In her first full day on the job, new city schools boss Carmen Fariña announced she’ll focus on the city’s struggling middle schools during her first year in office.
“I really believe if we get middle schools right, the rest is going to be a piece of cake,” the chancellor said Thursday in her first school visit — to Middle School 223 in the Bronx.
The Bloomberg administration tried for years to improve performance at middle schools, where many students fall behind, leaving them at a disadvantage when they face more challenging high school courses.
Fariña, a veteran educator and former developer of middle-school curriculum, declined to evaluate the previous administration’s efforts to target grades six through eight, but said there’s good reason to emphasize middle schools.
“I think we’ve made a dent in terms of the high school graduation rates,” she said, adding that focusing on improvements starting in the ninth grade is too late. “We know by the seventh grade who’s going to graduate in the 12th grade.”
Fariña offered few details about what she is planning to do, but said she intends to appoint talented principals, spread approaches used at the best middle schools and cater to students’ needs to a greater degree.
She described Day 1 at the office as being hectic. She said she drank “lots of coffee,” skipped lunch and had “many, many conversations” with officials at the Department of Education’s headquarters in Manhattan. Yet she found time to meet for nearly an hour in a one-on-one setting with MS 223 Principal Ramon Gonzalez, whom she greeted with a hug.
Fariña chose to visit the South Bronx middle school because it has been a success, she said. The school, where nearly all students are poor enough to qualify for free lunches and nearly all are black or Latino, has earned an A-rating under the Bloomberg administration’s high-stakes school report cards — a system Mayor de Blasio has vowed to scrap.
Fariña, who has worked as a teacher, principal and education administrator, didn’t reel off any statistics as she toured three MS 223 classes, but instead noted details of what she liked at the school.
A native Spanish speaker, she praised the dual-language instruction she observed in a social studies class. Popping in on a seventh-grade English class, she noted the “buzzing” of student voices. “You hear the noise around the room? That’s good,” she said. “Kudos to the teachers in this room.”
Fariña caught sight of a sign for the principal’s book club, and remarked: “How can that fail?”
Overall, she praised Principal Gonzalez and the school’s teaching staff for their devotion, particularly for working closely with all students, including children with special needs, to make sure they improve.
“That’s what a good school does,” she said.
