One Man's Continuing War Against Recentralization: A Long Struggle for School Autonomy By Gil Schmerler The battle to find a bureaucracy-free zone, where educators are free to make important academic decisions at the levels closest to the students, will continue, Mr. Schmerler maintains. And Eric Nadelstern will be at -- or somewhere near -- the front in that battle.

ERIC Nadelstern is an intensely practical man among the romantics and idealists of the small-schools movement. He is also passionately committed to a fair shake for the poor immigrant students he serves and to the transformational powers of performance assessment -- for schools as well as for students.

Nadelstern is the founding principal of International High School in Queens, New York City, which enrolls students from more than 40 countries. Many speak no English when they arrive, and International has targeted those with insufficient command of English. A majority of its students also come from poverty-level homes. Yet International's dropout rate has been as low as 1% and its college attendance rate as high as 96%; its achievement compares favorably to that of the top New York high schools.

At the beginning of the 21st century, both Nadelstern's abundant administrative skills and his patience with city and state bureaucracies that had, up to this time, allowed him to carve an independent, creative path for his school were being sorely tested.

Nadelstern stands out even among his peers in the vibrant New York City small-schools scene for the extent to which he has actively searched for, and worked tirelessly to create, a policy-friendly environment for International. A teacher of English as a second language for 15 years within the traditional school system -- and a skillful insider -- Nadelstern saw his chance to do more for his underserved students within the board of education's Alternative Schools Division. Thus he founded International in 1985.

Despite its alternative status, the school began traditionally, with an eight-period day, 40-minute periods, and teachers in the front, as Nadelstern tells it. But it didn't take long before Nadelstern and his carefully chosen staff recognized the need for new approaches. They lengthened class time, increased participation and interdisciplinary work, and instituted peer review among the staff. Most significantly, they worked at developing sophisticated systems of performance assessment for students. The school rose to respected status within the alternative and small-schools communities, spawning new international high schools in Manhattan and Brooklyn that adopted many of International's methods.

International and other successful small schools found a congenial climate in the city for much of the 1990s. The small number of such schools allowed them to vary their approaches without seriously threatening the larger system. They had the support of a strong, innovative chancellor, Joseph Fernandez, and his successor, Ramon Cortines. They were also helped by the like-minded organizational growth of reform networks such as the Center for Collaborative Education and New Visions for Public Schools, supported by Annenberg funding.

But the climate began to change -- slowly at first, then more dramatically with the appointment of Rudy Crew as chancellor, a more conservative turn in city and state politics, and, especially, the powerful new hold taken by "standards" and high-stakes testing. By the late 1990s, there were several hundred "small schools" in New York City (the New York Networks for School Renewal, a reform network, counted more than 140 schools among its members alone), and the variances and variations were an increasing challenge to the larger system. No longer could these assorted exceptions to the rule remain virtually invisible. Nadelstern and his peers felt increasingly intense pressure toward centralization and standardization and began to worry about holding on to even the most basic elements of their individuality.

Simultaneously, the exploding charter school movement landed in New York. In December 1998, without much warning, the legislature had authorized charter startups in New York State. Chancellor Crew, originally outspoken in opposition, reversed himself after the proposal became law and said that New York City would itself be the chartering agent for selected schools and share overall authority with the state. International High School, among a select few, was invited to consider joining the first wave of charter conversions. Nadelstern, ever the pragmatist, believes he was offered this opportunity for a dual reason: International's clearly demonstrated success, along with his own ability to play by (or at least with) the rules; and, equally important, the chance for the city to relieve itself of (or co-opt) one of its potential "troublemakers." In any event, a decision needed to be made -- and proposals submitted -- in short order.

Nadelstern had doubts about charter status: he worried about moving to the edges of a public education system he believed in. He feared the potential of a divide-and-conquer strategy. He was concerned about bringing in the state as a new partner and wild card. This would indeed place International in uncharted waters. But life under the increasingly heavy-handed New York City bureaucracy was becoming, as he saw it, intolerable. He identifies at least six reasons he decided to take the gamble for increased autonomy as a charter school.

1. Student selection challenges. Just when International was considering charter status, in early 1999, the city's Division of High Schools (now "run with merciless efficiency" by a new director, according to Nadelstern) was suddenly insisting that the school use the board of education's computerized system for selecting its students, based on an "educational options formula": the school picks half of its students and the city assigns the other half, to create a school population in which 68% of students are reading at or near grade level, 16% are above grade level, and 16% are below. "The formula was devised with good intentions," says Nadelstern, "but it would send us exactly the wrong kids."

International High School was designed explicitly for students who were functioning well below grade level in English -- specifically for recent immigrants, some of whom had barely any English at all. But the new system produced for International a list of 500 students, 80% of whom were fluent English speakers! "For the first time in 15 years, we were being told we could no longer determine which kids were best suited to our instruction. Our criteria for admissions had been agreed to years earlier as the result of very complicated negotiations to define a specific at-risk population." (Nadelstern does believe that ensuring equity is one of the few legitimate functions of the governing bodies overseeing schools -- but he is emphatic that this is a very complex, subtle business that requires wide latitude and is ill served by simplistic formulas.)

"The only way we could resist was to say, 'You can't do that to us, we're a charter school -- or we're going to be.'" When that argument was not initially accepted, Nadelstern -- not for the last time -- threatened to withdraw from the chancellor's charter initiative. As a result, International kept its authority to select its own students, for the time being.

2. The need for school-based staffing. International was a pioneer in developing school-based staffing, working on it first in 1987 with the United Federation of Teachers and then with Chancellor Fernandez. A memorandum of understanding was negotiated that enabled the school, on an experimental basis, to create a faculty personnel committee that would have the primary voice in hiring new staff. This was a significant deviation from the norm in a system that had long run a highly centralized personnel operation. International's process later served as the blueprint for New York City's "school-based option," which currently gives more than 300 schools a somewhat increased role in staff selection. (International also developed a highly refined peer review process that offered colleagues an exceptional role in teacher evaluation.)

But Nadelstern points out the problems of bringing reforms of this type "up to scale":

When there were one or two schools operating this way, each year as there were hundreds of teachers excessed citywide, the board and union could ignore us and place those teachers in other schools. When our number got to be over 100, the board could no longer ignore us. So all bets were off for conditions of excess.

In New York City there were hundreds of people excessed every semester, now sitting in superintendents' offices all over the city, who needed to be placed before anyone could hire. First they told us we couldn't hire until they placed these people, and we said, "Okay, we'll cover those classes and we'll let you know five weeks from now." Then they got smart and said, "If you don't tell us now, at the start of the semester, so we can place these ineffective people, then we'll never let you hire for the rest of the semester." At this point it became impossible for us to hire the kind of people we needed, having pioneered school-based staffing for the school system. We simply could not live with teachers who were not worth protecting elsewhere.

3. Scheduling rigidities. International, like many other small and alternative (and private) schools, dismissed students early one afternoon each week so that the staff could have an uninterrupted two-hour block for curriculum and professional development. For overextended faculty members with collaboration and participation at the heart of their work, this was a necessity, not a luxury. International had conducted its staff development on Wednesday afternoons, in large and small groups, for 12 years.

Then the board, in the person of the director of the High School Division, "did something interesting," in Nadelstern's understatement.

They knew this was going on, but not exactly where. The director comes in and says, "I support this, but in order to really support it, you have to let me help you get the state to approve this as a permanent variance for the way you do business. I'll do everything I can to support it." Everyone but us and Middle College was foolish enough to apply, and as soon as the director found out who they were, she said, "Sorry, I asked the state and they said no, you can't do it anymore" -- and then went about with a vengeance to destroy weekly staff development at small schools all over New York City. She didn't go after us because she didn't know we were doing it. On the other hand, whenever Wednesday rolled around, I would sit there with my fingers and legs crossed and hope that nobody from the board would walk in and casually notice that none of the kids were there.

4. Financial rigidities. There are time-honored practices for circumventing bureaucracy that lose their efficacy as centralization becomes more extensive and efficient. For years, because the high school budget, in Nadelstern's words, is "only open nine months, and kids have needs for 12 months," savvy principals would prepay staff for necessary work to be done during the summer.

At International, teachers needed to help students refine their portfolios (on which their graduations depended) even after the budget was closed in June. They also had to begin orienting students and developing curricula in August, long before school opened. So the only way it was possible to handle the situation was to pay people "per-session" hours for work ostensibly performed in June but actually done later. Then came Rudy Crew's drive for greater centralization and, even more ominously, Ed Stanczik, the school system's zealous special prosecutor for weeding out mismanagement and corruption.

Suddenly, according to Nadelstern,

they started firing people for doing that. They made it out to seem as if there was some nefarious scheme to pay people for work not performed. But I don't know how to serve my kids in these important ways unless you open the budget 12 months per year or let me prepay. The rule used to be, when I started 15 years ago, you could break the rules. If we caught you, we might discipline you -- but if it wasn't to line your pockets, we were going to understand and in the end you could survive it. If you were doing it because you felt it was the best way to help kids and run your school, we weren't going to make you pay too high a price for it. The rules of that game changed dramatically. Personally, I never in 15 years, until this month, paid myself a single per-session hour. Now, I take it only because I work for a board of trustees (charter) that's determined this is the best way to pay me for the things they want me to do. Until this year, I refused to take a cent, despite the fact that I paid my staff as much as $200,000, with individuals making as much as $9,000 and even more.

5. Purchasing rigidities. Purchasing equipment and supplies in a bureaucracy is complex and time-consuming, at best. At worst, it is grossly inefficient, costly, and demoralizing. In New York City, with the need to ensure the honesty of close to 100,000 employees, the procedures in place too often work against the expeditious purchase of the best materials at the best prices, despite the best of intentions.

Nadelstern describes one "typically absurd" example of the problems created by the rules:

We received a state grant that would enable us to buy four computers for some narrowly defined purpose. We discovered that, for the money available, we could buy five rather than four, because prices had gone down precipitously from the time the grant was written until the time we were ready to purchase. We informed the purchasing person at the board that we now had the opportunity to buy five computers. He said, "You can't -- you'll need to apply to the state for budget modification." We realized that would take another six months. So our choice was to get four computers now or five in six months. The more we thought about that, the angrier we got.

6. State assessment requirements. Performance-based assessment is a linchpin of International's entire educational program. Intricately detailed standards and procedures are now in place, after years of painstaking development. Students graduate only after a portfolio consisting of evidence of 10 major "performance-based assessment tasks" (e.g., a research paper, an application of the highest level of math attainment, an oral presentation/defense of the portfolio) has been approved by a demanding, interdisciplinary teacher/student/community panel.

Meanwhile, the requirement of city and state tests for the graduation of all students loomed ever more ominously. The hope that charter status would protect International's ability to assess students in the way it considered most authentic, valuable, and fair was the factor that had figured most prominently in the school's decision to file a charter application. Ironically, it was the charter status itself that provided -- one year later -- the rationale for Commissioner Richard Mills' ruling: he determined that International, as a charter school now accountable to the state, was, preeminently among the Consortium for Performance Assessment schools, not entitled to a waiver from Regents exams.

"We assumed that as a charter school we would have more decision-making autonomy as to how students were assessed than a regular public school," says Nadelstern. "Conversely and perversely, the commissioner ruled the opposite." It is abundantly clear to Nadelstern that "you can't do both" high-stakes testing and legitimate, productive performance assessment. It is fair to neither the students nor the faculty. It is impossible to overestimate "the extent to which the test defines the instruction," he believes, leaving little or no room for the intensive work that would otherwise go into performance assessment. The commissioner's emphatic ruling in May 2000 brought Nadelstern and International to another watershed.

The Glories -- and Ironies -- of Charter Status

The first year of charter status at International, 1999-2000, was more preoccupied with efforts to protect performance assessment than Nadelstern would have liked, but otherwise it served many of the purposes he had envisioned. A week before the school began life as a charter, Nadelstern wrote:

I will not begin the fall semester as an employee of the New York City Board of Ed for the first time in three decades. . . . We will exist outside the orbit of the Board of Ed, free from the influence of the school district's rules and regulations. . . . As principal, I will not need central office approval to attend a conference or schedule a school trip as I have in the past. Working with the faculty, parents, and the students themselves, we will now make the important instructional decisions that affect what teachers and students do in the classroom. We will decide who should work at the school, how to develop and evaluate them, and how to expend our resources in support of teachers' efforts to promote student learning. In other words, I have been given license to exercise my professional judgment for the first time in 30 years.

Toward the end of that first year, Nadelstern's enthusiasm for the virtues of charter autonomy was only slightly tempered:

We've created the opportunity for ourselves to be in exactly the position we want to be. For the first time in my working life, I don't work for anybody. I work for a board of trustees consisting largely of teachers in my school. And we work very closely together; it's not a subservient relationship in either direction. It's the closest I've ever come to what I imagine it must be to feel like a professional.

He cited with pleasure the absence of the numbing biweekly meetings with the High School Division that he had been forced to attend in the previous year, where each individual school director was only made to feel more isolated.

During that first year of charter status, neither the city nor the state was particularly intrusive or forceful in its bureaucratic demands, as the meaning of "Chancellor's charter" status was gradually being defined. The state monitors were merely an occasional, not very significant, presence.

Late in the year -- slightly more than one month before graduation, in fact -- Commissioner Mills surprised even the worldly wise Nadelstern with the sweep and vehemence of his assessment ruling. Precisely because they were charter schools, neither International nor Middle College High School could be included in the extension of the performance assessment variance that had been granted other alternative schools. Even the students due to graduate only weeks later, in June, would be required to pass the state tests in reading and writing before receiving diplomas. International had not even ordered copies of any such tests, let alone prepared its students to take them.

Furthermore, all subsequent students would need to pass Regents Exams in order to graduate. The compact International had made with all its students -- to base graduation solely on passing courses and the rigorous performance assessments -- would be broken. And Mills was firm about deadlines and consequences: "Your failure to submit the order forms or to administer the examinations specified above would be a violation of the terms of the charter, warranting revocation," his letter warned.

Nadelstern immediately enlisted the aid of former state commissioner Thomas Sobol, who affirmed in a strongly supportive letter that the variances he had granted five years earlier served as a guarantee that, at least through this year's graduation, International could determine its own assessment and graduation criteria. Wrote Sobol:

I recognized then, as I do now, that there is more than one effective way to educate high school students, and more than one effective way to assess their progress. . . . State officials have no monopoly on wisdom concerning the best way to teach and evaluate students. . . . Inasmuch as the schools requesting the variance had a well-established record of teaching students well, I deemed it appropriate to permit the applicants to continue their effective practices.

An unmistakable irony here is that Richard Mills had come to national prominence and New York's attention as a major proponent of portfolio assessment when he was state commissioner in Vermont.

Mills held firm. Having exhausted all administrative and legal recourse, International gave the state tests to its seniors just prior to graduation. Nine did not pass and did not graduate with their classmates. (As of this writing, one student had still not passed the tests and was still missing his diploma.)

As the second year of charter status unfolded, Nadelstern's ambivalence increased. On the one hand, despite his anger at the commissioner's ruling on assessment, he still loved his job as a charter school principal. "This can be the best job in public education. I love it that I work for the faculty. We are able to do a tremendous amount." On the other hand, he was running into major difficulty on another front: the city was, in his words, "reneging on its financial commitment." If revised funding formulas and staff benefit procedures were put into effect, International would be facing a steep decline in funding per student, and its staff would lose major personnel benefits they had previously enjoyed.

Nadelstern was angry again -- enough to threaten once more to surrender charter status -- but not to return to the status quo of the New York City Board of Education. "We can't go back. We've come too far. Too many students are counting on us." Now Nadelstern and his staff were determinedly seeking a third alternative and talking with union leaders, higher education officials, politicians -- in fact, anyone who was willing to help find creative solutions for the governance of a uniquely effective school. And, if past is precedent, they will find such a solution.

The battle to find a bureaucracy-free zone, where educators are free to make important academic decisions at the levels closest to the students, will continue. And Nadelstern will be at -- or somewhere near -- the front in that battle.

Postscript. Since this article was written, Eric Nadelstern has accepted the position of Deputy Superintendent of New and Small Bronx High Schools. In this new capacity within the New York City Public Schools, he intends to transform the most challenged schools in the most economically disadvantaged Congressional district in the country by creating at least 15 new, small, autonomous schools in the next two years.

International High School has rejoined the New York City Public Schools within a new school district known as the "Learning Zone." In return for increased accountability for student achievement, this experiment promises the regulatory and programmatic autonomy available to charter schools but with the full funding levels provided to public schools.

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Last updated 17 January 2002
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