men and women who every day give their all to make a difference for our students. My respect and admiration for these heroes could not be greater. The vast majority of the 80,000 teachers in our schools are hard working, competent and committed. Our challenge is to make sure that all students are taught by successful teachers.
We know how important good teachers are. Research convincingly shows that effective teaching is the single most important factor separating student success and failure. If school leaders are truly to be empowered – and held accountable for results -- they must be given broad flexibility to recruit and keep the best teachers possible. We have already taken several important steps towards that end:
- A 43% increase in teacher salaries, making it easier to attract and retain the best educators for our children.
- The end of the practice of “bumping” or “force placing,” which previously had required principals to hire teachers even if they were not qualified or a good fit for the school.
- A $15,000 housing allowance to help recruit teachers in shortage areas such as math, science and special education.
- A Lead Teacher program, which allows us to reward teachers with an additional $10,000 a year to mentor and coach other teachers.
But we must do even more if our schools are to be empowered to build the best team possible to educate our children. That’s why we are putting forward two important initiatives to support that critical objective:
First, we intend to make tenure a well-deserved honor, not a routine right. Today tenure is nearly automatic. About 99% of teachers receive it after three years as a matter of course. Indeed, it is the “default mode.” If no action is taken, a probationary teacher is awarded tenure automatically. We want as many teachers as possible to become tenured, but because that status makes it very difficult to remove a teacher for poor performance, we want to make sure that teachers earn it with good teaching not just the passage of time. Accordingly, principals will receive a new set of supports and tools to ensure that this decision is made in a rigorous, thoughtful, and fact-based manner. We look forward to collaborating with the UFT in this effort.
Because an affirmative decision on tenure affects not only an individual school but the entire system, we will also insist that a principal’s recommendation be reviewed by appropriate personnel outside the school, notably the Community Superintendent. Indeed, so critical is the tenure decision that Mayor Bloomberg will meet annually with each group of newly-tenured teachers to celebrate their accomplishment.
Second, in addition to adding an important measure of rigor to tenure decisions, we also will build on a provision in our recent contract with the UFT and provide school leaders with additional supports when necessary to remove poor performing teachers.
The vast majority of teachers are doing a good, and often superb, job; But those who do not, stand in the way of student success. And, as teachers frequently tell me, they also undermine the morale of other hardworking teaching professionals in the school.
Today only 1.2% of our tens of thousands of tenured teachers receive an unsatisfactory rating. Too often, our principals don’t bother giving an honest rating because, in the past, it hasn’t led anywhere; because the removal process is a waste of time; or because the path of least resistance is to counsel a teacher to move to another school.
We are changing that.
We have agreed with the United Federation of teachers to participate in a new peer intervention program for teachers who are struggling and are working to put it in place. We will also initiate two other kinds of supports:
- A small team of retired principals will help teachers improve their work in the classroom or, if necessary, document continued poor performance.
- In cases where remediation fails, we will give principals additional support to help them with the process of removing our most ineffective performers.
These interventions will send an essential message to everyone: Results matter.
We must be fair, but rigorous, in our tenure process as well as in our efforts to remove the poorest performers from our classrooms. But we must never lose sight of the reality that the overwhelming majority of our teachers are highly competent and critical to the success of a school. In good schools, teachers and principals are aligned in a common mission. Great leaders build great teams. Principals who are arbitrary or unconnected with their faculty will not succeed and ultimately will face the consequences of failure.
Because of our abiding respect for our great teachers, we are looking for new and important ways to make sure that their wisdom becomes an even more important part of every school’s culture. In addition to working with the UFT to develop the Peer Intervention program noted above, we will also be implementing “360 Degree Reviews,” a well accepted practice through which an organization solicits employees’ views about the strengths and weaknesses of their managers. When done right, this is an extremely productive practice through which organizations invariably get better. Teachers are professionals. Their views on how a school is being run are critically important. We need to formalize the process by which those views are expressed and properly considered.
Accountability
Thus far I have been detailing reforms that generally fall in the first “bucket,” that of empowerment: Let me now turn to the second, accountability -- the partner of empowerment in driving student achievement. Just as it is unfair to hold principals accountable for results without giving them the authority to deliver them, it is a mistake to give schools broad discretion and not hold them strictly accountable for results.
Our accountability system has three principal components, which have been tested this year, and will now be implemented citywide.
First, parents are our partners in helping make sure that schools succeed. To be effective advocates for their children, they need good information. Making school reports more thorough, comprehensive, and accessible, as well as easier to understand, will help parents make better choices for their children.
Accordingly, every school will be receiving a Progress Report with an overall letter grade (A – F) and subscores that compare it both to similar schools and the city’s best schools. The grades will be based on performance (where a schools stands in absolute terms), progress (whether and how fast a school’s students are improving) and items related to school environment (such as attendance and safety).
In addition, starting this year all schools are being evaluated by skilled educators who spend up to three days observing teaching and interviewing the principal, teachers, parents and students. These “Quality Reviews” are summarized in a report that is also made available to parents.
Second, we are offering a broader set of tools to enable educators to accurately measure and analyze how well our students are learning – and to adjust instruction accordingly.
We are providing all schools with periodic assessments, diagnostic tools administered over the course of the year that will help teachers adjust instruction in time to make a difference.
We are also launching a powerful new achievement data system – ARIS. Principals, teachers and parents will have at their fingertips information that will enable them to answer such questions as:
· How well are students doing in each area (fractions, vocabulary, etc.) – sliced and diced by student, grade, school, and classroom?
· Are trends going up or down?
· What teaching practices are making difference for children and which are not?
This online system will track progress in real time and take the guesswork out of what good teaching looks like – thus enabling teachers to tailor instruction to the particular needs of each student.
Third, to be sure that these powerful new tools change behavior, it is important that educators, parents, and the public know that we are serious about rewarding success and dealing with failure.
As I’ve said, all schools will be graded based on their success with students. Those with the top ratings will receive bonuses for serving as demonstration sites for others. Top schools will be eligible as well for additional funds for struggling students they accept from poor performing schools. And those schools identified as the poorest performers face leadership changes and ultimately restructuring or even closure.
Our accountability systems are equally important for traditionally high performing schools to challenge them to reach even higher planes of success. By measuring real progress, they will also serve to expose those schools that have been resting on their reputations even when their achievement data no longer measures up.
For too long, school systems have embraced the concept of accountability but not had the resolve to act on it. I want to assure you that this will be different in our city.
FAIR STUDENT FUNDING
Let me now turn from Empowerment and Accountability, to the third major reform initiative: building a funding system that is fairer, clearer, and better at helping kids achieve.
Despite real improvements over the last four years, today we still have a funding system that falls short of those goals. Today, we send money to schools under 90 separate funding formulas. What is worse, the biggest pots of money follow the weakest logic. They are distributed largely based on historical patterns. That means they carry forward decisions made based on long-ago political deals, not the current needs of our kids.
And the results are plain to see. Take two schools with similar enrollments, about 550 kids. They’ve both got high poverty rates, over 80%. One school gets about $5500 per student in general education tax dollars. The other school gets about $3500. That means one school gets $1 million more in general tax dollars than the other. And there is no good reason for it.
This is not about rich versus poor, Brooklyn versus the Bronx. This is about senseless disadvantages that strike every community and every corner of our great city.
The status quo isn’t fair to the kids at the schools that end up with fewer teachers or programs, or both. The status quo also undermines our accountability system, where too often we hear officials excusing their low performance based on money—even though money may have nothing to do with it.
Instead of proliferating an unjust and unfair status quo, we propose a simple reform called Fair Student Funding. And it is really simple. From here on out, we’re going to fund the people who matter most. We’re going to fund the kids.
At every school, every student will carry a base level of tax levy funding based on grade level. Then, on top of that, we’ll offer additional funds to kids who cost more to educate based on their unique characteristics: because they are poor, learning English, performing poorly, or in certain specialized schools, like our testing high schools. So a 7th grader might carry $3500, plus an extra $300 if she is poor, and an extra $1000 if she reads poorly on the day she entered middle school.
So under fair student funding, two schools with the same mixes of kids will get the same amounts of city tax dollars. (In addition, they’ll also continue to get federal and state categorical dollars, like Title I, as they had before) It is so simple that we’ll eventually be able to explain to principals most of their budgets on one clean page.
Simplicity and fairness are virtues, but they are both means to our ultimate end: student achievement. Our new approach does so:
· By taking away the excuse that unfair funding has forced low achievement,
· By building in incentives for schools that succeed in helping our lowest performing students; and
· By laying the foundation for greater parental choice among our public schools in the future.
Fair student funding is an exciting vision, but it is also a vision we will achieve one step at a time. We are going to implement it gradually and flexibly, over a period of several years. We are going to avoid drastic swings and do this in a way that protects the important programs in all of our schools.
And we are going to move forward with the benefit of the views of parents teachers and other stakeholders. Starting next week we will be initiating an extensive schedule of community engagement through which I have no doubt that this initiative will be refined and improved.
CONCLUSION
Let me end with an obvious point: The changes that we have discussed today will not be easy. They will not be painless. And they will not be without controversy. But they are necessary for our kids, our city, and our nation. The stakes are too high for timidity or tinkering.
I ask for your support as we move forward together.
Thank you very much.