☀ ‘New Allentown schools superintendent puts own job on the line’
The Call’s excellent education reporter, Steve Esack, on Allentown’s new superintendent, Gerald Zahorchak:
There is a plan for 18,000 students behind the words and gestures of the new superintendent of the Allentown School District. Zahorchak has such faith in his objectives that he is willing to put his job and the job of other administrators on the line.
“For some of the schools I want to be called out,” Zahorchak said Monday in an interview with The Morning Call. “Like for Central Elementary if we don’t get 80 percent of kids in third-grade at grade level — where only a very, very small percentage of Central Elementary kids are — three years from today, then you should fire the superintendent. That should be the first thing you do.”
Before taking the ASD job, Zahorchak was the state’s secretary of education, and has a good reputation. I’m excited about him, and the future of the ASD.
Zahorchak has plans to internally divide the city’s two high schools:
Citing national research, he said, the high schools will be broken down and “humming” into mini-academies of no more than 600 students. That number allows staff to get to know each child by name and understand their home life situation and their classroom performances. That breakdown is occurring now as Allen’s and Dieruff’s principals break their incoming freshmen classes into teams of teachers who will work in the schools’ new wings that have been built.
One way to answer the challenge of theme-based charter schools would be to develop these academies along thematic lines, creating the equivalent of magnet schools. ASD is the state’s third-largest district, after all; Pittsburgh and Philadelphia both have well-developed magnet systems.
One of the city’s major challenges is the perception (and, to a far lesser extent, the reality) of its schools. Middle-class families avoid the district, or move out when their kids get to school age. They have their reasons–some legitimate, some less so–but if the city hopes to regain a mixed-income population downtown we all have to double-down on the district. My own kids will be attending ASD’s Cleveland elementary when they’re old enough. One reason is Zahorchak.
