NEW YORK, NY October 31, 2003 — Chancellor Joel Klein and Mayor Bloomberg announced today they're planning to open 50 new charter schools over the next 5 years. Charter schools are public schools that have less bureaucratic regulations and New York City has about 2 dozen of them. The city's effort is unusual because it's being funded with private donations. The city is also setting up a non profit corporation to help run the new schools. Chancellor Klein sat down with WNYC's Beth Fertig earlier today and explained how the new charter schools will fit into his overall reform plan.



KLEIN: These are going to be schools in all the boroughs. They're going to be schools in many instances that we're going to house in public school space. They're going to be part of the public school system.



FERTIG: Now there's a very small number of charter schools in New York City right now, so can you explain how are these new schools going to be the same as or different from the existing public school system?



KLEIN: They're going to be different in the sense that they're going to work on much more autonomy but much more accountability, and you need both. When I say much more autonomy they have discretion over their hiring, they have discretion with respect to curriculum, they can figure out their own budgeting and staffing. Which I think is terrific. But if they don't serve our children then those people are gone.



FERTIG: So they don't have to hire unionized teachers, they don't have to have the same work rules as the existing schools, and they don't even have to have the same core curriculum that you've introduced?



KLEIN: That's correct. It's up to them. But they take public school children, with the same dollars that go to our schools. I view these charters as part of our system. And second, and this is the key point Beth I think and I keep wanting to underscore this: they're accountable. If kids don't want to go to the schools, if the families don't want those kids to go because they're all volunteers, families have to apply - it's by lottery for acceptance - but they have to apply. If families don't want to go, if there's non performance those people are out of business.



FERTIG: You've been touting your new school reforms all year. A new core curriculum, a new management structure. What sort of message does this say if you're creating a new system outside of the system that you're trying to improve?



KLEIN: It's not a new system outside it's a new system that's part of the system. And indeed even when we created a core curriculum we had over 200 schools that were exempt. And I said at that time and I will repeat: we continue to look for ways to increase discretion and accountability. We've got 1200 schools, 1.1 million kids. We need multiple strategies to solve this problem. And this is one of the strategies that we are using. The core curriculum for many, many failing schools is a very appropriate strategy. But we didn't impose it on all schools because there were differentiations in the system. This charter strategy again will be one of the strategies. It stimulates innovation. If you see a charter that's doing particularly well you want to replicate it, you want to learn their best practices and bring it into your other schools. So I think the system should tolerate a different variety of approaches and we shouldn't make it a one size fits all approach.



FERTIG: That's been the criticism of your reform so far since the start of school, is that there are teachers who have said they feel like they're being micromanaged, that they have to spend you know X number of minutes on each different part of a lesson plan, for example, or they have to arrange their rooms in a certain pattern with you know clusters instead of rows. What's your perception of how these reforms are going through?



KLEIN: I think the reforms are actually going quite well. And again in any system like ours you're going to get a variety of reaction. Some people who have been doing certain things one way for many years don't like a new way and they may call that micromanagement. But remember, I inherited a system that by and large was not working well for many, many of our children. So you have to make some changes and there's some discomfort in that process. People are trying new strategies, people are being asked to do things a different way. Now, in that process I'd also say to you that occasionally I'd imagine a supervisor or somebody is heavy handed. That's not systemic but that happens. So when that happens of course that becomes the focus of a news story or something like that. But I wouldn't infer from that that it is any way a systemic problem. And my sense is we need management in this system if we're going to really bring it to a different level. The old way was let everyone do his or her thing. And we see the results it got. So what I'm trying to convey is both the sense that I believe in discretion but I don't believe in sort of everyone doing your own thing.