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NYC School Takeover Inspires Fenty, but Critics Abound
At Bronx Lab School, one of six small schools sharing a building in New York, Kari Ostrem helps Christopher Rodriguez with a Chinese lesson.
(Helayne Seidman -- TWP)
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The city's Panel on Education Policy, an appointed committee that replaced the school board and approves major policy decisions, balked. No matter: Bloomberg dismissed two members he had appointed, orchestrated the removal of another and got his way.
That move outraged stakeholders who believed Bloomberg had walled off healthy dialogue.
"The biggest mistake Bloomberg made is that because he was given control by the state legislature and elected by the public, he thought he had all the answers," said David Bloomfield, an education professor at Brooklyn College who serves on an advisory panel to Klein.
Bloomberg does not apologize.
"Control means control," he said. "If what you want is something where the mayor sits there and says, 'I'm at the top of the tree, but no one has to listen to me,' that's not control."
Perhaps no change has been as dramatic as the development of the small high schools. Bloomberg and Klein tapped a $100 million donation from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to rapidly expand the program.
Students are selected through a lottery. Because of space limitations and enrollment caps at about 108 students per grade level, many are turned away.
At the Evander Childs building, located in a low-income neighborhood, each of the six schools has its own principal, teachers and classrooms.
Early signs are promising: At one of the schools last year, 56 of 60 students graduated.
On the fourth floor of the building is the Bronx Lab School. Founded three years ago by Marc Sternberg, a Harvard Business School graduate, the school houses 300 students in grades 9 through 11 and will add a 12th grade next year.
Sternberg, 33, who spent three years teaching in a Bronx middle school, was working for a charter school company when he was tapped to be a principal by a nonprofit group helping Klein solicit proposals for small schools.
Along with friends and colleagues in his Upper West Side apartment, Sternberg dreamed up a school "where we convey to students the importance of hard work and get them out of their comfort zone to try new things and prepare for the next step, which we think should be college."
