Chancellor To Create Office of Parent Support

After weathering a week of criticism of the latest plan to overhaul the school bureaucracy, the city schools chancellor, Joel Klein, is creating a new position in the schools administration, "CEO of Parent Engagement."

Mr. Klein made the announcement yesterday as he and Deputy Mayor Dennis Walcott began several hours of testimony on the proposed overhaul in front of a committee of City Council members, who reprimanded them for excluding parents and other stakeholders in the decision to transform the school system. Mr. Klein later said that the new position had not been created to placate parent groups upset at the reorganization.

"I always think it's very important … making sure parents have the information about their schools, so they know how they're performing and we work together to improve them," he said.

Mr. Klein said the details of the position and who will fill it had not been decided, but said the main difference from the already existing parent engagement office was that the CEO would report directly to the chancellor. He also announced the creation of parent offices in each of the 32 school districts, but did not have details as to how this would differ from the current system except that more "parent support resources" would be directed to the districts. The 32 districts are currently required by state law to have three employees, which usually already include a parent support officer.

The president of the Citywide Council on High Schools, a parent group, David Bloomfield, said he was encouraged by the creation of the CEO, but skeptical that the parent officers in district offices would have much power under a new system where principals are largely free of supervision and oversight by superintendents.

"I'm not sure any real accountability resides in the new districts," he said. "What are they going to be doing?"

The Department of Education also announced it has opened the application process for private vendors to apply as support organizations for schools as principals are released from the current regional structure under the new plan. Although for-profit companies can apply, Mr. Klein said the department would be looking for organizations with a proven track record working in the New York City schools — which he said are mostly nonprofits.

The president of the teacher's union, Randi Weingarten, also attacked the planned overhaul, saying there was little evidence to support the expansion of the empowerment schools model. She compared the decentralization experiment to the system in post-Katrina New Orleans.

"Why would we engage in the most radical restructuring of the best urban school system in America without any real evidence that what is being proposed works any better than what is being replaced?" she said during testimony at the hearing.

Mr. Klein, who has pointed to anecdotal testimony of principals as evidence of the success of the empowerment school model, dismissed Ms. Weingarten's attack as "rhetoric and invective."

He noted that some of the other changes proposed by the mayor have been tried in other school districts, referring to the proposed A to F grading system for schools which mirrors the A-plus program introduced by then-Governor Jeb Bush of Florida in 1999.

"It's had a big impact" in Florida, he said. "I think there's no question that the schools in Florida have moved forward. I think any independent evaluation of that will show that."

The former chancellor of Florida public schools, Jim Warford, who was appointed by Mr. Bush in 2003 and later resigned because he said the A-plus program was too focused on test scores, said Florida had indeed gained when it came to elementary grade test scores. But he also noted that graduation rates had fallen under the A-plus program, of which the majority of Florida voters disapprove, according to a recent poll.

Mr. Warford, in a phone interview with The New York Sun, warned Mr. Klein to learn from Florida's mistakes, which he said included a top-down approach that excluded parent and teacher involvement in school reforms that led to the falling public support. "There was a lack of consensus building and flexibility," he said.