July 24, 2007

Good morning, Chairman Jackson and members of the City Council Committee on Education. I am pleased to join you today.

Fourteen years ago, in 1993, the Campaign for Fiscal Equity filed a constitutional challenge to New York State’s school finance system, arguing that the State short-changed the City’s public schools and denied its students their constitutional right to a sound basic education. Robert Jackson remembers this well; he was one of the original plaintiffs. Finally, this April, our Legislature and Governor acted on the court ruling, deciding to send our City the first installment of the education aid it so desperately needs. This is due to the hard work of so many who fought for so many years. Today, we should congratulate all those whose vision and perseverance have achieved this victory for our children.

My colleague, Deputy Chancellor Dr. Marcia V. Lyles, will address the specifics of the proposal we recently submitted outlining our plans under the Contract for Excellence. Before she does so, I want to put our submission in its proper historical and practical context. Three points bear emphasis:

1. The Bloomberg Administration is already five years into the most comprehensive and successful school reform initiative in the nation. CFE, as important as it is, arrives at a time when our reform efforts are well underway. The progress we’ve made already warrants celebration, whether we measure progress by graduation rates, increases in student achievement, or the substantial narrowing of the shameful achievement gap that has plagued us for decades. Because we are so clearly on the right path, our priorities are to integrate the CFE mandates seamlessly into our ongoing reform effort and to accelerate the promising course we are pursuing.
   

2. This priority is easily achieved for the simple reason that our reform strategy and the State’s Contracts for Excellence strategy are in total alignment. Indeed, when I first read Governor Spitzer’s announcement of his proposals, I was struck by how much our work had anticipated the Governor’s direction, later embodied in the Contracts for Excellence legislation. Precisely the same core values are at the center of both DOE’s reform agenda and Contracts for Excellence. These values are:
1. A deep belief that, while more money is always a positive, to be effective it must be spent on reforms that research confirms actually work for children. The key is not more money, but more money spent well.
2. A core belief that accountability is essential to the success of any reform agenda—accountability, first and foremost, for student results, but also accountability for being good stewards of funds so that we ensure that they are spent on their intended purposes.
3. A fundamental belief that our resources, energy, and efforts should focus heavily on those students for whom educational quality historically has been the most elusive—so called “high-needs” students: the economically disadvantaged, those who are still learning English, those with a history of persistent academic failure, and those with special needs.
    

3. The third point is a pragmatic one. At DOE, we have a school system to operate, with more than 1,400 schools serving 1.1 million children. The real-world requirements of managing this system are indifferent to the legislative calendar. Budgets need to go out; teachers need to be hired; books need to be bought and distributed. The Contract for Excellence legislation became law in April. Despite the State Education Department’s heroic efforts and its tireless assistance, it has still not finalized the implementing regulations and guidance. Our submission was due on July 15 and the quantity of data it requires assures that we will still be refining it until mid-August, days before school opens in September. Input from community and advocacy groups is still flowing in, and needs to carefully considered. Independent of all this, we distributed school budgets in early May, the last possible date that would give principals and school communities sufficient time to build and implement their educational plan for the fall. While, as noted, there is a near perfect symmetry between the substance of our reforms and CFE, we must all acknowledge the practical timing challenges related to fulfilling the mandate of the new legislation this first year.

Let me elaborate on these points.

When the Mayor gained control of the schools five years ago, we knew that New York City schools were failing far too many students. And, what’s worse, we knew that the majority of the children who were most under-served were the children who most needed our help—the poor, the African American, the Latino students who were more likely to struggle in school were drawing the shorter straw time and time again. We faced an educational crisis of staggering dimensions.

Under these circumstances, it obviously would have been wrong to simply wait for the CFE suit to wend its way to its final resolution. And we did not. The Mayor and all of us at the Department of Education are now in our fifth year of executing the most ambitious set of school reforms in any city in America.

Starting in 2002, we began working to fix our schools so that they could provide all of our 1.1 million students with the opportunities, the support, the skills, and knowledge they needed to graduate from high school ready to lead successful, productive lives. We stood with the CFE plaintiffs, fighting for additional resources and support from the State. But we knew that until we received new funds—and in preparation for the day this matter was eventually settled—we would have to rethink the way we were spending what we had.

Since 2003, we cut about $350 million from the bureaucracy and redirected it to our schools where it could do our children the most good. We held a spotlight to our successes and failures, school by school, with the most sophisticated and consequential accountability systems any school system has ever seen. Every parent will now know how his or her child’s school stacks up against others in the only thing that matters—how well are children learning. We have marked more than 65 low-performing schools for closure and have opened more than 200 new ones, where graduation rates are rising to unprecedented levels. Every school is given the funds and authority to choose the support system that best enables it to meet its ambitious achievement goals and then held strictly accountable for meeting them. We are doing everything in our power—from tenure reform to improved training and mentoring—to ensure that there is an effective teacher in every classroom. We have increased the number of applicants for teaching positions, eliminated uncertified teachers from our schools, created incentives to attract shortage area teachers in such critical areas as math and science to New York, adopted a Lead Teacher program that sends some of our finest teachers to high-needs schools, provided unprecedented levels of training to our educators at every level, and instituted a bonus system to reward our most successful principals. We have launched a capital plan that is creating more than 60,000 new classroom seats and enhancing our successful efforts to lower class size at every level. And we are correcting the shameful funding inequities that forced many schools, too often those serving our neediest children, to make do with less than their fair share. The list goes on and on.

As we developed and executed this comprehensive plan, Children First, front and center in our mind were high-needs students—precisely those that CFE lawsuit sought so valiantly to help. For me, personally, as somebody who knows first hand the difference education can make, this work has been more than just “organizational reform,” but a moral imperative that would change the lives of children, and, indeed, the future of our City.

That is why, this spring, as we waited for regulations governing the Contract for Excellence funds, we developed a budget that directed more than $138 million to schools that have traditionally been shortchanged. The overwhelming majority of the students in the schools that received these funds are among our highest needs students. Now, those schools are using funds to help create programs for these students, so that they can have more of the opportunities they need and deserve. We also sent an additional $230 million to all schools, the vast majority of which schools can spend on additional teachers, instructional materials, and services of their choosing. Not one cent of these latter funds derive from the Contract for Excellence legislation—but it is a telling parallel that the amount of new dollars we gave to schools to further their educational success is roughly equal to the amount subject to the Contract for Excellence “menu.”

Today, because of the steps we have taken, our schools are fundamentally different: our children have better teachers, principals, curriculums, and opportunities than ever before, and our students are performing at a higher level than many people dreamed was possible. We are being recognized as a leader in urban education reform, most recently as one of five finalists for the third consecutive year for the coveted $1 million Broad Prize for Urban Education. And, most importantly of all, the children our system has historically failed, the disadvantaged and those with specialized educational needs, are making progress at unprecedented levels.

The work we have done does not consist only of strategies and theories. Our work is making a difference for the kids who most need help.

In all, 50.8% of students in grades 3-8 are at or above standards in English and 65.1% are at or above standards in math, compared to 39.3% in English and 37.3% in math in 2002. And overall, according to the State, our graduation rate has increased from 44% in 2004 to 50% in 2006. At the new small schools we have created, more than 70% of students graduated this year, compared to less than 40% at the schools they replaced. Those percentage points measure real human lives that are changed for the better because of the strategies we have pursued.

This is the backdrop against which to understand the infusion of new funds associated with CFE: a work in progress, a bold effort well underway, but with far, far to go before the job is done. We embrace the Contract for Excellence, not only because it brings critical new funds to the district and those children who need it most, but also because, effectively integrated into our existing reform effort, it has the potential to enhance it, to accelerate the positive path we are pursuing.

The new funds from the State represent an extraordinary opportunity to further the strides New York City has already taken. We are committed to the full and faithful implementation of the requirements of Contracts for Excellence not only because the law requires it, but because we embrace the bold educational agenda it embodies. If we can execute its mandates in a manner that enhances and accelerates the five years of reforms that pre-date it, if we can continue to balance resources with accountability, if we can sustain our focus on the most challenged students, if we can ensure that every new Contracts dollar is spent in one of the five permitted areas while preserving the ability of our great educators to make decisions on behalf of students, we will continue to change not just the means by which we fund schools, but the lives of thousands of children who need education most.

Now, I’d like to turn it over to Dr. Marcia Lyles, my deputy chancellor for teaching and learning, to discuss the details of our Contracts and Class Size Reduction plans.