In the mid-nineties, the New York City Schools Chancellor created a citywide improvement zone to take over a significant proportion of the city's lowest performing schools whose local community school districts had failed to improve them. This "Chancellor's District" defined centralized management, rather than local control, as the critical variable necessary to initiate, enforce and ensure the implementation of school improvement. This large-scale intervention involved both a governance change and a set of capacity-building interventions presumably unavailable under local sub-district control. Our study retrospectively examined the origins, structure and components of the Chancellor's District, and analyzed the characteristics and outcomes of the elementary schools mandated to receive these interventions. Our longitudinal analysis compared Chancellor's District schools to New York City's other state-identified low performing schools, based on a school-level panel of performance, demographic, human resource, and expenditure data collected from district Annual School Report Cards and School Based Expenditure Reports from 1998-99 through 2001-02. The results suggest that the Chancellor's District intervention improved these schools' instructional capacity and academic outcomes, both relative to where these schools would have been and relative to comparable schools.

The rate of children being diagnosed with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) has risen dramatically, to an estimated 1 in 150 children. Under the Individuals With Disabilities Education Improvement Act of 2004 (IDEA), children with ASD are entitled to a free appropriate public education in the least restrictive environment. To ensure this, school districts are looking for ways to educate children with ASD that address their core challenges in least restrictive settings. The New York City Department of Education developed the ASD Nest Program to facilitate successful learning in an inclusive classroom. Essential to the success of the program are classroom modifications and a variety of strategies designed to meet the specific academic, behavioral, sensory, and social needs of students with ASD. 6 COUNCIL FOR EXCEPTIONAL CHILDREN

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Many students with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are educated separately from their typically developing peers, while others are placed in inclusive classes but without supports that would help them benefit from less restrictive placements. The needs of students with ASD who are in inclusive settings are often not planned for or met appropriately, resulting in continuing problems and movement to increasingly restrictive environments or private placements. There is a critical need for school models to fill the gap in appropriate services for this population of children with ASD. These models should include those that are inclusive and academically challenging, that can be implemented by many school districts, and that are responsive to the unique combination of strengths and deficits in these students. In the current article, the authors describe the development and core components of the model, and implementation of the ASD Nest program in public schools in New York City.

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