By Chris Lombardi

Releasing a long-awaited report from a Middle School Task Force last Wednesday, Mayor Bloomberg and the City Council announced they have set aside $5 million to begin improving 50 high-needs schools and appointed a former superintendent to implement the changes citywide.

All parties present at the announcement, from Mayor Bloomberg to City Council Speaker Christine Quinn to Task Torce Chairman Pedro Noguera, Ph.D., see that first $5 million as a down payment, the first step in improving schools for all of New York City’s middle-grade students.

“We knew that, given the negotiations between the mayor and the Council, it wasn’t going to be everything right away,” said Noguera. But he saw the announcement, and the hiring of former Region 8 Local Instructional Superintendent Lori Bennett to oversee New York’s middle schools, as a sign of commitment to get the job done.

“And given the diversity of the crew, I think we [the task force] did very well,” said Noguera, director of NYU’s Metropolitan Center for Urban Education. The 23-member group of educators, advocates and corporate sponsors (which included the likes of MTV) developed their recommendations after canvassing the city, holding forums and visiting many, if not most, of the schools currently educating New York’s 220,000 middle sixth-to-eighth-grade students.

By “very well,” Noguera was speaking both of the commission’s 20 core recommendations, outlined in a 35-page report, and of the $5 million in new funds announced by Quinn and Bloomberg, which will go toward implementing five of those recommendations in the city’s 50 highest-needs middle schools.

Bloomberg and Quinn prioritized recommendations that seemed most immediately doable, according to officials Chelsea Now spoke to on Wednesday. “The report took longer than expected,” said City Council Press Officer Anthony Hogrebe. “So, they seized on things that could start right away and that would make a difference.” Many of the report’s more comprehensive initiatives, he added, would require systemic change and more involvement from the Department of Education.

The 50 middle schools, which have the lowest test scores among middle schools citywide, will be able to spend the $5 million on additional guidance counselors and family assistants, extended day programs for students, teacher scholarships, professional development or consultation services, or creating “collaborative communities.” And in the spirit of Chancellor Joel Klein’s theme of school choice, added Hogrebe, “they can look at their school and say, ‘Yes, we could use a new guidance counselor, or more staff to go out and meet parents at home.’”

Hogrebe and Noguera both admit that $5 million, when spread across 50 schools, is fairly limited, given that $100,000 per school could amount to hiring a single new staff member. But, they say, it is a start, considering the hugeness of the task. This past spring, even as the task force was doing its work, Chancellor Joel Klein released test results that confirmed the need for more money: While test results for fourth graders had increased dramatically, those increases slowed and even reversed by eighth grade.

Noguera, a nationally known educator who has gained a reputation for his leadership on adolescent development, told Chelsea Now that even as a native New Yorker, he found the vast scale of New York’s school system breathtaking, with so many schools spread across five boroughs. The task force learned very quickly, he said, that adolescents could thrive in elementary schools, high schools, or stand-alone middle schools. The differences lay almost everywhere else.

“There are many outstanding middle schools,” said Noguera. They tend to fall into two categories, he added: those that “screen out the challenging students” and those that include students who are not performing to grade level and also “surround them with tons of services,” from tutoring to counseling to evaluation for learning disabilities.

The middle schools where most of Chelsea’s public school students end up are, for the most part, among the schools Noguera called “outstanding.” They are thus among the most competitive, and therefore also suffer from what Noguera called “lack of equity.”

At M.S. 104 on East 21st Street, for example, which is praised by the nonprofit Inside Schools for dividing its large school into four intimate “clusters,” less than 10 percent of students qualify for free lunch. That figure is 34 percent at Robert Wagner, on East 76th Street, which accepts students outside of its Upper East Side neighborhood by examination only. Both schools, which serve many of Chelsea’s middle-school kids, work well despite their large size.

In the less successful middle schools, largeness only exacerbates the problem, said Noguera. “There are overcrowded schools in Queens and the Bronx with thousands of students,” he said.

He affirmed what advocates at the nonprofit group Class Size Matters, and others, have said: that class size is the single most important factor for improving performance quickly. Not surprisingly, it is also one of the first core areas addressed in the task force’s report: “Reduce class size in the middle grades, targeting the highest-needs schools first.” Others of similar priority include:

• making Regents courses available in schools that have never offered them

• creating a “career path” for middle-school teachers, so that more young teachers specialize in the challenge of teaching younger adolescents

• creating stronger “recuperative programs” for students who are struggling

• reformulating the school day, allowing for more double periods and longer days

• creating curricula integrating more real-world elements (life skills, civics, job skills) with more academic subjects

• offering greatly expanded mental health services

• expanding programs for English language learners

• replacing NYPD officers in middle schools with trained school security personnel

• mandating at least one year of foreign-language study by all eighth graders.

Innovative schools and teachers, added Noguera, have already implemented many of these practices. Chelsea’s Clinton Writers and Artists middle school has “advisories” for sixth graders, where they may talk about anything that’s bothering them in small groups, while M.S. 390 in the Bronx runs its seventh-grade English class in double periods, and uses “collaborative teams” that pair English and special-needs instructors. Other smaller schools that have cropped up in Chelsea in the past year include one that uses an “expeditionary learning” model and one whose theme is the construction industry. (More on the new small schools in an upcoming issue of Chelsea Now.)

“Too many schools,” said Noguera, “let the schedule determine their decisions. We want to encourage schools to think beyond the schedule,” and to expand these “best practices” citywide. Other items on the list, like foreign language instruction, are a fairly straightforward problem of staffing, he said.

“We don’t have enough foreign-language teachers,” said Noguera, let alone those trained in dual-language classes (where two languages are spoken equally, giving all students an immersion class in one or the other). And he knows full well that class size, the bottom line for many advocates, is in New York subject to the vagaries of the real estate market.

In any event, added the task force chairman, the middle-school ship just got a new captain, with the appointment of Ms. Bennett. Her first responsibility will be coming up with guidelines for the first phase, focusing on the 50 high-needs schools. And after that, he said, she has about 25 more priorities, and promises of support from the mayor, the chancellor, Quinn, and Noguera himself, who met her for the first time at Monday’s press conference.

“We’ll be sitting down together soon,” said Noguera.