News

NEW YORK, NY September 14, 2004 — More than a million New York City students are back in school. Chancellor Joel Klein kicked off the first day of class by greeting students at Thomas Jefferson High School in Brooklyn, where he was joined by the mayor. Klein visited schools in all five boroughs yesterday. WNYC's Beth Fertig joined him on a van for part of his ride. She asked about the decision to send extra police into 30 more schools, a program the Chancellor credits with improving safety at Thomas Jefferson and other high schools.

KLEIN: The police department will be moving resources based on need and I think they estimate 30, but from my point of view we'll be looking at all our schools doing safety audits. This is not, you know, a sort of focus on here's a list but to look at various schools. As things develop I expect there will be more time with more people, more police moved to different places. But I think that will be a product of what the ongoing year develops and shows.

FERTIG: What will you say to the students who are returning to the large schools that you thought were dangerous and failing, where they're now opening smaller schools. Many of those students are concerned that it's just going to contribute to safety problems to have so many schools under one roof or they worry they're not going to get the attention that these smaller schools are getting.

KLEIN: Well first of all the larger schools are smaller as a result. I mean by creating the small schools, like at a place like Thomas Jefferson where we just were, that helps with the larger schools as well. Second in terms of safety and coordination. We set aside an additional six million dollars for each of those campuses to work on those coordination issues. So there's no question that in these transitions there's a certain amount of what you call transitional problems that you have to work through. But I think we're dealing with them in a sophisticated way this year and most importantly we're increasing the options. You have schools that are large schools that are being pushed and pushed because people want to go into them and that has an unfortunate effect. At the same time there are schools people don't want to go to. So you create these 91 new schools, particularly in middle schools and high schools to increase the options for people. This is not a day to day or even a week to week or month to month transformation. It is a system's transformation that will take us years to fully implement but we're on the right road. The third grade results, now we implement, bring in the fifth grade. You know the better we do of educating our students in the lower grades the easier it will be educating them in the higher grades.

FERTIG: Now that there's so much emphasis on helping third graders and fifth graders - what you call a promotion policy instead of a retention policy by putting more emphasis on not letting them go into the next grade until they're ready, what are you doing to refine this curriculum if anything this year?

KLEIN: First of all, Beth, it's not what I call - it IS a promotion policy. It's just based on a notion that we educate students before we promote them. I've raised this question with you and everybody. And I know you're not in a position of answering questions. But there's no doubt in our city that children have been promoted wholly unprepared for middle schools and high schools. It's not even a serious question. In terms of what we're doing, first of all our curriculum is much more flexible than the curriculum some of our critics said we should have adopted - those scripted curriculums. Our curriculum was a much more dynamic curriculum, had much more writing in there, had phonics in there, had reading and writing and much more if you will multi-varied type of approach to teaching and learning. Now what we're doing is taking it to the next level which is we've got intervention specialists working with struggling students so instead of saying one size fits all we're going to have a plan for each of the struggling students. That's what education has always been about. That's why you don't want to use simple scripted programs.