Chancellor Carmen Fariña Changes New York City Schools’ Course.
A dozen principals and New York City education officials were gathered in an office early last year, sorting through a database to look for schools to use as models — those scoring highest on tests, graduation rates and other measures, compared with schools of similar demographics.
The new schools chancellor, Carmen Fariña, walked in, saw a spreadsheet projected on the wall and cut off the official who was presenting the data. “I know a good quality school when I’m in the building,” she said, according to one participant in the meeting. “We’re going to do this,” she added, “based on the schools we know to be good.”
In the little more than a year since Mayor Bill de Blasio appointed her to lead the city’s Education Department, Ms. Fariña has presided over a methodical dismantling of the policies of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s first and last chancellors, Joel I. Klein and Dennis M. Walcott.
She inherited a department that tracked data closely and used it to decide schools’ fates, rating schools annually from A to F. Principals, many of whom during Mr. Bloomberg’s tenure were drawn from the ranks of novice teachers and given managerial training, were given as much freedom as possible.
If their schools did not score high enough on an array of data points — graduation rates, attendance, the number of students passing classes and going to college — they were subject to being closed. In 12 years, the Bloomberg administration either shut down or began to phase out 157 schools and opened 656 new, smaller schools. It was also supportive of charter schools, which are privately operated with public money; 173 of them opened in the city under Mr. Bloomberg.
Ms. Fariña, in contrast, believes that principals need both more experience and more supervision than they had during the Bloomberg years. She increased the requirements for new principals’ teaching experience to seven years from three. (One former aide reported hearing Ms. Fariña, 71, say that it was “ridiculous to think that you can be a principal under the age of 35,” though the policy is age-neutral.) And last month she re-established the importance of the system’s superintendents, whose role in overseeing principals had diminished during the Bloomberg years. Rather than closing struggling schools, she has said she will support them with more guidance and an infusion of social services, from family counseling to optometry. Shutting schools is to be a last resort.
Where the Bloomberg administration was at war with the United Federation of Teachers, Ms. Fariña has, with the help of a labor-friendly mayor, turned the union into a close ally, giving teachers more time for training and appearing less zealous about firing subpar teachers.
Instead of the previous administration’s technocratic, sometimes corporate language — full of terms like “accountability” and “competition” — her speeches are peppered with a new set of buzzwords, like “collaboration” and “trust.”
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