The Journal News

Xavier Estevez, who will attend Columbia University in the fall, doesn't place much faith in Yonkers' leadership of its schools.

He and other high-achieving students at Gorton High School last year wanted to take advanced placement courses in chemistry and U.S. history, but administrators cut those programs to save money. The night the Board of Education eliminated 502 jobs, it granted then-Superintendent Angelo Petrone a $43,000 retroactive raise. Petrone, who drove a Lincoln Navigator that cost taxpayers nearly $12,000 a year, had a family friend hired for a $90,100-a-year accounting job and was backed by the mayor and school trustees until the day before his indictment for lying to investigators in the hiring scandal.

"A lot of students became quite cynical," Estevez said. "Talk about school leadership in Yonkers? That's the biggest joke there is."
When he resigned last month, Petrone left the state's fourth-largest school district in the hands of his deputy. Bernard Pierorazio is the fifth man to take the helm in 10 years.

Yonkers' record in retaining its superintendents is worse than the norm, even for city school systems. Big-city superintendents stay an average of 4.6 years, according to the Council of Urban Boards of Education. Statewide, a survey by the New York State Council of State Superintendents found the average tenure was 6.7 years.

The pressures are higher than ever on educators to improve learning for the nation's neediest students. Yonkers, like other urban districts nationwide, is under scrutiny by the public, local politicians, the media and state education officials who want the city to close the achievement gap between minority and white students.

Churn at the top makes change much harder, said Michael Casserly of the Council of the Great City Schools in Washington. Shifting priorities and power, programs added or eliminated, reforms half-started and half-tested — all those things confuse teachers and parents, affect morale and take time, money and effort away from the classroom.

"Turnover that high makes it almost impossible to gain any momentum behind any reforms," Casserly said. "While things may be getting better, it's hard to sustain it and harder to accelerate it when you switch actors too often."

The need for stable, focused leadership in urban districts has become more crucial with the federal No Child Left Behind law. The law requires testing of all children, and results made public. Schools that don't make certain benchmarks may be shut.

Now urban superintendents need to transform districts saddled for years with persistent student failure. It's a radical change from the 1980s, when urban schools were focused on granting access, said Richard Laine, director of education at the Manhattan-based Wallace Foundation, which supports education research and experimental programs.

"Under the old model, the superintendent's goal was universal access, which meant having a chair for anybody who came through the door," Laine said. "Now it's universal success, so the demands are clearly higher. Educational leaders have to ratchet up the quality for all the students."

A recent Wallace Foundation study found that good leadership was second to classroom instruction in contributing to what students learn at school, with good leadership having the biggest effect in districts trying to turn around failing schools.

Doing so can be quite a challenge, especially in urban districts such as Yonkers. Family income, parents' educational attainment, proficiency with reading and writing English, and access to health care all have an effect on achievement; and urban students tend to have lower levels of all of these compared with their suburban counterparts. Urban districts have less money per student, more dropouts and more discipline problems.

Many districts, including Yonkers, have made strides overcoming those obstacles.

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