Speech to new students and families

Welcome to our learning community. You were selected from more than 1300 highly qualified candidates. Your selection is a recognition of your academic achievement, hard work and dedication. At Columbia Secondary you will be joining a select group of students and faculty who yearn for academic excellence and who thrive in being part of one of the most diverse selective school in the city.

Our shared vision is to build the best public school in the city, and in the nation. In two short years we have made great strides in this direction. Already we are ranked as one of the city’s best 100 schools. Our School Environment surveys have been outstanding; in the top 95% of the city. Other measures of academic outcomes place us in the top 10% of the city’s performance. Our first Progress report earned a 96.4% and we maxed out in the two most important categories of school performance. More importantly our unique curriculum is already world class: a one-in-the-nation Philosophy and Engineering core course program, our more than 40 electives and creative arts courses, and our exceptional June mini-semester with its travel abroad and field expeditions programs. We have already established New York’s most diverse and comprehensive middle school curriculum. As we expand into the Upper school, Columbia’s vast undergraduate curriculum, and our own college level course offerings will outclass anything offered by any school in the city.

Our success as a school depends critically on parent support - through hard work, dedication, and vision we can build a great school together. Join us in this labor of love – as we strive to create an extraordinary learning community for our children.

I am committed to lead this school in particular ways…and want to be held accountable by students and parents. Hence below, I am sharing this vision of leadership with you. This is my commitment to you – and an invitation to become involved in THIS ADVENTURE of building Columbia Secondary School.

My public commitment to an ethical leadership
 
It may surprise you that the first formal conversation I hold with you, focuses on ethics, and not on science, or the curriculum or the school building, or the myriad of other things that are important to our school, and which you must have many questions about.
 
But education is primarily a moral enterprise. We are in the business of transforming children’s minds. This is profound stuff ….with immense implications. How I act as a principal potentially affects the lives of hundreds of kids, in many cases, for their entire lifetime. This is an awesome responsibility and I take it very seriously.
 
Because of this I want to take time to articulate to you the values and priorities that will drive my leadership. It is important for me to do this now, early in our partnership, for two reasons:
 
First: I want to be held accountable. I want you to be my best critics. And it is during the first years that I will need the most criticism, as my learning curve needs to be steep for us to succeed as an institution.
 
Secondly: I want you to understand what drives me; what values and ways of thinking will constrain, shape and hopefully, enlighten my decision making.  We are going to have disagreements – I want to make sure you understand where I am coming from – what it is that I aspire to accomplish as a leader. I think that if you understand me, even when you are angry at my decisions (and I can guarantee you that there will be these moments) at least you might respect them.
 
Leadership is an activity beset with ethical implications. Leading a school like ours, because it goes against the established practices, norms and expectations; because it attempts to break new ground and expects higher outcomes,  and thus takes risks not normally taken, is laden with particularly challenging ethical decisions and actions.
 
When I accepted the opportunity to lead this school I did so because I wanted to work with the diverse children and families of upper Manhattan and because I thought a magnet school in this setting, associated with a great university like Columbia, presented a unique opportunity to lead in a courageous and ethical way. 
 
These are the highlights of my vision about leadership - my guiding principles and values
 
1) The children’s learning and developmental needs take precedence in all our decision making. I will always ask the question – How does this affect the most important member of our community – our students?
 
2) I will be courageous and take risks – it is the only way to educational excellence. In a world full of mediocrity and naysayer, we must constantly battle against this strong urge to conform, to accept less, to do what everybody else is doing.  I must lead these efforts against conformity.
 
3) Knowledge and reason will guide my decision making and I will hold my staff and faculty to the same expectation. Decisions in our school will have valid, defendable rationales that are justifiable publicly. You deserve a justification – we all need to know why we makes decisions the way we do and what factors and considerations were taken, or were not taken, into account. Critical inquiry and research findings will guide our decision making and we will be transparent in justifying our decisions.
 
4) I will embrace diversity in all its forms, and will promote a community that respects, values and takes full advantage of the richness of the totality of the human experience. We are, and I am terribly excited about this, in all likelihood, one of the most diverse science and math magnet school in the country or very close to it. In an increasingly diverse and small world, where unfortunately divisionism and parochialisms of all kinds threaten humanity with extinction, we must present an alternative…
 
5) Teaching is our most important activity and teachers are our most important professional. I serve the students by serving the needs of my faculty; by empowering them to become extraordinary teachers. I should be, above all, an instructional leader. To underline the importance of teaching my staff and I will be required to teach, alongside the core teachers.
 
6) I will be guided by the best values of humanism - the belief that within our unique human capacities and limitations, we can choose to be good, caring, empathetic and loving.  In a city that is often impersonal and dehumanizing, I want us to create a village where people feel caring, compassion, love …..where we are, in many ways,… a family.
 
Seven years from now, when your kids become our third graduating class, we will, I am very confident, have the tests scores, and college acceptance letters and scholarships that show that we trained you well in this respect. This will be an achievement we can certainly all be proud of.
 
But for me, the most important gift we can give our children is not academic success. – the most important measures of our success as a community and as a school lies elsewhere. I will look more at the quality of their humanity: their capacity for judgment and discernment, the quality of their human relations, their degree of happiness, their understanding of their role and responsibilities in this world, and the meaning and purpose they find in their existence. I hope I can lead our school in this dual emphasis on academic achievement and moral-personal development that I see as central to our responsibility towards our children, in part, by the examples of an ethical leadership...
 

Again WELCOME TO CSS!

WE BUILD CSS TOGETHER!