EDUCATION
Staten Island schools are pulled in multiple directions by political and professional developments at the national, state and local levels. The No Child Left Behind Act, passed by Congress in 2001, required states to link standards to a system of annual student assessments in reading, mathematics and, to a lesser extent, science. The law also made mandatory the inclusion of students with limited English proficiency (LEP) and with learning disabilities. As a result of the law, annual tests for students in grades 3-8 are being added to the battery of Regents examinations taken by high school students, and the law requires the disaggregation of results.
In 2002, the New York state legislature, in keeping with a trend evidenced in urban school districts around the country, gave the mayor direct control over NYC schools. Mayor Bloomberg instituted a massive governance overhaul that centralized power in the hands of a direct mayoral appointee, the school's chancellor. Under the new governance structure, Region 7 -- an area that includes the entire borough of Staten Island along with parts of south Brooklyn -- subsumed the former District 31, which since 1969 had run the elementary and middle schools on Staten Island, and BASIS, which had run the island's high schools. Through the naming of Local Instructional Superintendents (LIS), the city's Department of Education retained a faint semblance of the decentralization that many island residents favor.
Two overarching goals link these and other developments in education: raising academic standards and offering families greater choice among schools. In turn, pursuing these twin goals has led to a pronounced focus on accountability. The statistics presented here reflect the kind of information that city, state and federal authorities increasingly rely on to evaluate the performance of individual schools and that parents use in making decisions about where to rear and/or educate their children. Thus, data are presented for public schools as well as the large number of primary and secondary Catholic and other private schools found on Staten Island. Finally, there are three major institutions of higher education on the island: the College of Staten Island, Wagner College, and St. John's University.
Kenneth Gold
CSI Department of Education
