Empowered Principals Draw Mixed Reviews

As the Bloomberg administration looks to expand the mayor's empowerment school initiative, educators and parents are warning that the program has stumbled through a host of minor glitches and major snags.

The initiative, the Education Department's latest restructuring of the schools this school year, unfettered a group of 332 principals from much of the oversight and support of the bureaucracy in exchange for more responsibility. Recently, parents have been reporting cases of power-hungry principals that have undermined school parent groups, and some educators have found stacks of paperwork piling up as a skeletal support structure has responded to their calls for help at a snail's pace.

The department has acknowledged some of the problems, attributing them to the newness of the initiative and promising improvements are under way.

"There are issues to be worked out," the schools chancellor, Joel Klein, said yesterday at a meeting of parent leaders.

At another parent meeting this week, the deputy chief of empowerment schools, Veronica Conforme, responded to concerns, saying her office was trying to resolve problems such as errors in the data that will be used to grade schools on an A through F scale and an understaffed Integrated Service Center, which assists principals with such things as writing budgets, payroll, and contracting vendors.

"They've scaled this up so fast, they are really still mired in working out the operational requirements," the president of the Citywide Council of High Schools, David Bloomfield, said. "Those questions should have been answered before the system was scaled out."

Mr. Klein declined to say whether the mayor will announce the expansion of the empowerment school initiative in his State of the City address next week. But education officials have signaled a desire to expand the program.

"I believe the impact of that initiative has been very, very powerful," Mr. Klein said.

A spokesman for the Education Department, David Cantor, added, "We haven't made any secret of the fact that we like the empowerment model and that we've wanted to expand empowerment from the start. … I don't think anyone will be surprised by any developments."

But some educators and parents urged the department to solve the problems and assess how the schools are performing before adding more schools to the empowerment list.

"We are concerned that the powers that be, who talk constantly about using data to drive decisions, would deem empowerment a success before there has been any independent analysis as to whether it's actually working to improve student outcomes," the president of the city teachers union, Randi Weingarten, said, noting that she has heard both good and bad things about empowerment schools from teachers.

The leader of one of the network teams who provides support to 22 schools, Judi Aronson, said her only complaints are the distance between her schools — she spends hours driving to schools in her network, which are in all five boroughs — and the lack of a secretary.

Network teams, which are elected by schools and not based on geography like the regional structure, have only five staff members, including the leader. But these hardships are worth it for the freedom and innovation possible at the schools, Ms. Aronson said.

The mother of a 6-year-old boy who attends an empowerment school in Brooklyn, Rosemary Ganpot, also praised the freedom her principal has to choose curricula, although she said the school's parent groups lost power in the transition.