Report: City to resurrect special district for struggling schools

The education department is looking to resurrect a special district designed to support struggling schools, according to a news report, a signal that the new administration is holding to its pledge to flood the lowest performing schools with resources before it considers closing them.

The city is forming a plan to group about a dozen struggling high schools under a single district superintendent and offer them special support, according to the New York Post. Another cohort of elementary and middle schools would be kept separate but also receive extra support.

Chalkbeat could not confirm the report, and the Department of Education did not respond to questions on the plan. The United Federation of Teachers, which championed the now-defunct district that the new plan reportedly draws from, declined to comment.

Chancellor Carmen Fariña’s major school-improvement plan so far has been a partnership program that would group especially strong schools with schools that are weaker in specific areas to share effective practices and ramp up training for all teachers.

The new teachers contract also contains several provisions meant to boost schools, such as more time for professional development and extra pay for teachers who take on additional duties or work in hard-to-staff schools. Fariña has also promised to give greater assistance to middle schools.

But Fariña has yet to describe how the department will approach long-struggling schools that need intensive support. She has been critical of school closure, a signature tactic of the Bloomberg administration that Mayor Bill de Blasio has denounced, and said the department will not issue A-to-F report card grades in favor of more nuanced metrics.

De Blasio’s 2013 campaign platform called for an “early warning system” to identify schools that need immediate help and a “Strategic Staffing Initiative” that would replace the principals of the most challenged schools and send in a team of experienced administrators and teachers. The struggling-schools district would incorporate elements of de Blasio’s plan, according to the Post.

If the department established such a district, it would harken back to one that former Chancellor Rudy Crew created in 1996 to turn around 10 struggling schools, which eventually grew to include 58 schools before former Chancellor Joel Klein dissolved it in 2003.

Schools in the so-called Chancellor’s District received a slew of supports: smaller class sizes, longer days and years, new curriculum materials, more professional development, and extra staff. Teachers who worked in some of the schools received bonus pay. As those supports were rolled out, the Chancellor’s District schools eventually spent $2,400 more per student than the city’s other struggling schools.

The District schools achieved some limited success, with fourth-grade students’ reading scores outpacing those of other schools on the state’s list of struggling schools, according to a 2004 report. That report did not evaluate the 10 high schools in the program.

The UFT and others celebrated those results and pointed to the District as an alternative to school closure. But critics said they did not justify the amount of resources devoted to the schools.

Eric Nadelstern, an education department official under the Bloomberg administration, said the past program amounted to “micromanaging” low-performing schools, rather than overhauling them. He said that in the current administration were to group together low-performing schools it would conflict with its other strategy of partnering high-performing schools with others.

“Putting all your lowest-performing schools in the same jurisdiction is a terrible idea,” he said. “It’s like a remedial class for principals of schools.”