Software Engineering School Was Teacher’s Idea, but It’s Been Done City’s Way

Richard Perry/The New York Times

Michael Zamansky, center, a teacher at Stuyvesant High School, who has been trying to revitalize computer science education in New York City schools, at a mixer for present and former students over pizza at the offices of Foursquare in Manhattan.

At last year's State of the City speech, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg announced the creation of a public high school called the Academy for Software Engineering. The school would be part of an ambitious expansion of computer science education in the city, and Mr. Bloomberg called it the "brainchild" of a local teacher named Michael Zamansky.

Mr. Zamansky was seated on the stage, a few steps from the mayor. But by that point, he said recently, the project was his in name only: he said he had been effectively cut out of the school's planning process, and his vision of an elite program had given way to one that was more focused on practical job skills.

"I don't know if they think my plans are too grandiose, or too unrealistic or if I'm an elitist snob," he said.

The mayor spoke about other efforts to train the city's future engineers and entrepreneurs. But Mr. Zamansky worried that the new school would be too small: not enough students, not enough ambition.

Mr. Zamansky, 45, had spent two decades developing the computer science program at Stuyvesant High School. Former students now working at Google and Facebook call him a mentor, a role model, a man who showed them their future.

He liked to say he "hacked the school" to get what he wanted at Stuyvesant. But hacking the city's education bureaucracy was proving more difficult.

When Mr. Zamansky first came to Stuyvesant's math department in 1993, technology education there included wood shop and telescope-building along with basic courses in Cisco Systems networking and robotics. He introduced the first advanced computer science electives, and started advocating for the subject to be a universal requirement, like math or biology.

Now, more than 300 juniors and seniors routinely vie for the 150 seats available in his advanced classes, which emphasize putting programming to real-world use. And last year, after nearly two decades of arguments, Mr. Zamansky persuaded the school to add a yearlong computer science requirement for the school's approximately 800 sophomores.

His students have built a movie-recommendation Web site, an app that searches for language patterns in celebrity Twitter posts and Pixar-style animations. Mr. Zamansky says his best students graduate "Google-ready."

But even with six full-time staff members, he feels Stuyvesant takes his program less seriously than subjects with their own departments. "We're just considered math teachers by the school and city," he said. "All of this could go away at the whim of the principal."

So in 2010, he decided that if he could not have his own department, he would have his own school.

He envisioned an elite institution with roughly 300 students per grade, all of whom would be admitted after demonstrating math proficiency. Computer science would be a standard part of the curriculum. Initially, he received encouraging feedback from the Board of Education, he said, but his proposal was rejected after the first application round.

Everything changed, however, after Fred Wilson came calling.

Mr. Wilson, 51, is a founder of Union Square Ventures, one of the bigger players in New York's growing technology start-up scene, and had invested in some of the companies where Mr. Zamansky's graduates now work. He learned about Mr. Zamansky's proposal after his own son experienced frustration trying to learn to write computer code in middle school.

The two agreed that the public schools needed to become incubators for tech talent. "I was really impressed by what Mike was doing," Mr. Wilson remembered. "He had lots of alums who'd gone onto Carnegie Mellon and M.I.T. and Stanford, and had come back to the city because they were born and raised here. And I thought: that's amazing, that's what we want to happen."

Mr. Wilson went back to the Department of Education with Mr. Zamansky's proposal, but this time with a significant sweetener: he promised to cover the one-time costs of starting a new school. Space was available in Washington Irving High School in Gramercy, near the city's tech corridor. But the budget for hiring staff, a principal and designing a new curriculum was considerable.

This time, the project was approved.

A flurry of meetings followed. The city advocated for a small school of about 100 students per class whose electives would focus almost solely on computer science. They also wanted the school to be unscreened — meaning no entrance examinations.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: March 31, 2013

An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that Washington Irving High School in Manhattan had closed.

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