The British Have Arrived: They're Reviewing City Schools

The adults were nervous, the children were rambunctious, and the two middle-age British women who arrived to help them were armed with clipboards, a jolly sense of humor, and firm advice that few would dare question.

The scene could have been from "Nanny 911," the reality TV show about a crew of British nannies who swoop in to rescue parents struggling to tame their unruly children. In reality, it was a public middle school in Greenwich Village, and the visitors were reviewers from the British company Cambridge Education, which has a contract with the Department of Education valued at about $6.4 million a year to evaluate how city schools evaluate themselves.

The role of the for-profit company isn't much different from that of the nannies, however. The mostly British reviewers are among a growing group of outsiders Chancellor Joel Klein has turned to in his quest to transform a school system that — though it has seen many improvements during his tenure — still has more than 300 failing schools and a graduation rate near 50%.

Like the reviewers themselves, Mr. Klein borrowed the idea from a system that has been established in England for more than a century. He learned about it from Sir Michael Barber, a former education adviser to Prime Minister Blair who has worked as a consultant for the city's education department. Along with annual progress reports based mainly on test scores, the reviews will decide the fate of schools and principals in an accountability system Mr. Klein has set up as the counterpart to a system allowing relative freedom from bureaucratic meddling that will be bestowed on the city's 1,400 schools starting next year.

The reviewers' main job is to meddle.

Cambridge Education has enlisted a crew of close to 100 of its consultants — all of them former head-teachers, as principals are called in England — for the competitively bid contract the company was granted after it conducted a pilot program last year. They are paid between $80 and $85 an hour, and spend between two and three days in a school. They make about $1,280 for a two-day review of a mid-size school but can make more for larger schools or if they stay extra hours.

As a part of their payment, most of the reviewers, because they are from England and are in the city only temporarily, are also provided a space in a bank of company-rented apartments in TriBeCa and on West End Avenue. A few stay in hotels. They are supported by an administrative team of less than a dozen people who make between $17 and $34 an hour, and a full-time project director who makes about $70 an hour.

On a recent day at Greenwich Village Middle School — a relatively orderly and competently performing institution — two reviewers, Kathryn Wood and Jan Lomas, spent hours poking around in nearly every corner. They pored through pages of student test score data, attendance records, scoring rubrics, and student work. They sat with the principal, students, teachers, and parents in separate meetings, asking questions and making sure each group's answers meshed. They popped in on classes, pulling

students and teachers off to the side to whisper quietly, scrawling pages of notes as they went.

Afterward, the principal, Kelly McGuire, said he was exhausted.

"It's nerve-wracking," he said. "But I am really hopeful about it."

Mr. McGuire, in his first year as a principal, will eventually receive a grade for his school on a scale of one to three that will be posted on the Department of Education's Web site. The worst score he can get is "undeveloped." In the middle is "proficient." The best is "well developed."

As for the intense scrutiny into his classrooms, office, and files, Mr. McGuire said, "I'm a public employee. It's not really about me, it's about the students … I don't think I get the right to be private about this stuff."

Parent groups, City Council members, and the principals and teachers unions have criticized Mr. Klein's move to expand the role of private groups and highly paid consultants to perform such intimate tasks within the school system under the new reorganization.

But the Department of Education's director of school quality, Santiago Taveras, who oversees the quality reviews, says that few other companies have as much experience and that an outsider's eye is helpful to bring fresh perspective to the school system.

"Cambridge Education has done reviews over 15 years," he said, adding that while in the past superintendents performed more informal school reviews, "We wanted to do it consistently and provide feedback that was meaningful."

The quality reviews have been posted on an ongoing basis since the beginning of the year. A proofreader checks through all the reviews before they are posted online to make sure there are no British phrases or spelling.

Most of the reviews posted so far, including those of Samuel J. Tilden High School and South Shore High School — which the education department has since announced it will be closing — have been fairly positive.

A pair of British principals who were visiting schools in New York City last week to learn about the education department's parent engagement program, Martin Howlett and Philip Mottershead, used the same phrase to describe the experience of being reviewed: "nerve-wracking." Mr. Mottershead joked that "the reward for doing well is a shorter inspection in the future." They also said that in general they see the quality review system as it exists in their country as useful.

In Britain, the government handed over control of some struggling school districts to private for-profit companies, including Cambridge. It fined the companies if students did badly and rewarded them with extra money if the students did well. The plan met with mixed reviews, although the vice president of Cambridge, Trevor Yates, said student achievement in the districts it has managed improved.

The company has also created professional development and training materials it sells to school personnel and districts preparing for the reviews, an industry that has become lucrative.

"It's a very big business," Mr. Mottershead said. "It's a moneymaking thing as well."

In New York, in addition to the several days of training the reviewers must do to become qualified in England, they must go through a day-long training about New York's education system.

Ms. Wood said it took her a few days to pick up the language of acronyms that New York educators speak fluently.

Some cultural differences persist, however. Ms. Lomas, joking with a group of middle school students, lamented the lack of a "lift" in the five-story school building. They stared at her blankly until someone explained she meant "elevator." Later, she scrutinized a bulletin board full of student essays about the conditions of refugees from Sudan's war-torn Darfur region: She said she was surprised to see they were all written in print, not cursive script. In England, she explained, children take a major national handwriting exam in the fifth grade and thereafter are expected to write up their assignments in elegant script.

The reviewers say they have met with a warm reception in every school they've visited, despite the occasional cultural hiccup.

"I haven't met any principals who've said, ‘Who do you think you are, you British person?'" Ms. Wood said. "We're not telling them how to manage their schools. … We're not trying to catch people out."

Out of the 600 schools that have been reviewed as of last week, only eight principals have disputed the reviewers' findings.

The reviewers say they are not getting too comfortable in New York, however. The contract ends in three years, and by then Mr. Taveras says the Cambridge reviewers will have trained a new set of Department of Education-employed reviewers who will gradually replace the British imports. He said that nearly all of the American reviewers would be principals and superintendents working in the city system that would do the job part time.

Mr. Yates said he was hoping to find other ways Cambridge could help.

"There are other things we could do," he said. "I would expect we would be looking at other things and wider things as the contract changes."