New York City Schools Win $500,000 Broad Prize

Mayor Michael Bloomberg

Bloomberg's takeover split Bushwick into four smaller high schools: the Academy of Urban Planning, the Bushwick School for Social Justice, the New York Harbor School, and the Academy for Environmental Leadership. They each occupy a different floor of the original Bushwick building, and each has its own principal, cadre of teachers, and specialized curriculum.

Monique Darrisaw, the principal of the urban planning academy, recalls crying the first year she moved into her new role. She and the other administrators faced a wall of opposition from parents and students who were skeptical about the new schools. But with only around 500 students in grades nine through 12, Darrisaw and her staff—like the other three "Bushwick" schools—have been able to forge closer bonds with students. In these more intimate environments, kids are embracing themes of social justice and environmental leadership and picking up skills like computer graphing and mapping that they can use after graduation. The smaller school size lets Darrisaw get close to her students. A former teenage mother herself, Darrisaw attends her pupils' baby showers. She and her staff sometimes go shopping for clothes when students can't afford a prom dress. When a student recently marched into her office, she asked "Why didn't I see you last week?" The boy offered an appearance-based excuse—"I didn't get a haircut." Darrisaw deftly countered by reminding him that he could have called her cellphone and she would have gotten one of her aides to give him a haircut.

The smaller school size is intended to do more than just let the faculty get to know its students. Under the city's plan to give greater autonomy to principals, Darrisaw, like other principals, is under intense pressure to raise attendance, test scores, and graduation rates. Beginning this year, schools will receive grades on a "report card." If Darrisaw's school fails to pass muster, she could lose her job. While Darrisaw doesn't approach the role of principal as a CEO, as the mayor likes to say, she nevertheless thinks principals should be held accountable for every student. "I definitely feel a lot of pressure," she says. "But I feel kids deserve the best, and if I'm not giving them the best, then I should leave."

Ernest Logan, president of the city's union for school administrators, has embraced reform under mayoral control but worries that not all schools are equipped to handle the weight of them. As examples, he cites principals who now can hire their own teachers but don't have a human resources staff to help with the paperwork, and principals who are in charge of classroom spending but lack the training and understanding of the budget process. Under the mayor's Leadership Academy, about 160 new principals are running schools.

"We embrace the idea of accountability," Logan says. "But one of the concerns I have is, if you're off track, who helps you get on track?"

The pressure has also trickled down to teachers. New York City employs nearly 80,000 teachers. Tim Evans, who has taught social studies for four years at the urban planning academy, keeps track of every student's progress on practice exams on spreadsheets that tell him about their strengths and weaknesses on a variety of topics. "I don't like it," he says. "Not because it's more work for me, but because I view education as a qualitative profession that's about relationships and curiosity and questions. The new philosophy is trying to quantify everything. [The chancellor's office] doesn't care if a girl got into a fight with her mother the night before."

"I make no allusions that I don't teach to the test," he says. "I do. Because I know that is how Ms. Darrisaw is going to be held accountable and that is how I'm going to be held accountable."

Indeed, many of the criticisms of Bloomberg's reforms challenge whether its infusion of businesslike accountability comes at the expense of the experience of education. Bloomberg's administration also has come under attack for making decisions without enough input from parents and teachers—such as ordering a ban on cellphones in schools that parents say keeps them from reaching their kids in emergencies and, for a while, forcing all schools to follow a rigid set of practices that even mandated how books should be shelved.