Chancellor Black: Please Consider This

Many of those interviewed were sharply critical of the city’s formula for grading schools on a scale of A through F, and expressed hope that Ms. Black might steer the focus away from standardized tests. Others begged her to do more listening to parents, teachers and principals. One warning sign: several principals said they were afraid to be quoted. “She’s going to be my boss,” one said. “I just found out my Q.R. is at the end of January,” another said, using educrat-ese for the school evaluation process called a Quality Review. “I need her to give me advice.” ELISSA GOOTMAN?

EDWARD TOM, 40, is the founding principal of the Bronx Center for Science and Mathematics, a 430-student high school that opened in 2005 in the Morrisania section of the South Bronx.

Chancellor Black, you have many innovative, proven leaders who have ideas that they believe can help reform urban education. Many of us are looking for a forum to be able to share those ideas with you. There are so many people, and they get stopped at every door because of the bureaucracy and the politicking. If you want to create a system where it’s about great ideas and proven models, you need to open those doors.

Minimize the budget cuts that filter down to the school level. Look harder and deeper at central staffing to see if there’s more fat to cut, if there are middle-manager positions — assistant directors, deputy directors — that can be phased out.

The biggie is the progress report. You can have a school full of kids not ready for college that gets an A because it’s making progress with low-performing children.

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GREGORY M. HODGE, 57, is the longtime principal of Frederick Douglass Academy in Harlem, a selective school for grades 6 to 12.

I think it’s so important for the new chancellor to look at the richness of the school system and realize that we really need to address the question of equity. Stuyvesant is a stellar school, Bronx Science is a stellar school, Brooklyn Tech is a stellar school. But the school system is disproportionately minority, and in these schools of eliteness you have an infinitesimal percentage of children of color. There are intelligent black students, intelligent Hispanic students, that deserve the opportunity to go to a great school like Stuyvesant. The kids who are in the middle should have the opportunity to take more A. P. classes.

Another piece of advice I’d be willing to share with the chancellor is that the public school system should be at the forefront of green roofs. The D.O.E. under Ms. Black’s leadership could be on the front end of saying, “We’ve got these great school buildings and we’ve got this tremendous amount of roof space. Let’s create green roofs, green spaces that are going to be used for actual learning.”

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SAMONA JOE TAIT, 42, has been head of school since 2007 at Bronx Preparatory Charter School, which serves 700 children in 5th through 12th grades in the South Bronx.

First, figure out where the work is really being done well, whether it’s a charter school or a traditional public school. It’s the “Where would you want to send your child to school?” question. Then share that, and facilitate everyone connecting to those places. How do we begin to really connect what have been these sort of islands of success? How do we connect them to each other, and how do we connect them to the mainland? We could start by asking folks to self-identify.

What do you think is a practice that is happening in your school community that is highly effective, that is helping us to get great results with young people? Survey Monkey will get you a whole lot of rich information.

The quality of teachers that we put in front of young people is a huge, huge issue. I think one thing to do is certainly to be at the table with the deans of the schools of education and the presidents of universities, and really look at the detail of what it is we’re training people to do. I went to an Ivy League institution, got a master’s degree, and didn’t know the first thing about teaching the 12-year-olds who were sitting in front of me how to read.

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MAXINE NODEL, 47, has been principal since 2004 of Millennium Art Academy, a 500-student high school in the Soundview section of the Bronx.

I would love to see an overhaul of writing across the curriculum. I think she should have a deputy chancellor solely devoted to developmental writing. A huge percentage of our students require remedial writing courses at CUNY. She should ensure that writing is fostered in the early grades and evolved yearly, so that students can eventually handle the rigors of academic college writing. Writing requires thinking skills. If you can’t think you can’t write, and if you can’t write you can’t be successful in college.

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Black’s Appointment as Chancellor Is Contested

ALBANY — Opponents of Cathleen P. Black’s appointment as New York City schools chancellor tried to convince a judge on Thursday that the state education commissioner misinterpreted the law when he approved her selection.

At a hearing in State Supreme Court here, their lawyers argued that state law did not permit Ms. Black, who has 40 years of experience in publishing, to assume the chancellor’s job, because she had no teaching experience and no degree beyond a bachelor’s.

But lawyers for the city and the state said that the education commissioner, David M. Steiner, had the discretion to waive the traditional requirements for the job.

Justice Gerald W. Connolly gave no indication of when he would rule on the suits. Ms. Black is due to start work on Jan. 3.

Ms. Black, who was appointed last month by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg to succeed Joel I. Klein, does not have the master’s degree, graduate courses and teaching experience that state law requires chancellors to have.

State regulations allow the education commissioner to waive the law for someone who does not “meet all of the graduate course or teaching requirements” but whose “exceptional training and experience are the substantial equivalent.”

Dr. Steiner granted the waiver, citing Ms. Black’s publishing career and the city’s agreement to create a position for a senior deputy chancellor with a strong education background.

Eric J. Snyder, a lawyer from Park Slope, Brooklyn, with two children in public schools who sued to invalidate the waiver, argued that while the rules allowed Dr. Steiner to waive the requirement for graduate course work, they did not allow him to waive those for a master’s degree.

City and state lawyers argued that the language allowing Dr. Steiner to waive the graduate course requirement meant he could waive the master’s degree requirement as well, and that he had the latitude to interpret education regulations as he saw fit.

Lawyers representing other opponents of Ms. Black’s appointment who sued argued Dr. Steiner had gone beyond the law by considering the new senior deputy chancellor position when he granted Ms. Black’s waiver.

“It would be similar to someone without a license driving a car, getting stopped by the police and saying, ‘It’s O.K. My passenger has a license,’ ” said Roger S. Wareham, a lawyer for two parents who sued.

But Kelly L. Munkwitz, an assistant state attorney general, said that it was Dr. Steiner’s right to decide whether Ms. Black’s qualifications were the substantial equivalent of graduate courses and teaching experience. She said he also had the right to consider the city’s special needs.

“This is not a perfect fit; there are weaknesses,” Ms. Munkwitz said. “However, no one has disputed that she has knowledge of large, complex systems” like the New York City school system.

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Touring Schools That Work, Chancellor Says New Approach Is Needed at Those That Don’t

In the first school Cathleen P. Black visited, students in a fifth-grade classroom had one laptop apiece, from which they received individualized lessons. In the second school, for teenagers who had been on the verge of dropping out, counselors routinely show up at the homes of students if they are absent three days in a row. The third was one of four schools in a building that once housed one; students had violin and dance classes, aside from traditional subjects like history, English and math.

Ms. Black, who officially began her job as New York City schools chancellor on Monday, has been visiting schools for weeks. But the tour on Monday, more than an introduction to the system, was a tightly choreographed showcasing of the Department of Education’s biggest successes and newest programs, like using technology to help teachers in the classroom and breaking up big schools into small ones.

It was perhaps a fitting start for Ms. Black, who is taking the job with a mandate to effectively stay the course of her predecessor, and who presumably has only three years before she is replaced. She visited one school in each borough, serving different grades, most of them with similar student populations: primarily black and Latino students who qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, a snapshot of a system where minorities are the majority and poverty is pervasive.

The schools had something else in common: they had all received A’s or B’s in consecutive years in their progress reports, the measure by which the city judges schools. The only exception was the Hungerford School on Staten Island, a middle and high school for students with severe disabilities, which, like other such schools, does not yet receive letter grades.

Still, they all had something novel: about the way their teachers taught their classes, the courses they offered, or the way they prepared their students to take the next step.

Ms. Black, who was followed at one point by close to 50 reporters, photographers and videographers, as well as by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who hand-picked her for the job, was there to witness a little bit of it all.

“We must have schools that are successful or are showing promise of really turning around,” she said. “If not, we really have to take a different approach.”

At Public School 262 in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, she watched a pair of teachers guide fourth-grade students through an English lesson, in which the children learned about writing stories with a clear beginning, middle and end. At Democracy Prep Charter School in Harlem, she saw ninth-grade students learn Korean. At North Queens Community High School, she heard about the value of one-on-one counseling for students who had come close to giving up on their education.

The school’s director, Lainey Collins, told Ms. Black, “Every morning, we’re at the front door, checking them in, making sure they don’t miss school, and sometimes going after them at home to find if they don’t show up for class.”

Ms. Black replied, “Making every effort so someone doesn’t fall through the cracks.”

While Ernest Logan, president of the principals’ union, accompanied Ms. Black on her first visit, Michael Mulgrew, the teachers’ union president, did not. He engaged, instead, in his own tour, to a school on Staten Island where a possible PCB leak from light fixtures forced the closing of some classrooms, and a school in Brooklyn trying to find money to hire a math coach.

Of the schools she has visited in the past few weeks, the worst received a C in their progress reports, which are mostly based on how the students fare on standardized tests. A spokeswoman, Natalie Ravitz, said that Ms. Black had visits scheduled to schools that got D’s and F’s.

Taking stock of all she has seen so far, Ms. Black said, “Where there’s a strong and effective principal, where parents are committed, you have great schools.”

Little else of what she said had not been heard before. She emphasized the difficulty of reducing class size. (“It’s New York City. It’s not like we can build a whole lot of schools.”) She reinforced her idea of the ideal teacher. (“The most effective teacher is one who cares about her kids.”) And she showed no intention of rethinking any of the reforms that her predecessor, Joel I. Klein, brought to the system, chief among them the use of test scores and algorithms to measure the performance of teachers, principals and schools.

But mostly, she listened. During a geometry class at Democracy Prep, Ms. Black, who carried around a manila folder labeled “briefing material,” huddled with Seth Andrew, the school’s founder and superintendent, and asked in a near-whisper if he had trouble hiring teachers (his answer was no), as well as how he felt about tenure (his answer was inaudible).

At the school in Brooklyn, she gave Mary Simpson, a cook in the cafeteria, “a great big hug” and a kiss on both cheeks, Ms. Simpson said.

At Hungerford, Kelly Garcia, 17, asked through the computer that she uses to communicate, “Are you nervous for your first day of school?”

“The answer is yes,” Ms. Black said. “It’s like everybody’s first day of school. A little bit nervous, but excited.”

Juliet Linderman contributed reporting.

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