Making the grade

Leadership Academy's winning strategy should stifle critics

By RICARD SCHWARTZ
April 27, 2005

No one promised the road to school reform wouldn’t be long and bumpy. The new math and reading programs? The jury’s still out. Carving small schools out of big ones? A work in progress. A new high school admissions scheme? Let’s just say, mistakes were made.

But a few flowers bloom. School construction costs have plummeted. Test scores are inching up, albeit slowly. And the new Leadership Academy for principal training actually works.

Don’t take my word for it. Ask Shimon Waronker, one of the 77 members of the academy’s inaugural class that graduated last year. An Army vet, Waronker said, "I went through military intelligence officers training. The Leadership Academy was much tougher."

"We intentionally made it very rigorous," said the academy’s new CEO, Sandra Stein. "We simulate the principal’s job from the outset." Some call it boot camp for principals.

Waronker, a former private school assistant principal and Spanish teacher at Public School 161 in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, is now principal at Middle School 22, a tough school in Morrisania, the Bronx. And already there are tangible signs of progress.

Last year, one parent attended the school’s annual parents association meeting. A year later, under Waronker, more than 250 parents showed up.

What changed? "The academy taught me how to collaborate," said Waronker. The full-time trainees even spent a day with Education Department lawyers to learn how to build a paper trail for ridding a school of a bad teacher—something principals have never formally been taught in the school system’s history.

Then there are the special master classes taught by business superstars such as former GE honcho Jack Welch, Time Warner chief Dick Parsons and former Chase Chairman Walter Shipley.

And yet, critics have been carping about the academy since Schools Chancellor Joel Klein announced its creation two years ago. Cost is the big gripe. No doubt, the program’s $75 million price tag for its first three years seems lavish. But it’s misleading. The budget—entirely from private donors—pays the salaries of the academy’s trainees, who are mostly rising stars from the school system in midcareer. (They’ve got to eat, don’t they?)

The rest of the money goes straight into hiring topnotch trainers, laptops for each student, customized learning software and getting a state certification for each graduating principal. This year’s actual training cost per student, $45,000, isn’t a whole lot more than the $40,000 in tuition and fees at Harvard Business School.

"We’re . . . committed to making change in the toughest schools in the city," said Stein. So, what’s not to like? The costs are reasonable, the training is excellent and the private sector is paying the tab.

Kathryn Wylde of the Partnership for New York City, which has raised millions for the academy, says, “It’s obviously been a shock to the system to use a business model for training principals.”

But that’s just the shock this system needs.

Originally published on April 27, 2006