A Troubled Tenure
In City School System, Hopes That New Leader Can Steer Right Course
By SHARON OTTERMAN and JAVIER C. HERNANDEZ
Published: April 8, 2011
At dozens of struggling schools, New York City education officials have yet to apply for federal money that could help turn them around. Some principals are complaining about reorganizations that have left them without sufficient guidance. Charter school leaders are upset about fights sparked by where the city is placing them. A new teacher evaluation system, long discussed, is mired in negotiations with the teachers’ union, and its point person has just resigned.
Robert Stolarik for The New York Times
Ruby Washington/The New York Times
Cathleen Black quit Thursday.
“There will certainly be challenges, difficulties and setbacks along the way,” Mr. Walcott said, “but I am confident that by working together, we will come out stronger on the other side.”
But Mr. Walcott will have more than just budget cuts to handle. On a number of fronts, people inside and outside the Education Department report, the school system has been adrift.
He is inheriting an enormous agency, the city’s largest, and some of its problems date back years. But the brief, unsteady tenure of his predecessor, Cathleen P. Black, made the situation worse, education observers said.
“Anybody working on any plan for the last two and a half months had no assurance that it would ever get done rather than just having dust gather on top of it,” said Joe Williams, the executive director of Democrats for Education Reform, who works closely with schools and education officials. “Not having a leader there makes them wonder why they are showing up every day to this giant bureaucratic blob.
“They are trying to change the world, and they can’t do it when there’s no one steering the ship.”
Two top education aides complained that under Ms. Black, the lack of a clear agenda from on high had begun to create inefficiencies in the department. Her predecessor, Joel I. Klein, liked to make quick, forceful decisions. Under Ms. Black, proposals meandered through layers of review: Ms. Black, her two powerful deputies, and City Hall officials, including Mr. Walcott and another deputy mayor, Howard Wolfson.
Amid the confusion, several proposals were delayed, including the effort to secure grants for school improvement. The aides spoke under condition of anonymity because the mayor has asked that officials move past criticism of Ms. Black’s tenure. An effort to obtain a response from her on Friday night to their remarks was unsuccessful.
Some officials worried that the momentum of Mr. Klein’s reform agenda, including his push to rid the system of subpar teachers, was beginning to falter. Without the presence of Eric Nadelstern, a deputy chancellor who retired after Ms. Black’s appointment, the department seemed increasingly unfamiliar with the needs of individual schools.
Ms. Black often deferred to Shael Polakow-Suransky, the chief academic officer, and Sharon Greenberger, the chief operating officer, giving them so much power that education officials jokingly referred to them as “chancellor,” the two aides said.
Meetings were rife with jockeying as senior officials tried to steer Ms. Black toward their view, the aides said. Mr. Polakow-Suransky and Ms. Greenberger served as gatekeepers, deciding which proposals to endorse and which to scuttle.
Mr. Polakow-Suransky, the acting chancellor until Mr. Walcott receives a waiver, disagreed on Friday with those who complained that the department had lost its moorings. “There have been frustrating moments, and there have been ups and downs,” Mr. Polakow-Suransky said of the last few months. But there is also, he said, “real excitement and a sense of possibility.”
“People are working hard on a lot of different fronts,” he continued. “The fact that Dennis has taken over, that is only going to add to it.”
One school in limbo, the Cobble Hill School of American Studies in Brooklyn, was supposed to be improving by now. It is part of President Obama’s program to turn around failing schools, and New York City is viewed as a national model for urban districts. But when state reviewers visited in January, they reported that “evidence of teaching and learning was not apparent in the majority of the classrooms.”
The lack of progress at the school is a result of many factors, but one is the city’s slow pace in applying for federal turnaround money and hiring personnel to make it work.
“There are fights every day,” said Naya Hunt, 16, an 11th grader, at dismissal on Friday. “There was a fight just today, before we left the school.”
One man, who the police said was not a student, was led out in handcuffs shortly afterward. “It’s crazy in there,” she said.
Though state, city and union officials disagree about the cause of the slowdown, all agree that the money did not start flowing to schools until January, too late to produce change.
“Some of the schools have just decided, you know what? We are going it alone,” said Michael Mulgrew, the president of the United Federation of Teachers. “There has been no support from the Department of Education for those schools.”
At other struggling schools that could qualify, principals have received a 51-page document that asks them to come up with a plan for how they could use millions in federal funds. But they have not been told if they will be closed, forced to fire many of their teachers, or allowed to improve.
“What good is it to plan, only to have them change the game plan after a plan is written?” said the principal of a Queens high school, who shared the blueprint he was supposed to fill out. “And if we don’t get the money by July 1, or even know if we will get it by then, how will we plan for next year?” He spoke on condition of anonymity because of concerns that speaking out might have a negative impact when officials decide his school’s fate.
Among some charter school operators, there is also frustration. When new charter schools open, the Education Department guarantees most of them space.
But there have been challenges to the space allocations, brought on by flawed plans that needed to be amended due to lack of detail or typographical errors.
The problems have also meant that e-mails and phone calls are not getting returned. “I’m trying to hang a sign on a building, and the czar of signs is not answering his phone,” said the head of a high-performing network of charter schools, who asked not to be named for fear of angering the department.
At high-performing schools, the shifts at the top have not had much impact. Principals have become expert in dealing with change, from the days of community school districts, to regions, to more cutting-edge management structures like “school support organizations” and networks.
But there is also a sense of disappointment that principals who once relied on people outside the building to make them feel connected to a wider sense of mission now correspond with education bureaucrats primarily through data and documents.
“We attend to our everyday instructional life and communities, and we keep submitting the documents required of us,” said Alicja Winnicki, the principal of Public School 34, a successful school in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. “But I feel that with every reorganization we become more and more isolated. I hope that Mr. Walcott will make sure that he reaches out to us.”
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