Newsroom

Bloomberg Visits A Good School That's Not A Charter
NY Daily News
Mayor Bloomberg visits APP graduate Renee Cloutier’s school.

Students from Bronx's Accion Academy, New Venture School display artwork in city parks
NY Daily News
Students at APP Graduate Adrian Manuel's school display artwork in city parks.

A Harlem Middle School Bets on Technology
Gotham Gazette
Visit the common room of Global Technology Preparatory, a new middle school in Harlem, almost any morning of the week, and by 8:30 a.m., 15 minutes before the official start of school, you will find most of the school's 60 or so students,...

Editorial:DISD to reveal promising West Dallas partnership
Dallas Morning News
To achieve that, the partnership will implement a development program modeled on the acclaimed New York City Leadership Academy, the centerpiece of Mayor...

Mary J. Blige's Mission of Hope
Oprah.com
Nine-time Grammy winner Mary J. Blige is a music superstar—and a survivor. After overcoming a rough childhood, abuse and addiction, Mary channeled her pain to create some of the most soul-stirring albums in the music industry.

Regional Robotics Competition Arrives At Javits Center
New York Times
The Fe (Iron) Maidens from the Bronx High School of Science, Stuypulse from Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan, Tech Know of Staten Island Technical High School, and The Mary Louis Academy team will go to the national finals in Atlanta next month.

Pressed by Charters, Public Schools Try Marketing
New York Times
Rafaela Espinal held her first poolside chat last summer, offering cheese, crackers and apple cider to draw people to hear her pitch. She keeps a handful of brochures in her purse, and also gives a few to her daughter before she leaves for school each morning. She painted signs on the windows of her Chrysler minivan, turning it into a mobile advertisement.

School's in class by itself
NYPOST
To most educators, 60 elementary-school kids in one classroom would sound like a nightmare.
To founding New American Academy Principal Shimon Waronker, it's the new way forward.

Family Basketball Night in Queens
NYC Department of Education
Teachers at P.S./I.S. 178 in Queens traded blackboards for backboards last week when they took on students and their parents on the basketball court. More than one hundred teachers, school staff, and families packed the Holliswood gymnasium for the school’s second annual Family Basketball Night.

TRW's Partnership Team: Helping Kids Make Strong Connections at School
TheatricalRights.com Blog
In October 2009, the Partnership Team began our work with over sixty first and second graders from the Family School, coordinated through Music Specialist Justin Dayhoff and Principal Pamela Lee. November brought a follow-up assessment meeting between the Theatrical Rights team and Dayhoff and Lee that resulted in an agreement to continue the drama/music program in a new session beginning in January 2010. The program will feature an extended schedule, including an early morning before-school component.

Academy for Young Writers' Students Looking for Storied Internships in the City
NY Daily News
About 40 seniors from the Academy for Young Writers in Williamsburg will skip school for two weeks in January. If enough positions can be found, they will spend those weeks at unpaid internships at businesses around the city. The two-week job is an extension of Academy's founder and Principal Carolyn Yaffe's education philosophy. "We are an exhibition-based- on-instruction school," Yaffe said. "It is important that students see how what they are doing in the classroom is connected to the world outside the classroom."

One in Five Kids is Homeless at PS 636 but After-School Program Makes Them Feel at Home
NY Daily News
Parents at Public School 636, where one in five kids is homeless and living at one of 10 area shelters, say the after-school program has transformed their lives. The year-old after-school program is funded mainly through a federal grant, enabling PS 636 to maintain the extra programming other schools have been forced to trim because of budget cuts. Unlike many after-school programs, however, academics is not the central focus. "I just knew that the kids did not have successful experiences academically," said Principal Danika Lacroix. "They needed to feel good about being at school," added Lacroix, who took over last year.

Principal Program in N.Y.C. Linked to Student Test Gains
Education Week
A new study of New York City’s vaunted training program for principals finds that schools led by the program’s elementary and middle school leaders made gains in English-language arts at a faster pace than other city schools led by new principals... These were schools no one wanted. This program successfully placed those principals in those schools,” said Sean P. Corcoran, an NYU professor of educational economics and a co-author of the study. “From what we are able to tell, they were able to begin to reverse the academic decline these schools were in. And that’s a very significant thing.”

Turnaround Leaders: Developing Principals Who Can Change a School’s Trajectory
Education Week
Through an independent evaluation conducted and recently released by the Institute for Education and Social Policy at New York University, we learned that elementary and middle school principals trained in our program produced statistically significant gains in English language arts when compared to other principals placed at the same time. After taking on schools that had been in decline relative to city-wide performance, our graduates were able to curb that decline and student scores began to improve apace with city-wide growth. NYU’s evaluation shows that we have started to close the performance gap between schools led by our graduates and initially higher-performing comparison schools in English language arts. In math, our graduates’ schools also produced upward trajectories.

The New York City Aspiring Principals Program: A School-Level Evaluation
New York University Institute for Education and Social Policy
This report represents the first systematic comparison of student outcomes in schools led by APP graduates after three years to those in comparable schools led by other new principals... Controlling for pre-existing differences in student demographics and achievement, we find that APP principals bettered their comparison group counterparts in ELA performance, trending upward apace with overall city-wide gains.

Can All-Male High Schools Boost African-American Boys' Graduation Rates?
The Village Voice
The Academy of Business and Community Development (commonly known as ABCD), another all-boys charter school in Bed-Stuy that is not affiliated with the Eagle Academy network, had 1,100 aspiring middle-schoolers apply for 65 sixth-grade seats... Clyde Cole, ABCD's founding principal and himself a product of an all-boys Catholic school, counters that his students are being failed by traditional mixed-sex education. "Boys of color start getting treated differently around the third or fourth grade," he says. "They're labeled as needing special education; they have more discipline problems." At ABCD, he adds, "It's a 'boys being boys' mentality, and we don't discipline them. Girls are able to adjust better in school. They are neater, better organized, ready to work, and they even have more camaraderie in recent years. Boys aren't doing as well, and they need an environment that focuses on them and their needs."

Improving Schools by Improving School Principals
WGRC Channel 9
When it comes to improving schools, much of the focus is on teachers. But a local partnership is focusing on school principals, and how they can improve their leadership skills. St. John Fisher College and the Rochester City School District have teamed up to create the Rochester Leadership Academy. The idea is that stronger leadership among school principals will lead to stronger schools.

Video: School Recording Studio
WABC New York
The singing stars of tomorrow are being groomed today at a middle school in Harlem. And they're not just singing, but also writing their own songs. It's all being done at a brand new recording studio Intermediate School 286, also known as the Renaissance Academy… The project was the idea of Principal Qadir Dixon whose father is a jazz musician. "We knew, coming into the school, that this was gonna be something that eventually we were gonna fight for and be able to bring this to the school and bring this to the students," said Qadir Dixon.

Grade A Improvement in Queens
New York Post
It's like turning around an ocean liner. But teachers and administrators at the 3,000-student John Bowne HS in Queens have done just that -- posting the best improvement in graduation rates of the city's large high schools in recent years. Teachers and parents credited the 16.1 percentage-point gain in the graduation rate since 2005 -- from 44 percent to 60.1 percent -- to innovative programs that get kids interested in school, more individualized attention for students and a greater emphasis on accountability. "[The principal] puts more emphasis on differentiated instruction for every student," said Salvador Peña, a 34-year-old social studies teacher. "We've also had goals put in place for every student. It's kind of personalized the experience."

Cahn Fellows Program Extends Work of NYC Leadership Academy
One-Third of 2009-2010 Cahn Fellows Trained at the NYC Leadership Academy
NYC Leadership Academy
“We are very pleased that eight of this year’s Cahn Fellows are part of our Leadership Academy family,” said Dr. Sandra Stein, the Leadership Academy’s CEO. “We believe that this is a testament to the fact that our programs enable participants to build a practice of continual individual and team growth on behalf of closing the achievement gap. Congratulations to all of the Cahn Fellows; your accomplishments and dedication to school reform are inspiring.”

Shimon Waronker: Doctoral Student Profile
Harvard Graduate School of Education
I began my career as an educator teaching elementary school. I then taught Spanish to a middle school in Brooklyn, NY. I was selected into the first cohort of the New York City Leadership Academy and then became principal of MS 22 in the Bronx, NY. MS 22 was on the list of the twelve most violent schools in the city and was also on the New York State list of failing schools ("School Under Registration and Review" -- SURR). Through a firm belief in distributed leadership, I was able to transform MS 22 into a thriving learning community full of confidence and hope.

The Urban Assembly School for Applied Math and Science Named Finalist for Intel Schools of Distinction Award
The Urban Assembly School for Applied Math and Science
The Urban Assembly School for Applied Math and Science was recently named one of three finalists for the Intel® Schools of Distinction Awards – Middle School Math Excellence category. The annual nation-wide Schools of Distinction Award (SODA) program honors schools for implementing innovative and replicable math and science programs that produce positive educational results. “I am so proud of all the hard work of our students, teachers, and staff,” said the school’s Principal Kenneth Baum. “Math lies at the heart of our school."

Training Headmasters is Academic
New York Post
In an effort to prepare better principals to take on troubled schools, Mayor Bloomberg inspired the creation of the corporate-style Leadership Academy to train a new generation of leaders. Six years later, about 15 percent of all principals working for the city Department of Education are graduates of the academy. They participate in a 14-month boot-camp-style "Aspiring Principals Program" that simulates the challenges faced by a school leader and pairs trainees with veteran principals for a year of on-the-job insights. Many graduates are then assigned to low-performing schools.

A Principal Player
Carnegie Mellon University
Chad Altman doesn't like to wait. Maybe that's why, at age 27, he became one of the youngest principals in the New York City school system..."I wanted to do something hands-on and to give back," Altman elaborated. "I wanted to get my feet on the ground in terms of directly impacting society." Again on the fast track, [he was] accepted to the New York City Leadership Academy, a 14-month training program for aspiring principals.

SPOTLIGHT: Sandra Stein, A Matter of Principals
Stanford Magazine
Five years ago, the New York City public school system faced a crisis: an alarming proportion of principals were on the brink of retirement. Many lacked the skills and leadership qualities to help students meet increasingly strict national standards, and it was nearly impossible to keep quality administrators in the poorest and lowest-performing schools. With a student population of more than 1 million—larger than that of most states—New York City needed to solve its school leadership problems. Enter Sandra Stein, who became CEO of the New York City Leadership Academy in 2005. The nonprofit trains current and prospective leaders in New York public schools.

February

Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein Announce New Schools
NYC Department of Education
Mayor Bloomberg, Schools Chancellor Joel Klein, Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz and community leaders visited [Sunset Park, Brooklyn's first neighborhood high school] this weekend to announce it would be one of 42 new schools opening in the Fall... Principal Corinne Vinal said, "This school will be a resource to the community and will draw on the community as a resource. Our commitment is not only to our own education but to the betterment of the community in which our school exists."

NYC Leadership Academy Convenes Teams from Several States and School Districts to Strengthen School Leadership Strategies
NYC Leadership Academy
“The Convening has been a great opportunity to get our mind around leadership development as a state to state issue,” said Paul Katnick, Director of the Missouri Leadership Academy. “It’s about the value of networking. We have to get outside our borders to affectively implement what goes inside our borders.”

For Schools Facing Closure, Sam Sloves Offers a Helping Hand
The Village Voice
As the DOE's director of school transformation, Sam Sloves works to provide support for schools in the process of closing; the transformation, he says, comes with the opening of new, more successful schools in the same buildings.

2008

December

Student do-gooders defy drop-out rate
NBC Nightly News, msnbc.com
Each weekday 81 sixth graders meet in a New York public school where every inch—even the uniforms—is about saving the world. Principal Carry Chan opened the doors in August, one of a growing number of American educators who use the world and its problems as real-life lessons for every subject.

November

Holliswood Celebrates Blue Ribbon Designation
yournabe.com
The DOE gives schools the Blue Ribbon label if they have made dramatic gains in student achievement or are high−performing. Holliswood Principal Jennifer Ambert said the school received its Blue Ribbon award due to special education students making “significant” improvements on state tests.

Breaking the Mold to Create Effective Leadership Development Programs
The New York Times Knowledge Network
This town hall meeting focuses on the development of leaders for urban schools. A range of perspectives will be represented, including those of researchers, practitioners in urban districts, and alternative leadership preparation programs.

October

How Good Principals Make a Difference
The New York Post
The last four years have seen a quiet revolution in New York City's public schools, and early evidence suggests that it's bringing major gains for students. In large part, this revolution has focused on the city's nearly 1,500 principals. By general agreement, they're the system's most important executives…

Leadership Excellence Honors Top Programs
Leadership Excellence
For the third year, Leadership Excellence magazine has released its ranking of the best Leadership Development (LD) programs in the country. "Every organization benefits from developing its people through some program or process," says Ken Shelton, editor since 1984. "The best programs are designed to deliver outcomes aligned with the vision and strategy. They build bench strength-a pipeline of people who are prepared to step up and lead out when the calls comes or the opportunity arises."

Department of Education Selects the NYC Leadership Academy to Provide Principal Training and Development Services
Department of Education
Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein today announced the selection of the NYC Leadership Academy as the primary provider of training to prospective New York public schools principals and professional development to principals already working in City schools.

The F is for Forward
The New York Post
"The school changed, the principal changed, the rules changed," explained seventh-grader Gilberto Martinez, one of several students who credited [Principal Qadir] Dixon.

A Matter of Principals: On Training School Chiefs
City Limits
The NYC Leadership Academy was formed as a 501(c)3 nonprofit in 2003, with Dr. Sandra J. Stein as academic dean. This year it will graduate 59 principals to help fill the approximately 150 slots open for next academic year.

NYC Leadership Academy Principals Win Cahn Fellowship
NYC Leadership Academy
The Cahn Fellows Program for Distinguished New York City Principals at Teachers College, Columbia University has named 24 New York City school principals as Cahn Fellows. Eight of these newly named Cahn Fellows began their careers as school leaders in NYC Leadership Academy programs.

Bronx Principal Fighting to Give Students Arts Education
NY1 News
This is known as cross-curriculum teaching, bringing art out of the band room and art room and into every classroom — par for the course at the Bronx school, where the arts are everywhere. The school's approach can even be seen in the hallways, where Principal Philip Scharper teaches the Charleston.

In Bronx School, Culture Shock, Then Revival
The New York Times
Junior High School 22, in the South Bronx, had run through six principals in just over two years when Shimon Waronker was named the seventh... Mr. Waronker, 39, a former public school teacher, was in the first graduating class of the New York City Leadership Academy, which Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg created in 2003 to groom promising principal candidates.

2007

December

Academy in N.Y.C. Prepares Principals for Toughest Jobs
Education Week
The outcome of New York City’s gambit to give schools greater autonomy over their budgets and curriculum in exchange for heightened accountability for results will arguably rise or fall based on the skills of its principals. So the role of the New York City Leadership Academy —created by Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein to recruit, train, and support new principals for the city’s toughest schools—has never been more central.

January

The King of Crown Heights
Time Magazine
Most of all, schools need a leader, and that is why in New York City, one of the cornerstones of school reform has been a training program for a new generation of principals. It is called the NYC Leadership Academy, and its first graduates are now leading some of the city's most challenging schools.