NYC Ending 'Renewal' Program To Turn Around Troubled Schools

NEW YORK — Mayor Bill de Blasio's administration is closing down an initiative to turn around New York City's most troubled schools that reportedly cost the city more than three-quarters of a billion dollars. While the city will continue to provide resources to the so-called Renewal Schools, the program will not continue in its current form, city officials said Tuesday.

The Renewal program was started in November 2014 with 94 struggling schools that the city aimed to save from closure. That number has dwindled to 50 in the current school year. About a quarter of the schools made enough progress to graduate from the program but another quarter were closed or merged.

The effort has cost the city $773 million despite its mixed results, according to The New York Times. De Blasio and his schools chancellor, Richard Carranza, admitted the program's centralized structure bogged it down, but they said it taught the city valuable lessons that it would apply going forward.

"I am convinced it was the right road to go down, and I’m convinced now that we have a structure that can continue to take the lessons we learned and act on them," de Blasio, a Democrat, said at an unrelated news conference Tuesday.

De Blasio said the program's remaining schools would continue to get the levels of funding they have received in recent years and will not lose their designations as Community Schools, which have additional resources to serve needy kids.

Under the city's new strategy, the Times reported, support and funding will be sent to the schools that need them most based on data in a new system called "Edu Stat."

The Department of Education will also work to address schools' problems within their districts rather than through a centralized Renewal team, the mayor said.

"They need extra help, they’re going to get extra help, via their superintendent, via their executive superintendent, right up to the leadership here," de Blasio said. "There's going to be a constant focus on those schools, but they'll be within a broader portfolio of the district.

The DOE's recent reorganization will help address a problem that emerged in the Renewal program, Carranza said: School principals receiving sometimes conflicting directions from multiple sources.

The Renewal label also gave the schools in the program a "stigma" that discouraged students from attending, Carranza said.

"This notion that you have a certain amount of time, if it doesn't improve there are certain consequences — people felt that that precluded students from actually considering whether they would go to that school or not," he said.

De Blasio defended the Renewal program as a necessary shift from former Mayor Michael Bloomberg's strategy of closing struggling schools, which he said left students in the lurch and caused "tremendous disruption" in communities.

The challenge of turning around struggling schools is one that officials across the country have grappled with but that no one has fully solved, Carranza said.

"Anyone tells you that they found the silver bullet, they’re going to sell you the Brooklyn Bridge next," he said.