Mayor-Touted Principal Training Program’s Future Uncertain
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When New York City’s principal training program was launched three years ago, the mayor called it a “core element” of the city’s educational reforms. Now, with the not-for-profit Leadership Academy’s $75 million in initial financing due to expire, the academy board is beginning to consider what shape the program will take in the future.
With questions swirling through the education community, some staffers at the academy are looking for new jobs, sources said. Some claim that the Leadership Academy, which has spent about $250,000 to train each graduate, is going to be dismantled entirely at the end of the school year. Others claim they’ve been told the academy is going to be brought under the umbrella of the Department of Education.
As the academy’s board prepares to consider its options and as its financial supporters prepare to evaluate whether they want to extend their grants, the Education Department says it is maintaining its commitment to the academy’s mission. “We are definitely continuing the Leadership Academy,” the chancellor’s press secretary, Jerry Russo, said, pointing out that the board is the final authority on the academy’s future.
Two members of the board told The New York Sun they are committed to preserving the academy, but said some questions remain unanswered about its fourth year and beyond.
One member, Louise Mirrer, the president of the New-York Historical Society, said the board would be discussing the future of the Leadership Academy over the next few months, but she insisted that any changes it recommends would “safeguard against losing its integrity in any way, shape, or form.”
Another board member, Kathryn Wylde, the CEO of the Partnership for New York City, said the board would consider a number of options in the next few months, including refinancing the Leadership Academy and maintaining it in its current form; farming out its responsibilities to other organizations, or incorporating its work into the Department of Education. She noted that all three options were discussed from the beginning, before the start of the academy’s three-year “demonstration” period.
The Wallace Foundation, the Leadership Academy’s biggest backer, said it will consider in the coming months whether to extend its grant.
Lawmakers and union leaders say decision-makers should think long and hard before reaching conclusions.
“As a concept, it has accomplished something very important, which is different than concrete results. The notion that we can solve the leadership problem relying on traditional supervisor schools is absolutely false,” the chairwoman of the City Council’s Committee on Education, Eva Moskowitz, said. “So we’ve got to have some alternative methods of training people.”
She said the board can probably raise more money, but she cautioned that it might be difficult to raise it on the same scale. “I imagine it’s going to get pared down,” she said. “Maybe they can find cheaper ways to do it. But it’s not easily sustainable both from the cost perspective and also their rates of return.”
The teachers union president, Randi Weingarten, called the Leadership Academy a “very big state secret” and said if there’s any possibility that it will be publicly financed, it should become more publicly accountable. Even if it remains privately financed, she said, “I think that anything that is as important as training people to be principals in a public education system should have public accountability.”
The executive vice president of the principals union, Ernest Logan, had a stronger opinion: “The road to the principalship should come out of the supervisory stocks. … You’ve got to have a ladder. You really do, or you’re going to be lost here.”