Mayor Bloomberg announced yesterday that the city had secured $24 million in private money to establish a slew of new high schools and to pump money into creating and expanding other high school programs.

The money, $18.8 million of which was given by the chairman of Microsoft via his Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, allows Mr. Bloomberg to make good on a campaign promise he outlined three weeks ago before winning re-election.

The plan piggybacks on an initiative the mayor started when he came into office, to create small alternative high schools and addresses criticism from his opponent in the mayoral race, Fernando Ferrer, that he has not done enough to improve high school graduation rates.

Yesterday at South Brooklyn Community High School in Red Hook, Mr. Bloomberg told reporters that the announcement was not a response to Mr. Ferrer’s allegations: “We are not running an administration or school system in response to people that just picked facts and misused the facts,” he said.

The chancellor of the public school system, Joel Klein, called yesterday’s education blueprint the next step in what has been “the most comprehensive, thorough reform of high schools in any urban area in the United States.”

“No longer are we hoping for kids who will fit the needs of the school system,” Mr. Klein said. “We are designing a high school system that will meet the needs of our kids.”

The Gates’s money will be earmarked to create 15 new small “transfer” schools for students struggling in traditional schools; five new evening programs for students who have obligations during the day; 20 new sites for job training, and 10 new programs to prepare students to take their high school equivalency tests. It will also be used to establish four new all-girls high schools and to expand a variety of other programs. Some of those programs will be housed in existing facilities and require construction renovations.

The city also received $5.5 million in other private donations to establish seven new premier high schools, including one that will be affiliated with Columbia University and located on the campus the university plans to build in northern Manhattan.

Those schools will be geared toward “academically gifted” students and will be located mostly outside of Manhattan, in communities that have not historically had them. Of that $5.5 million, $3 million came from the Carson Family Charitable Trust, $1.5 million came from Mortimer Zuckerman of the Daily News, and $1 million came from the Judy and Michael Steinhardt Foundation. Mr. Steinhardt is an investor in The New York Sun.

City Council member Eva Moskowitz, the chairwoman of the education committee, said she was “pleased” the mayor and chancellor were “newly rededicating themselves” to improving high school graduation rates.

She said, however, that she was “not optimistic that this baby step initiative will tackle the high school graduation problem with the giant leap it requires.”