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The New York City School Construction Authority's (SCA) mission is to design and construct safe, attractive, and environmentally sound public schools for children throughout the communities of the City's five boroughs. Since its creation in 1988, the SCA has kept moving forward, constantly innovating to ensure that it designs and builds schools that meet the current needs of the City's students and teachers. In addition to building and modernizing educational facilities, the SCA is invested in developing much-needed resources and capacity building mechanisms for engaging diverse communities in the construction process. The SCA maintains one of the most successful small business development programs in the country and recently established a workforce development and small business initiative for college students. As the SCA celebrates its 30-year anniversary, its primary goal remains the same as on the day of its creation: to ensure that all children in the country's largest public school system have the facilities necessary to prepare them for the twenty-first century and beyond.
Helping educational leaders sustain continuous innovation and improvement in schools, this text presents a framework for understanding the norms, behaviours and structures that make school systems so intractable to change.
American metropolitan areas today are divided into neighborhoods of privilege and poverty, often along lines of ethnicity and race. City residents traveling through these neighborhoods move from feeling at home to feeling like tourists to feeling so out of place they fear for their security. As Gerald Frug shows, this divided and inhospitable urban landscape is not simply the result of individual choices about where to live or start a business. It is the product of government policies--and, in particular, the policies embedded in legal rules. A Harvard law professor and leading expert on urban affairs, Frug presents the first-ever analysis of how legal rules shape modern cities and outlines a set of alternatives to bring down the walls that now keep city dwellers apart. Frug begins by describing how American law treats cities as subdivisions of states and shows how this arrangement has encouraged the separation of metropolitan residents into different, sometimes hostile groups. He explains in clear, accessible language the divisive impact of rules about zoning, redevelopment, land use, and the organization of such city services as education and policing. He pays special attention to the underlying role of anxiety about strangers, the widespread desire for good schools, and the pervasive fear of crime. Ultimately, Frug calls for replacing the current legal definition of cities with an alternative based on what he calls "community building"--an alternative that gives cities within the same metropolitan region incentives to forge closer links with each other. An incisive study of the legal roots of today's urban problems, City Making is also an optimistic and compelling blueprint for enabling American cities once again to embrace their historic role of helping people reach an accommodation with those who live in the same geographic area, no matter how dissimilar they are.
How do you propel student achievement and meet students' social and emotional needs at the same time? How do you transform school culture so that students are eager to come to school every single day? After decades of leading schools to G.R.E.A.T.ness, Dr. Andy unlocks his time-tested pillars that educators can use to transform school culture and increase student achievement. Using each pillar of his G.R.E.A.T. Leadership Philosophy?, his school: - Moved from having one of the highest dropout rates to one of the lowest in the state. - Leapt from having one of the lowest graduation rates to one of the highest in the state. - Won 7 state championships over a five-year period, compared to one in the school's history. - Achieved consistent student academic growth each school year. - Reduced assaults and fights to almost zero each year.
Big cities have struggled to improve public school systems. This book shows why—and offers a framework for achieving future success. Fullan and Boyle, internationally renowned thinkers on school change, demonstrate that while the educational challenges of big cities may be overwhelming, they are not insurmountable. They draw on ten years’ of research to identify six essential “push” and “pull” actions that enable big school systems to improve student achievement. Leaders must push to challenge the status quo, convey a high sense of urgency, and have the courage needed to intervene. But they need to also pull together to create a commonly-owned strategy, develop professional power, and attend to sustainability. Examining three major cities—New York, Toronto, and London—through the decade of 2002–2012, this book weaves case studies with careful analysis and recommendations to hone in on which policies and strategies work best to raise the bar for all students and reduce the gap for the disadvantaged. Big-City School Reforms offers invaluable advice to those leading the next phase of school reform in cities around the world. This is an eminently practical book that focuses on big problems and big solutions. “This encouraging book draws on the recent experiences of New York, London, and Toronto to identify what it takes to transform big-city school systems. It recognises their complexities without being overawed by them. By concentrating on the factors that seem to matter most, it offers real hope that we can now tackle some of the key issues that have frustrated reform efforts in the past.” —Geoff Whitty, director emeritus, Institute of Education, University of London, UK "Fullan and Boyle present a compelling framework for motivating and sustaining improvement in large urban school districts. The authors’ premise that system leaders must optimally balance push and pull strategies serves as an important lesson to school-level leaders as well.” —Sandra J. Stein, education and leadership consultant “In this important new book, Fullan and Boyle answer the most important question facing the leaders of the world's major cities: what will it take to significantly improve the quality of public education? Through a sophisticated analysis of the policies pursued in New York, Toronto, and London, the authors make it possible for us to see why some cities are making more progress than others. Their clear and compelling insights couldn't be more relevant and timely.” —Pedro A. Noguera, Peter L. Agnew Professor of Education, Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Development, Executive Director, Metropolitan Center for Urban Education, New York University Michael Fullan, Order of Canada, is professor emeritus of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. Alan Boyle is director of Leannta Education Associates where he designs professional learning for education leaders.
Effective organizational communication begins with employees, who should be communications ambassadors for a district. From administrators to teachers to school bus drivers to custodians, employees set the tone for a district. The informal conversations they have at church, the bowling alley, the barbershop and other venues can make or break the image of a district. Armed with information, they can dispel misinformation. Without information, they can contribute to the grapevine of discontent. With the most credible sources of information about schools coming from teachers, parents, students and other school staff members, it is critical that school districts develop, fund, implement and evaluate their internal communications programs. "Building Public Confidence in Urban Schools: It Begins Inside the District" is a guide for administrators and board members to not only understand and appreciate the need for quality internal communications, but to begin developing an internal communications system to complement effective community outreach and media relations programs. The guide is a project of the Public Relations Executives Network of the Council of the Great City Schools based on annual meetings of the district communications directors.
For nearly a decade, parents have looked to Clara Hemphill to help them find a great public school for their child. For this third edition, Clara and her staff visited nearly 500 of New York City’s elementary schools and chose 200 of the best schools to recommend—with more than 70 new school profiles not included in the previous edition! This essential guide uncovers the “inside scoop” on schools (the condition of the building, homework, teacher quality, etc.), includes a checklist of questions to ask on a school tour, and incorporates new listings of charter schools and “magnet” programs. It also provides the hard facts on: Class size and total school enrollment Test scores for reading and math Ethnic make up: Black, White, Hispanic, Asian Admissions requirements: none? tests? interview? Teaching methods and styles: progressive, traditional When to apply How to decide which schools to try for Praise for Clara Hemphill’s Parents’ Guides! New York Daily News... “Brisk, thoughtful profiles of topnotch, intriguing schools.” Big Apple Parent... “Hemphill has done for schools what Zagat’s did for restaurants.” New York Magazine... “Thoughtful, well-researched required reading.” The New York Times... “A bible for urban parents.”
This report, from the Council of the Great City Schools' "Cities Building Cities" program, examines Detroit Public Schools' instructional program. The main goals of the Council's review were to: (1) compare Detroit with other urban school districts that were raising student performance; (2) propose strategies--based on what was working in other cities--that could raise student achievement in Detroit; (3) determine how well the Detroit schools were implementing the reforms initially proposed; (4) determine whether the Detroit Public Schools were on the right track in their attempts to boost student achievement; (5) judge how likely the district was to see improvements in student achievement; and (6) suggest ways to strengthen public confidence in the Detroit Public Schools. The Council also sought to identify expertise, resources, strategies, and materials from other city school systems across the country that the Detroit Public Schools could use to increase student performance. This report has an Executive Summary that follows this introduction. It outlines steps that the Detroit Public Schools have been taking to raise student achievement and improve communications. Chapter 1 presents a brief overview of the reform efforts in the Detroit Public Schools over the last three years. Chapter 2 summarizes--in narrative and table form--the recommendations that the Strategic Support Teams made to the school district a year ago and the status of their implementation. The text is organized around a set of themes that the research teams have found useful. Chapter 3 summarizes recommendations that the teams made to the district for improving communications and the status of those proposals. The final chapter summarizes and synthesizes the report. Appended are: (1) Individuals Interviewed; (2) Documents Reviewed; (3) Biographical Sketches of Strategic Support Team Members; and (4) About the Organization.