Dear Colleagues,

As the 2007-08 school year comes to a close, I want to thank you for your hard work, your focus, and your dedication to the students of New York City. Whether you support students in or outside of the classroom, you have played a key role in our students' success.

This afternoon, I attended the graduation ceremony of the Bronx Lab School, one of our new small schools. It was the school’s first-ever graduation—and let me tell you: it was a historic day for the school and for our City. Many of the students at Bronx Lab are what we call “high-needs” students—they are poor, their parents didn’t go to college, they are African American or Latino. But today, four years after these students entered high school, almost 100% of them graduated and are going onto college. Sitting in the auditorium, surrounded by parents, siblings, grandparents, teachers, and others, I could feel the pride and love for the students. And it was clear that the graduates realized that for everything they achieved, they had many to thank. They literally gave their principal a standing ovation and cried tears of thanks to their teachers. Don’t let anybody tell you that good schools can’t overcome great odds and effectively educate our high-needs students. It was the hard work and perseverance of educators that allowed these young people to overcome challenges, learn, achieve, and graduate. Today, we should all be very proud of these students and the many others like them across our City. They are why we do what we do, and their success is our success.

As a City, we have made real progress this year. We’re setting high standards and schools are rising to the challenge, focusing every ounce of effort on helping students succeed. This work is paying off. This week, as you know, we announced that our students have made substantial, consistent progress in reading and math this year, building on gains since we started in 2002. Today, New York City students are steadily gaining on their peers in other parts of New York State, and we are making progress in narrowing the unacceptable racial achievement gap. This work helped us to win the 2007 Broad Prize for Urban Education, which was announced at the start of this school year. This was a tremendous honor that showed leading experts in education reform are taking notice of the remarkable things we are doing as a school system.

I'd like to thank you for your role in this year’s success. I’m looking forward to working with you next year—building on and accelerating this year’s progress. Best wishes for a wonderful summer.

Sincerely,

Joel I. Klein