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Supporting Great Teachers & Principals
New York City is the nation’s largest public school system – with 1.1 million students across 1,600+ schools taught by nearly 80,000 teachers. The city’s students are diverse and represent a wide range of backgrounds, needs, and experiences. To help ensure that every student achieves success, our educators need opportunities and resources to continuously improve their skills and enhance their instruction. The Fund has raised funding for several programs, tools, and initiatives that support educators’ growth and development in their classrooms and schools, helping ensure all students have access to high-caliber teachers within a vibrant learning community. A few examples include:
The New York City Leadership Academy
In 2003, Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein created the New York City Leadership Academy, an independent non-profit organization, to address the urgent need for a new generation of school principals to lead New York City’s most challenging public schools – those marked by high student poverty, low student achievement, and frequent leadership turnover. Today, the Leadership Academy continues its mission – preparing and supporting aspiring, new, and experienced principals to transform struggling schools into rigorous learning environments, open highly performing new schools, and improve educational outcomes for all students.
The Leadership Academy’s comprehensive leadership development services consist of training programs for aspiring principals, including the Aspiring Principals Program and the Leaders in Education Apprenticeship Program, as well as in-service support for acting principals. This support includes the New School Intensive, which assists principals opening new small schools, differentiated coaching programs for new and experienced principals, and leadership development workshops. In addition to these services, the Leadership Academy also provides strategic consulting to help the New York City Department of Education achieve its key reform priorities.
Since its launch, Leadership Academy-trained principals have had a sizeable impact on our schools and students, and its model is shaping school leadership programs nationwide. For example, the Leadership Academy’s Aspiring Principals Program (APP) graduates collectively serve over 100,000 students across the five boroughs. Schools led by APP graduates are significantly improving their students’ academic performance. An evaluation conducted by New York University’s Institute for Education and Social Policy found that elementary and middle schools led by APP graduates made greater gains in English Language Arts than comparison schools led by other new principals – even though APP graduates were generally place in lower-performing schools.
In addition, the Leadership Academy’s New School Intensive (NSI) has played an integral role in the New York City Department of Education’s strategy of transforming large, struggling schools into new small schools that offer students more personalized learning environments. NSI helps principals address the unique operational challenges of launching and sustaining a successful school from the ground up – from hiring and training staff, to developing the school curriculum and culture. The dedication of Leadership Academy-trained principals serving in these schools has contributed to their strong graduation rates.
The Leadership Academy’s coaching programs for new and experienced principals are also having a city-wide impact. Delivered by expert practitioners – recently retired principals and superintendents – the programs provide new principals with 1-to-1 coaching while experienced principals can choose from a menu of customizable coaching options, including 1-to-1 coaching, coaching for school teams and groups of principals, project-based coaching, and retreats. To date, the Leadership Academy has provided coaching to more than half of the school system’s 1,600+ principals.
The Fund helped raise approximately $80 million of critical funding that supported the Leadership Academy's transformational programs during the organization's first five years of operation. By providing a pipeline of excellent new principals and a robust set of in-service programs to support principals while they are on the job, the Leadership Academy is poised to continue supplying New York City with leaders committed to creating high caliber schools and driving achievement for all of their students.
To learn more, visit the Leadership Academy’s website.
Achievement Reporting and Innovation System (ARIS)
ARIS is an innovative data system that provides principals and teachers with a robust assessment of their students’ academic performance and progress at their fingertips. ARIS’s timely and reliable student achievement reports are drawn from multiple sources, including attendance information, grades across all subject areas, New York State test results, and more. In addition to delivering information, ARIS also helps turn data into action that will improve student learning. For example, educators can use ARIS data to identify strengths and areas for improvement in their schools and then design targeted strategies to effectively address any such areas. School staff can better diagnose individual students’ learning needs, set goals to accelerate their achievement, and measure success against these goals.
ARIS also provides a forum for New York City’s 1,600+ public schools to collaborate and share best practices. It serves as a library for instructional materials where principals and teachers can store and share effective resources such as lesson plans and classroom management guides as well as identify other educators who have similar interests or face similar challenges and work together to design solutions.
An important component of ARIS is Parent Link. Families are an integral part of their students’ academic success, and this web-based resource empowers them to be meaningfully involved in their child’s education. Parents can log onto Parent Link to see how their child and their child’s school are performing, understand what their child his learning, collaborate with teachers to create a plan to improve performance, and advocate for services their child needs. Streamlining the complex web of information sources makes it easier for parents to play an active role in their child’s school and hold it accountable for supporting student achievement.
Common Core Standards Initiative
The Common Core Standards initiative is a state-led effort to create clear and consistent educational standards across the nation. These standards will provide a common understanding of the knowledge and skills all students across the country are expected to learn over the course of their K-12 education so that teachers and parents know what they need to do to help them achieve. The standards are designed to be rigorous and relevant to the real world, reflecting the knowledge and skills that young people need to succeed in college and careers. Developed in collaboration with teachers, school administrators, and experts, the standards clearly communicate what students need to master at each grade level. This information tells principals and teachers exactly what they need to help students learn and enables them to establish individualized benchmarks for students based on their progress.
In anticipation of New York State’s adoption of the Common Core Standards, the New York City Department of Education is supporting schools in transitioning to these rigorous standards. This support will allow principals, teachers, and other school staff members to build leadership in different components of the Common Core Standards and help determine what additional assistance is needed in order to effectively implement these standards across all of New York City’s public schools. To learn more about the Common Core Standards, click here.
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