Local Hero: Daniel Garodnick

Add Manhattan Councilmember Daniel Garodnick, (who I had the pleasure to meet in January at a rare synagogue appearance of mine) to the chorus of councilmembers fighting back at autocractic DOE control. from the nytimes:
Council Assails Mayor’s Plan to Give Principals More Autonomy By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN
City lawmakers yesterday harshly criticized the Bloomberg administration’s plans to give many more public school principals wider autonomy in September, telling a top city schools official that there was not enough evidence of success among 322 principals who received additional authority this academic year to justify expanding the program.
At a hearing of the City Council Education Committee, lawmakers spent more than two hours grilling the official, Eric Nadelstern, who is the chief executive of the school system’s empowerment initiative. Under that initiative, principals who agree to meet student performance targets are largely freed from the oversight of superintendents.
“We’re still looking for results,” said Councilman John Liu, a Queens Democrat, demanding that Mr. Nadelstern provide data supporting his claims of improved attendance and graduation rates in the empowerment schools. “You keep touting the success, and we don’t see the success.”
Mr. Nadelstern, a 35-year veteran of the school system, said in his testimony that 29 schools that participated in a pilot program begun in 2004 had better attendance and higher graduation rates, and that schools and principals were better off with principals having more control. “In my 17 years as a principal, I desperately strove to find the empowerment we are now offering,” he said.
But even as council members complained that the administration was moving too quickly to expand principals’ autonomy, Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein announced a major step yesterday toward holding principals accountable for the results in their schools: the awarding of a five-year, $80 million contract to I.B.M. to develop a vast new storehouse of educational data to track the individual progress of the city’s nearly 1.1 million students.
The new program, the Achievement Reporting and Innovation System, which officials said would be up and running by September, will be used to give each school a letter grade, A to F, and will show whether principals are meeting their performance targets. Under the empowerment program, principals who fail to meet their targets can be removed from their schools, though state tenure law could make it extremely difficult for the administration to fire them.
The new system will track scores on the state’s annual reading and math exams as well as the results of additional exams in each subject to gauge student achievement at regular intervals during the academic year, and, officials said, will allow educators to make complex analyses of student strengths and weaknesses.
In September 2008, the system will be made available to parents, giving them a powerful tool to track their child’s academic progress. “The ARIS system will play a very crucial role,” said James Liebman, the school system’s chief accountability officer, “by empowering principals and teachers and then students and parents as well.”
In announcing the I.B.M. contract, which was awarded early in January, Mr. Liebman emphasized that the administration had received bids from 19 major technology companies — an acknowledgment of criticism the department has faced that it awards too many contracts without the competitive bidding normally required of city agencies.
Such no-bid contracts are permitted under state law, but the administration has come under heavy criticism, particularly over a $15.6 million deal with the consulting firm Alvarez & Marsal, which is working to restructure the school system’s financial operations. As a cost savings measure, the firm proposed changes to school bus routes that infuriated parents when they took effect in January.
At yesterday’s Council hearing, the Education Committee chairman, Councilman Robert Jackson, invoked the bus problems as part of his criticism of the department’s overall performance and as a reason for slowing down any additional widening of principals’ autonomy.
“I’m not confident in the D.O.E.’s ability to make such large-scale reform,” Mr. Jackson said. “All we have to do is look back a month ago to the school bus fiasco.”
In a letter to Chancellor Klein last week, another Education Committee member, Councilman Daniel R. Garodnick, a Manhattan Democrat, raised similar concerns. “If the recent school bus route changes have taught us anything, it is that we should not sacrifice careful implementation in pursuit of bold reforms,” he wrote.
At yesterday’s hearing, Mr. Garodnick said that principals were not being given enough information to choose from among three different types of support organizations that they are being offered in place of traditional superintendents for the next school year.
Mr. Garodnick also said that council members were concerned about the “sheer absence of consultation with us and with parents.”