New York revamps education, cuts jobs

NEW YORK (AP) -- The city is drastically overhauling its Board of Education by slashing more than 1,500 jobs from its administrative staff.

About 1,225 positions will be cut from the central office over three years, including 600 jobs this year. Another 300 administrative jobs are to be eliminated at community school district headquarters. The cuts amount to reductions of more than 40 percent.

The proposal is designed to replace the top-down management structure of the city's school system with a localized management structure that would focus on district and school-level leadership, Schools Chancellor Harold Levy said in a statement Wednesday.

Mayor Rudolph Giuliani approved of the job cuts, but said the proposal did not do enough to address serious problems at the Board of Education.

"It's a better proposal now. It's more ambitious (and) all that is movement in the right direction," Giuliani said this week. "But no one should really pretend that this is going to turn around the school system."

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New York City Board of Education

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