All things considered, public school children made more academic progress faster over the last decade in New York than in any other city in the US. The City accomplished this by motivating and empowering educators—and enabling them with the supports necessary—to diagnose and serve the particular needs of every child in every classroom.

The main beneficiaries have been the city’s poor, minority, non-English-speaking, and special education students. But their outcome gaps remain large, their progress has slowed recently and they are at extreme risk from proposals by some of the City’s more privileged families and others representing interests besides those of children to restore the status quo ante.

Building Blocks for Better Schools is right that readying more students for college and careers requires a combination of improved motivation (accountability), empowerment and support for schools. But I offer a leaner list of steps limited to must-haves, not distracting nice-to-haves.

First, the good news: no other urban district in the nation can match the City’s recent improvements in student results. Its graduation rate rose almost 40% from 2005 to 2012, with most graduates receiving a relatively rigorous Regents Diploma, not the watered-down Local Diploma that was common before.  The drop-out rate fell 50%. The percentage of college-ready graduates doubled to (a still abysmal) 31%. Black and Hispanic students improved more than white and Asian students on these measures, narrowing gaps.  Even as state reading and math tests got harder, the City nearly eliminated the previously large performance gap between its students (75% of whom are poor) and those in the rest of the state (25% poor). The City made more progress on national achievement tests than the rest of NY State.

The steepest gains came in 2007-2010, when the City first gave educators more responsibility, authority and tools to tackle each child’s needs. Previously, when schools were run by a bureaucracy imposing one-size-fits-all programs on all schools no matter what particular children needed and by special-interests focused on everything besides children, only economically privileged students consistently fared well—a true Tale of Two Cities.

Still, many of the changes made—including some I designed—were clunky and imperfect, and momentum has slowed recently. To motivate, empower and enable educators to extend recent gains to all children, there are seven steps the new administration should take or refrain from taking:

Motivate

1. In holding schools accountable, continue prioritizing students’ learning growth (which is what we really care about and is not a function of family wealth) over their current learning status (which is driven almost entirely by wealth). Otherwise, the Tale-of-Two-Cities message educators receive is that family wealth controls kids’ destiny, so that the only way good educators can get good outcomes is to transfer to schools with richer families.
2. Get rid of zero-sum rules that pit schools against each other by pegging grades to how each does compared to others. Instead, give schools realistic targets based on recent outcomes by the best schools like them, and give top ratings to all schools that reach or pass the goal, including by collaborating with other schools.
3. Fix a mistake I made and base schools’ overall rating on the leading indicators in the Quality Review as well as the lagging outcomes in the Progress Reports.
4. Continue adding more diverse measures of the quality of student work and let innovating schools replace city metrics with ones they devise and can show are no less rigorous or child-focused.

Empower

5. Give schools back the autonomy lost in the recent process of introducing the Common Core Standards and teacher evaluations. While not easing up on schools’ responsibility to enable all students to meet rigorous standards, give school leaders and educator teams more leeway to determine how to help kids master the standards and how to use the rich student-growth and observational information from evaluations to improve educator effectiveness. 

Enable

6. Don’t restore the geography-based deployment of school supervisors, which special-interests and privileged constituencies loved for the patronage power it gave them over which of their children and cronies got placed in the “best” schools but was a disaster for poor and minority children. Continue letting schools opt into networks with others facing similar challenges, but bring the academic supports the network staffs provide schools into better balance with the operational supports the networks have previously prioritized.
7. Most importantly, give parents a real role in central and local decision making, not through special-interest politics but through real participation in problem-solving and innovation. For example, let broadly representative groups of parents in the City’s diverse neighborhoods design new, stably integrated public schools to replace failing, racially segregated ones, and commit the City to replicate diverse schools that become popular with new ones nearby, so gentrification doesn’t keep destroying integration. A second example: give parents a lead role in designing accountability reports they can understand and use.

It would be a shame not to make changes like these seven to bring the rest of the City’s children into its recently widening sphere of success. It would be a tragedy to go back on the nation-leading improvements made thus far.

James S. Liebman is the Simon H. Rifkind Professor at Columbia Law School. Between 2006 and 2009, he led the initial design of the City’s school accountability system and accompanying  supports.