Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg laid out ambitious new plans yesterday to overhaul the school system by giving principals more power and autonomy, requiring teachers to undergo rigorous review in order to gain tenure and revising the school financing system that has allowed more-experienced teachers to cluster in affluent areas.
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The plan, which would also increase the role of private groups, represents the most sweeping changes to the system since the mayor reorganized it after gaining control of the schools in 2002. Although the mayor has chosen to spend some of the city’s current surplus on tax cuts, he said he could invest more in schools with money promised by Gov. Eliot Spitzer to equalize state education aid across New York.
The administration can undertake most of the education measures unilaterally, without City Council or union acquiescence.
Mr. Bloomberg presented the plans with great fanfare in his annual State of the City speech, which he gave this year at the New York City College of Technology, in Brooklyn.
In the midst of his second and final term, Mr. Bloomberg also offered a raft of new proposals, including curtailing labor costs by forcing the city’s unions to negotiate pension benefits as part of the collective bargaining process.
Responding to an increase in complaints against the police, and as the outcry over the fatal police shooting of Sean Bell has continued, Mr. Bloomberg said he would provide more money for the Civilian Complaint Review Board, which investigates reports of police abuses. And he called for reforming the “pay-to-play” culture of government by banning political contributions from people who do business with the city.
But in a speech packed with new antipoverty, criminal justice and tax-cutting measures, including reducing property taxes and eliminating the sales tax on clothing, the mayor’s focus on education was the most far-reaching and politically contentious element. This time, he seems intent on carrying out structural changes that his aides said would address inequities that they maintain are at the heart of troubled schools, particularly the imbalance in the quality of teaching and administration between schools in rich and poor neighborhoods.
“During our first term, we brought stability, accountability and standards to a school system where they were sorely lacking,” Mr. Bloomberg said. “With this strong foundation now laid, we can take the next steps forward, creating great schools where all students can succeed.”
Randi Weingarten, the president of the United Federation of Teachers, raised concerns about the mayor’s tenure proposal, calling it “a vital protection for teachers to be able to do their job.” She also said the mayor should focus more on reducing class size and giving teachers more latitude on instruction.
The proposals would overhaul the present system of near-automatic tenure for teachers after three years; requiring them to be more rigorously evaluated and actually recommended for tenure by principals.
At the same time, the administration is moving to extend the “empowerment school” concept across the system, eliminating the 10 regional offices and making principals far more responsible for hiring, teacher training, curriculum and budgets.
In keeping with the focus on accountability, Mr. Bloomberg said, principals will also be evaluated more thoroughly, with public letter-graded reports based largely on their students’ annual standardized test scores.
Finally, Mr. Bloomberg’s plan includes changing the way money is distributed to schools, to ensure that funds are based on the number of students and their particular needs, to close gaps in per-student spending in different schools that can run as high as $2,000 per child, he said. Under current procedures, each school is given enough money to cover the salaries of all its teachers . If a school has many long-time teachers, who earn more, its per-pupil spending is greater.
In doing so, Bloomberg administration officials said, the intent was to make the system fairer and to help improve schools that often lack resources and to allow administrators to use those resources as they see fit. The shift is partly designed to help schools that serve large numbers of poor students to attract more experienced and highly paid teachers who often gravitate to affluent areas.
As if to pre-empt concerns in neighborhoods like the Upper West Side and Park Slope, where some schools have high payrolls, Mr. Bloomberg said that the administration would take the new approach “flexibly, and phase it in over time to make sure that important programs we have now and services for our kids that we have are not jeopardized.”
