The New York Times

In a year of big gains in the number of New York City fourth graders meeting the state's reading and writing standards, no place has more cause for celebration than District 9 in the Bronx, which had the largest gain of any city district.

For decades, District 9, a roughly two-square-mile area just north of Yankee Stadium, was a tale of woe common to many places in the city - only more woeful. The local school board had a history of corruption stretching back to the 1970's. In 1988, an elementary school principal was arrested and charged with possessing crack cocaine. In 1991, a school board vice president was charged with threatening staff members with a gun.

And for many years, the district's reading scores were the worst in the city. Six years ago, when New York State introduced a new reading and writing exam, only 17.1 percent of District 9's fourth graders scored at grade level.

This week, District 9 is once again focused on the number 17.1, but for a different reason: it represents the district's outsized percentage-point gain in fourth-grade scores. That jump brought the number at grade level to 47.6 percent - still low but hardly last.

"There's nothing more rewarding," said Shelley Debin, the principal of Public School 11, where the number of students meeting standards rose nearly 31 points to 59.3 percent. "It's climbing Mount Everest."

Senior administrators, principals, parents, community advocates and other experts said the gains reflected years of hard work and steady leadership, particularly on the part of Irma Zardoya, the regional superintendent, who is also responsible for District 10, which posted the second-largest gains this year. They also attribute the students' success to cooperation at all levels among the school system, parents, community groups and the teachers' union.

Principals said that Ms. Zardoya had provided the principals and the teachers with enormous amounts of professional training and support and that she had encouraged keeping a sharp focus on data from interim testing to gauge student achievement and adjust instruction to their deficiencies.

Ms. Zardoya, in turn, credited everybody else and said the gains reflected an all-out effort to improve virtually every aspect of teaching in her districts, which collectively form Region 1.

"Everyone is a leader in this work. That's why we rely heavily on using teacher leaders," Ms. Zardoya said. "Our teachers need to learn from each other and support each other's growth, and what we ask principals is to create cultures of learning in their schools for both students and adults. We worked as a team in doing all of this."
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http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/20/nyregion/20school.html