De Blasio Unveils New Plans for Troubled Schools in New York

He described the new strategies, in a speech to a standing-room crowd of advocates and educators, as a sharp departure from his predecessor’s approach, which centered on closing large, failing schools and replacing them with smaller ones.

“The previous administration had a policy that a school like this was left to fend for itself, and that’s why we’re here today, because we reject the notion of giving up on any of our schools,” Mr. de Blasio said at the Coalition School for Social Change.

“We’re not giving up on them — in fact giving them what they need to succeed.”

The new program will designate 94 of the city’s most troubled schools, including the Coalition School, as Renewal Schools based on a list of criteria including low four-year graduation rates for high schools and poor test scores for middle and elementary schools. Students at those schools will receive an extra hour of instructional time each day, teachers will have extra professional training, and the schools will be encouraged to offer summer school. The schools will also be given additional resources, with $150 million spread over two years, about $39 million for this school year and $111 million in the next.

But the centerpiece of the proposal involves turning these institutions into so-called Community Schools, which try to address the challenges students face outside the classroom, with offerings like mental health services for those who need them or food for students who do not get enough to eat at home.

While these programs are often popular with advocates, and already in use around the country for many decades, including in New York City, their performance has often been viewed as uneven. An analysis by The New York Times found that some of the community schools in Cincinnati, which is viewed as a leader in the approach, still showed dismal academic performances even after years of work and millions of dollars of investments.

A New York deputy mayor, Richard R. Buery Jr., said, however, that there were examples of successful Community Schools around the country, and that they were an important part of a larger package of reforms.

“There is no magic bullet,” Mr. Buery said. “No one is saying Community Schools by itself are going to fundamentally change the work, but what I would say — and is critical — is that Community Schools are a necessary part of that work, as well as a deeper strategy to improve teaching in the building.”

Schools in the Renewal program will work along a three-year timeline, which will require improved attendance in the next school year and enhanced academic performance the year after that. Staffing changes, however, can be made along the way, and Mr. de Blasio said that if schools did not show meaningful improvement, they might still be shut down.

Joel R. Klein, who was schools chancellor for most of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s time in office, rejected the idea that the Bloomberg administration gave schools little help to improve. He also pointed to a series of studies that showed some substantial gains at New York City’s small schools, which operate on the premise that they can give more attention to struggling students than the large schools they replace. Last month, for example, a study by the nonprofit research group MDRC said that disadvantaged students who enrolled in small schools were more likely to go to college than their peers.

But the process of closing schools was messy. Students were allowed to graduate but no new ones would be admitted, and as teachers fled for more stable positions, the remaining students often found themselves in a shell of a school, with fewer and fewer course offerings.

During the Bloomberg years, the practice of shutting down schools and opening new ones in the same building was often the key to freeing space for charter schools, and for changing large portions of the staff without violating union contract provisions.

But the teachers from the original school who were left over were still entitled to their salaries because they had not done anything wrong, and as the number of such teachers eventually grew to more than 1,000, they became an embarrassment for both the city and the teachers’ union.

Clara Hemphill, the founding editor of Insideschools.org, a website based at the New School, called Mayor de Blasio’s announcement promising, though she cautioned that the details of implementation would be crucial. “I don’t think public shaming and giving them bad grades, or telling them they’re terrible, makes them work harder,” she said of educators. “In most schools I’ve seen, it’s not that they’re lazy, it’s that they don’t know how to do better.”

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