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New Chancellor Dennis Walcott says he strongly supports school reform efforts that offer parents additional educational choices — including controversial single-sex schools.
Walcott said that, along with adding charter schools and career and technical education programs, he’d like to boost the number of boys-only or girls-only schools in the city above the current 19 schools — which includes six charters.
“I’m a big believer in single-sex schools. I’m a big believer in options,” Walcott told The Post editorial board yesterday. “I want to expand those options. I think people should have that choice.”
Until legislative rules were loosened in recent decades, single-gender public schools had effectively disappeared. While there were fewer than a dozen such programs nationally in 2002, there are more than 520 public schools with classrooms dedicated to single-sex learning this year — including more than 100 stand-alone boys’ or girls’ schools, according to the National Association for Single Sex Public Education.
Still, a number of groups oppose the educational separation of kids along gender lines — including the New York Civil Liberties Union.
“There are issues of policy here that are of serious concern,” said NYCLU Director Donna Lieberman, who pointed to a lack of data that the schooling model works.
“In a school system that is supposed to be data-driven and that purportedly values diversity, it’s terribly disappointing to hear about plans for proliferating gender-segregated models,” she added. “It sends a terrible message to young people that our city doesn’t think that they can learn with their peers of the opposite sex.”
But supporters of the model say it not only provides public-school parents with an option that’s been the norm among private-school families for generations, it also creates a more focused learning environment.
“They don’t have to worry about the opposite sex and the competition and the peer pressure and all that it entails with the other gender being present,” said Yvonne McDowell, whose daughter, Takeisha Kamara, 17, is a senior at the Women’s Academy of Excellence.
“Academically, my daughter has done very well,” said McDowell. “[The academy] had the flavor, the quality of a private school because it was a small school and a single-gender school.”
On other topics, Walcott told The Post he is pursuing the repeal of the state’s seniority-based layoffs law “full-time” while also looking at legislative or contractual means to vault unsatisfactory teachers or those with other blemishes on their records to the front of the firing line.
He emphasized that the administration’s threat of having to lay off more than 4,600 teachers was real, and not posturing for political or contractual gain.
“People think we’re bluffing because, probably, in the past, things have been talked about and then we find a settlement at the end of the day,” said Walcott. “Right now, we don’t have that ability.”