Carmen Fariña is shooting for the moon this school year.
With less than a week before the first day of class, the schools chancellor revealed an ambitious set of goals to the Daily News that will transform the country’s largest public school system — if she can get them right.
“This is my first year as chancellor and there’s nothing I’m leaving to chance,” Fariña said. “This is going to work.”
Universal pre-kindergarten is her top priority.
On Thursday some 30,000 new kids will attend pre-K classes — a massive, rapid expansion that led Controller Scott Stringer to sound the alarm last week about “sacrificing safety in the name of expediency.”
But Fariña dismissed those concerns, and said all pre-K bases are covered — including at 830 community-based organizations that the city says will provide education equal to what is offered at public schools.
“We’ve always had high standards,” she said. “That’s always been my rule of thumb. If it’s not good enough for my kids it’s not good enough for any kids.”
On the eve of her 49th year as a city educator, Fariña was feeling confident.
Even the glacial pace of gains on state exams didn’t seem insurmountable. This year, city students’ scores improved by a paltry four percentage points in math and two percentage points in English.
In third grade — a critical benchmark for student learning — a meager 29.9% of students are reading at grade-level.
But Fariña remained unbowed, and said that she hoped that in the next few years she expected to see drastic improvement among second-graders — giving her even less time to improve achievement among young students in the education system.
“I want to see every second-grader on grade-level,” she said. “I think real change can happen over three years.”
But those are just two of the daunting challenges Fariña is ready to tackle head-on.
-She also expressed confidence she could improve teacher retention by restoring the dignity of the job. But it won’t be easy. A recent teachers union survey found that 32,000 teachers walked away from city classrooms in the last 11 years, with about 4,600 going to jobs elsewhere in the state — mainly to city suburbs that offer higher pay and less challenging teaching conditions.
-Fariña pledged to announce in the next two weeks a big reduction in the number of teachers getting paid despite not having steady classroom jobs. Earlier this month 114 of the roughly 1,100 teachers — known as the Absent Teacher Reserve — accepted $16,000 buyouts.
Fariña said the numbers would dwindle further as principals are taught best practices for writing up teachers and beginning the arduous termination process.
