Spread the word: in New York City, encouraging successful schools to share and grow

In New York City, which has the largest school district in the country, there are 1,700 public schools--and one contract for all of them. Often, schools want to make changes to the contract on a limited set of topics, a practice the district has long allowed. The Progressive Redesign Opportunity Schools for Excellence (PROSE) provides a structure to enable schools with a proven record of collaboration between teachers and administrators to make changes outside of the contract and regulations to support student learning and teacher development. The program was created to encourage schools to replicate and build on some of the best practices they had spent years putting in place: shared decision making, classroom visits by peers seeking to improve, scheduling changes to allow for more planning time and in-depth student work, and support for diversity in student enrollment. In this article, the PROSE program is described and the implementation and effectiveness of the program in the Brooklyn New School and the International High School at LaGuardia Community College is discussed.