Secondary School Reform in New York City
An American Youth Policy Forum Field Trip — May 6-7, 1999
Overview
The American Youth Policy Forum field trip to New York City included visits to four very different secondary schools--each in its own way attempting to provide a high quality middle or high school education responsive to the needs of young people and the community. Two of the schools--Central Park East Secondary School and the High School of Economics and Finance--have been recognized by the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Vocational and Adult Education, as a New American High School and a New Urban American High School, respectively. A third high school, the Bread and Roses Integrated Arts High School is a relatively new school founded by teachers from Crossroads Middle School in District 3, with a focus on arts and social justice. The final visit was to Washington Heights Intermediate School 218, a community school designed in partnership with The Children’s Aid Society.
The purpose of the field trip was to:
- explore the impetus for education reform in America’s largest urban district;
- gauge the effects of school reform on students, teachers and communities;
- learn about the types of supports provided to develop and sustain reforming schools;
- learn about the role that community and business partners play in school reform; and
- understand the structure and richness of New York City’s extensive network of schools, providing options in thematic focus, school size, and employing different administrative structures and levels of autonomy.
New York City has approximately 1,000 schools, including 150 high schools, and more than 1 million students spread over five boroughs. It has 37 magnet schools in which the ethnic and racial composition must reflect the city as a whole, many large neighborhood schools (some with enrollments as large as 3,000 students) and a number of strategies in place to create diverse types of schools. Approximately 40 district superintendents are responsible for 32 community school districts, six high school districts and citywide programs.
Over the last 25 years, there has been an unprecedented growth in the number of learning communities--schools, programs and academies in New York City. The genesis of these schools, programs and academies have come from the efforts of superintendents and the central board of education as well as from collaborations of community partners, including universities, businesses, community based organizations and school-based planning teams. Recently, charters and charter conversions have been thrown into the dizzying mix of schools exemplifying different origins, administrative structures, forms of leadership and sponsors.
Participants in the American Youth Policy Forum field trip to New York City tried to sift through and understand these structures. However, the scale of school reform and the swiftly evolving relationships among central administration, community school districts, communities and partners defied any rational analysis of the range of learning communities available to students. This field trip summary, therefore, represents only a slice of the diverse efforts to reform New York City public schooling. Although New York City is unique, its school system illustrates many of the problems while sharing many innovations and reforms with other school districts seeking better ways to manage schools and improve education for urban young people.
The Role of Community Partners and Intermediaries
In addition to school visits, our field trip provided opportunities to meet with and learn about the role and impact of community partners, such as the Center for Collaborative Education, The New York Association of Community Organization for Reform Now (ACORN), the New York Citywide School-to-Work Alliance Forum and The Children’s Aid Society. Each of these organizations plays pivotal intermediary roles in supporting networks of schools and providing important support services, data and advocacy necessary for comprehensive and continuing reform efforts.
The group met with Heather Lewis, co-director of the Center for Collaborative Education (CEE). CEE is the New York City affiliate of the Coalition of Essential Schools, a national school reform movement that began in 1984 with the work of Theodore R. Sizer and his colleagues at Brown University. CCE began 12 years ago with a group of schools seeking to effect policy change. It grew from six to 40 schools and shifted its focus from building small schools to building capacity for performance-based assessment (i.e., presentation of student learning through portfolios and student work).
According to Lewis, in contrast to the current national and New York State policy on holding students to high levels of performance and tying standardized tests to grade promotion, CCE schools are trying to institutionalize performance-based assessments and to show that these measures can be as rigorous and reliable as the standardized tests. The schools are a part of a waiver agreement with the state education department that allows the schools to graduate students by portfolio assessment in lieu of the Regents exam. At this point, the schools still administer the existing minimum competency exams required for graduation so that comparative data on scores for CCE schools and regular schools can be collected. CCE is working to establish common standards and benchmarks across schools and to align them with standards used across the state. CCE high schools are also developing rubrics to assess students’ exit presentations.
CCE member schools are attempting to become an alternative model for district schools, illustrating how schools can coalesce around common interests in assessment, professional development and ways to explore opportunities to be more autonomous and accountable. CCE works with its members to lobby for specific policy changes such as hiring teachers under a school-based option, not based on seniority. In many respects, the CCE schools are similar to charters but still remain within the school system.
CCE, along with New Visions for Public Schools and ACORN share an Annenberg Challenge Grant of $25 million The purpose of this grant is to pilot networks of small, alternative schools--the New York Networks for School Renewal (NYNSR)--linking a number of NYC public schools in "learning zones," the equivalent of a charter network, working together in mutual support and accountability. Presently, there are 130 schools with 50,000 students in what Norm Fruchter of New York University’s Institute for Education and Social Policy calls the "Annenberg sub-system" of small schools.
School-level databases have been created for all schools so that they can be compared to all others in the system. Long-term research seeks to identify the actual value that the NYNSR schools contribute to student learning. In the project’s first two years, gains in reading in NYNSR’s elementary and middle schools were documented. NYNSR schools also demonstrated greater "holding power" than other public schools. More than 94 percent of NYNSR elementary and middle students ended the 1995-1996 school year in the same school they started.
ACORN is a grassroots community-based organization with a membership of over 20,000 low- to moderate- income families. ACORN members organize to influence a wide range of issues, including education, housing, crime, bank investment, employment and health care. The ACORN Schools Office was established in 1988 in response to intense interest in improving local schools on the part of ACORN members. The Schools Office is governed by the Citywide Education Committee comprised of members from each ACORN neighborhood and school. Members and staff organize campaigns around education issues and develop small, autonomous public schools in ACORN neighborhoods. The NY ACORN Network of Community Schools includes P.S. 245 Elementary (Flatbush) (1993); ACORN Community High School: Crown Heights (1996); and Bread and Roses Integrated Arts High School (Washington Heights/West Harlem) (1997). ACORN Community High School: Bushwick is slated to open in September 1999.
The New York Citywide School-to-Work Alliance Forum is a non-profit organization that helps foster school-to-careers in the City, assisting schools to share best practices and working closely with the state and the local department of labor. According to Tom Pendleton and Mala Thakur of the Citywide School to Work Alliance, the state school-to-work funds were initially funneled through request for proposals (RFPs) to the city. In this manner, it was possible to highlight model initiatives and best practices leading to overall improvements in STW implementation and greater evenness in quality.
According to Pendleton and Thakur, New York has adopted new standards of learning and integrated performance standards and applied learning, providing for better links between the academic requirements of the Regents exam and school-to-work strategies. At least in the short-term, problems are anticipated in enforcing the new standards since in the past not all schools and students were expected to take the courses necessary for obtaining a Regent’s diploma. A decade ago, it was possible for a student to graduate with two years of math (arithmetic and consumer math). Former Schools Chancellor Ramon Cortines abolished these lower forms of math; now all students are expected to take higher levels of math. Vocational education schools were considered "dumping grounds" whose students were never expected to pass the Regents exam. The vocational schools in New York City are restructuring and upgrading their curricula in line with the new expectations for student graduation.
When the federal School-to-Work Opportunity Act sunsets in 2001, it is anticipated that STW will continue in some form. According to Pendleton, "Business needs what STW is doing for young people in improving their preparation for careers and postsecondary education. Student and employer needs are not going to disappear. STW helps make adults responsible for young people."
The Children’s Aid Society (CAS) is one of the largest non-profit social services agencies in New York City, providing community health, adoption and foster care, as well as programs for youth involved in the judicial system. CAS has a history of providing after-school programming dating back to 1875. Since 1989, CAS has joined in an unprecedented partnership with the New York City Public Schools, community school districts and community-based partners to develop a comprehensive response to the needs of children and families through community schools. Community schools are "Schools that integrate the delivery of quality education with whatever health and social services are required in that community." Today CAS is involved in 40 community schools in the U.S. and also has efforts underway in Europe. Field trip participants visited the CAS Community Schools Technical Assistance Center located at IS 218 and learned about the role of articulated services for youth in school reform. (See later discussion of CAS’s role at IS 218.)
Central Park East Secondary School (CPESS)
CPESS is one of NYC’s alternative high schools and is a cooperative project of Community School District 4 (a district of choice), the NYC Board of Education Alternative High School Division, and the Coalition of Essential Schools, a national high school network. It is an outgrowth of the successful learning environment created by Deborah Meier at the CPE Elementary School to improve the quality of educational offerings in a district that had become notorious for low student achievement. At the time, however, there was no precedent for such a high school; therefore the Alternative High School Division was created. The school currently receives funding from District 4 and from the Alternative High School Division. The Alternative Superintendency has helped spawn some of the most progressive recent ideas in education reform in the City and now has responsibility for 60 schools. As a district of choice, students attend from all over the city, including Staten Island. (For a fuller discussion of CPESS, see www.bpic.org/nuhs/sites/cpess.)
CPESS was created to meet the needs of students that previously had not been addressed. It operates on the same funding assumptions as other schools; however, the school’s leadership has made certain sacrifices to provide its student-centered programming. There are no department heads, no college or guidance counselors, no band, no gym classes and only one foreign language offering. Staff has taken on a greater range of responsibilities than in traditional high schools—a choice they have made to be able to have smaller classes. The average class size is 23–24 students, compared to more than 40 students in regular NYC public school classrooms. Although the school has currently reached its maximum enrollment of 450 students in grades 7 – 12, it is one of the smallest schools in the city. Enrollment is 45 percent Hispanic, 45 percent African American and 10 percent "other" race/ethnic groups.
The school is open to all levels of ability and there is no required entrance test, but all students are expected to meet the high expectations placed on them. Students from CPE I, CPE II, and River East schools also started by Deborah Meier, are ensured enrollment. Others apply through the District for admission. About one-third of the school’s population has been identified in need of special education services. Therefore, special resource teachers work closely with regular schoolteachers to address each student’s needs.
Every staff person works with a small group of no more than 15 students and gets to know them and their families well. Advisors serve as the school's primary liaison with the student's family and meet regularly with the student and family to review work, set goals, and to determine how to provide the best possible environment for each student. Report cards are not mailed home; the advisors distribute them and follow-up with the parents.
CPESS’ goal is to teach students to use their minds well, to prepare them for a life that is productive, socially useful and personally satisfying. The academic program stresses intellectual achievement and mastery of a limited number of centrally important ideas. Students are taught how to learn, how to reason, and how to investigate complex issues that require collaboration and personal responsibility.
CPESS offers a common core curriculum for all students in grades 7-10 organized around two major fields: Math/Science and Humanities. Each class is centered on a theme (for example: "Peopling of America" for Humanities; and "Vision and Light" for Math/Science). The teachers, with support and ideas from students, families and others, develop the curriculum. Communication skills (reading, writing, public speaking and critical listening), are taught in all subject areas by all staff.
Students in grades 7-10 spend one morning each week at a community-service site. These experiences help students develop social responsibility, acquire useful skills, learn about adult occupations, develop relationships with adult mentors, and participate in increasingly complex tasks. "Social issues" one of their portfolio ideas, is addressed as part of their service-learning projects in community-based organizations. Here, students perform an analysis of the service placement—its mission, leadership, design, issues that are being addressed, the outcomes that result, and provide recommendations for resolutions of problems. Students reflect on these projects and their service-based learning experiences in advisory group discussions and in journal writing which is shared with their school advisor and site mentors. According to Anne Purdy, Service Learning Coordinator and advisor of ninth and tenth grade students, "The more you can get a service-learning project within the culture and structure of the school, the more the student gets out of it. This is one way of getting students to see that quality things go on in the classroom."
Eleventh and twelfth grade placements are a part of the Senior Institute, which is designed to meet the personal needs and career interests of each student. The Senior Institute program of study includes classes at CPESS, CPESS courses at local colleges, and an internship of at least 100 hours focusing on an individual career interest within the public or private sector. Students set clear goals for what they are to learn with their site supervisor. Students reflect on their internship experiences through journal keeping, seminar discussions and preparation of an Internship Graduation Portfolio. While in the Senior Institute, students make future plans with help from their family, advisor, and others at school.
The final high school diploma is based on a presentation of work (portfolios) that demonstrates competence in 14 specified areas to a Graduation Committee composed of the advisor, a second faculty member, an adult chosen by the student, and a younger student--not on "seat time" in class. The committee judges the student's readiness to graduate, holding all work to high standards.
This is a staff-run school with little staff turnover. Teachers choose to work at CPESS. They work long hours, coming early and staying late. Teachers interview prospective applicants, looking for people who can work in teams and observing them in their current teaching roles. According to Principal David Smith, "This is not just a place to work, but a place to put down roots. A number of staff has left to start their own schools. This has been a hot house of leadership. The school’s success has been the direct result of the staff." Purdy also attested to the value of the collegial atmosphere at the school, "Being able to work with and get ideas from colleagues is a way of working—one that I can never move back from."
Principal Smith summarized the characteristics of the school:
- "Habits of Mind" (see end note 4)
- performance-based assessment
- a curriculum designed by staff
- a willingness on the part of the staff to take risks and to work together to solve problems
- a commitment to treat young people as individuals
- the fostering of creative disobedience
- almost all staff in the school function as advisors to students
- a commitment to staff development
He then discussed some of the continuing challenges the staff faces in implementing and remaining true to the core beliefs set forth by school founder Deborah Meier in 1985--to create a youth-centered environment where knowledge is continuously acted upon, and where young people are taught to question, to request and weigh evidence and to instill habits of mind that support continuous and critical learning. The faculty views its job as making explicit the implicit, and helping students develop self-discipline and time management skills so that they can obtain the tools needed to make powerful decisions about their future. Making assessment performance based with exhibitions of knowledge has also been the centerpiece of the teaching and learning process. " It’s hard to do this work well. The more time you spend with students, the more you are pulled into their lives." According to Smith, "Depending on who you talk with, CPESS is either very well known or totally unknown. But other NYC schools are beginning to apply our model."
High School of Economics and Finance
At the High School of Economics and Finance located in Manhattan’s Wall Street financial district, field trip participants met with Principal Patrick Burke, his staff and school founder Phyllis Frankfort, past executive director of the National Academy Foundation. According to Frankfort, the institution started as an Academy of Finance in 1981. It was not until the early 1990s that Schools Chancellor Joseph Fernandez gave her the charge to turn the academy into a school that opened in 1993.
Presently, the school is a citywide educational option program, providing a demanding college preparatory program for 700 students drawn from all boroughs of the city and reflecting its diversity. In school year 1998-99, the student body was 17 percent Asian, 38 percent Hispanic, 30 percent African-American, 15 percent White and less than 1 percent American Indian. This past year, over 4,000 students applied for 175 available openings in the school.
All students take courses to earn New York State Regents diplomas in addition to the Academy of Finance (AOF) program. The AOF program includes courses such as Financial Commitments, a 9th grade course in which each student plans a new business, learning how to develop a feasibility plan, cost out the product, and develop marketing and production strategies. Several students shared their business ideas and products with field trip participants. One student was selling sneaker laces. He had determined that teens in the 13 to 17 year-old age group liked to express themselves through laces in different colors and designs. The curriculum is augmented by the Stanford I. Weill Institute for Life Long Learning seminars and linkages to higher education--all seniors take a three credit-course at Bernard Baruch College.
Seniors also participate in the Investors Portfolio Management Virtual Enterprise. In the Virtual Enterprise class, students invest in mutual funds and manage investment accounts. During the AYPF visit, they were involved in activities necessary for running a successful business-- filing taxes and preparing for a trade show to sign up other virtual business enterprises in the city. The course is two periods a day, four days a week. According to Kendra, the enterprise CEO selected by her classmates, "We must follow SEC rules and can’t be too aggressive or gamble with the funds." She confided that she often has to take work home with her in the evenings in order to keep up with her responsibilities as chief officer of the enterprise. The teacher, Mr. Walsh, indicated that he "merely facilitates the process. It’s the students who do all the work."
The Weill Institute has three components: Wednesday Seminars, Work Experience and Skills Development, and The NASDAQ Incentive Plan. All students participate in three forms of work experience—120 hours of community service, 120 hours of unpaid and 240 hours of paid internships. The Weill Institute staff oversees placement and supervision of student work experiences. These work experiences are used to help students integrate their classroom learning with the demands of the real workplace, to see how businesses work and to learn on-the job skills. Internships are also used to help motivate students to do better in school since they cannot participate unless they are doing well academically. Students are required to keep an academic/career planning portfolio of their work experience and academic accomplishments (report cards, transcripts, PSAT/SAT scores, etc.).
In each seven/eight week cycle, the Institute conducts approximately 25 different seminars offered by external organizations. This helps further integrate the high school into the local financial community and the community into the school. This design also allows for expansion of the curriculum in that seminar offerings can include foreign languages and cultural offerings, such as music and art. Among the seminars offered for the final school quarter ending June 9, 1999 were: Community Service, SAT Prep, Physics Tutoring (to help students gear up for the Physics Regents), Sports Analogies (provided by the Police Athletic League), Advanced Local Area Wide Network (provided by Extranet employees); Understanding a Wall Street Firm (provided by Salomon Smith Barney employees); and What Happens at the Fed (provided by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York).
The NASDAQ Incentive Plan is used to reward students who demonstrate academic excellence and/or improvement. Students earn shares valued at $10 each for improving their GPA, passing all their classes or other achievements. Students enroll in the program, earn shares throughout their four years at the High School of Economics and Finance and, at graduation, exchange their shares for a check.
Bread and Roses Integrated Arts High School (An ACORN/New Visions School)
The need for access to quality high school education and schooling that is responsive to community interests was the impetus for the development of Bread and Roses Integrated Arts High School. Opened in 1997, the school was designed by educators, parents, students and other community members to address the high demand for: (1) small student-centered schools that are anchored in a community base; (2) programs that focus on students with disabilities or limited English language proficiency in an inclusive way; (3) schools that integrate arts into the curriculum; and (4) a curriculum that empowers and is relevant to the lives of students.
School Director and founder Carol Foresta has been an educator for 25 years and had founded a middle school in the South Bronx for kids with special needs--"kids that nobody wanted." It soon became obvious that many of these students had no place to go for high school and that there was a great need for smaller, more student-centered schools for teenagers. (Many high schools in New York City have as many as 3,000 students.)
ACORN helped organize neighborhood meetings to discuss the need and vision for the school. Community people visited the middle school and wanted to know more about it and why they didn’t have access to this type of schooling for their children. Foresta worked with parents and other educators to plan the design of the school and received a start-up grant from New Visions (through the Annenberg program). Securing a site continued to be a problem until ACORN rallied parents who demanded space from the NYC School Board—the top floor of another public school. Through community action, many impediments were removed and the way was paved for the opening of the school.
This is an education options school in which the Board of Education selects the first 50 percent of enrollees to ensure a spread of ability levels--15 percent below grade level, 15 percent above grade level and the remainder on grade level. (The school also has more autonomy in hiring and is not required to take transfers of teachers based on seniority.) The school selects the remaining 50 percent, ensuring diversity of ethnic and national origin, strengths and other abilities. Students are not selected for their artistic abilities, but rather, according to the school’s literature, the goal is "to tap into the energy and the potential of the artist in all of us." In the first year, with help from ACORN, students were recruited from local middle schools. Help in recruitment was needed since the school was notified in April of its approval to open the following September. The first class of 60 ninth graders included students who had been rejected from as many as 10 other schools and many for whom this was a last chance.
This year there were 900 applicants for 100 spaces. The current student body of 175 students (100 freshman and 75 sophomores) presents a range of reading levels, from 3rd grade through college level. This represents a formidable task for teachers since one of the goals of the school is to have every student read challenging age-appropriate literature. The school will reach its maximum enrollment of 300 students by school year 2000. The school is funded on a per pupil amount set by the Board of Education and the operation budget is based on the number of students enrolled.
Maintaining a small, intimate environment where students feel safe and families are valued is a basic principle of the school. According to Foresta, "If the school were staffed in the manner of traditional schools, classes would have 30 or more students. But since we staff for teaching and learning and have no administrative structure, classes have 18 to 20 students each." Flexible block scheduling halves the number of students teachers see daily, allowing them to focus more intensively on the needs of each student (in a typical school, teachers see 150-200 students each day).
The curriculum is student-centered. Self-directed and collaborative learning are valued. It is acknowledged that many of the students come from schools where classes are overcrowded and students have not been encouraged to think aloud. Instead, they have been rewarded for being quiet and not sharing their ideas, thoughts and feelings. According to the school’s literature, "It is a priority for us to reverse the silencing that our children experienced." Numerous strategies are used to make students comfortable articulating their views and becoming critical thinkers. This is done through Socratic discussion to help students develop and evaluate their thinking by making it explicit, opportunities for collaborative learning and collective thought, and through advisory seminars. For one hour every Wednesday, a teacher must prepare a seminar discussion in their discipline. Seminars use a number of pedagogies, taking the form of debates (e.g., on the Bill of Rights), discussions of works of literature or products of art, overviews of the history of a geographical region (e.g., the Balkans as a context for current events in Kosovo).
This is a form of staff development for the teachers as well. Teachers also meet once a week for staff planning to make decisions about the curriculum and the seminars, to model teaching techniques and to critique their own practice. The hiring of teachers is done through a committee composed of teachers, parents and students. The process involves many interviews and discussions with potential staff, demonstration lessons followed by debriefings with teachers of the class and students.
Field trip participants observed Michael Perez’s poetry and literacy class in which students were performing African drumming facilitated by a classmate who attended the Harlem School of the Arts and was an expert on Djemba drums. The teacher was using African drumming as a vehicle for students to learn about culture and heritage and as a mechanism of building on the talents and resources of their own and learning. Another class we visited was humanities focusing on the history of the 1940s, covering World War II, the Holocaust, and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. The teacher read passages from the novel "Sophie’s Choice" and students were having a lively discussion about the inhumanity of the concentration camps and the agonizing decision Sophie was forced to make, selecting which child—her daughter or her son—to give up to the Nazi soldier.
Through grants and partnerships with a number of community institutions, the school is able to expand its arts and social justice focus. New Visions funds have helped turn the school into an arts factory for two months each school year. This school year a professional puppet company was engaged to work with students to develop large-scale puppets (among the notables replicated were Malcolm X and Spike Lee) which have been used in community festivals and student performances. ACORN has assigned an organizer to the school to work with parents to build a parent-teacher organization, develop campaigns to address issues impacting students, such as safety on the subways, and to seek out ways to leverage parent power to impact policies and practices in the community.
Like CPESS, Bread and Roses uses portfolio assessment, although all students must take the Regents exam. English is the second language of two-thirds of the students and Foresta is worried about how well they will do on these examinations. The school is currently negotiating with the state education agency to approve the portfolio process and to be able to waive out of the Regent’s exam. Students are expected to go through a very intensive process producing multiple drafts and versions of their work and defending their products. Schoolwide rubrics are used not only to help teachers evaluate student efforts, but also to allow students to judge their own work.
Washington Heights Intermediate School 218
I.S. 218, in Community School District 4, is an innovative community school designed in partnership with the Children's Aid Society (CAS), combining academic study with health services, youth development activities and parental involvement. Field trip participants met with C. Warren Moses of CAS, Rosa Agosto, Director of the Community Schools Technical Assistance Center located at I.S. 218, Richard Negron, Community Schools Planner at I.S. 218, Alexander Soto, Assistant Principal, and Dr. Linda Freeman, a child psychiatrist on the faculty of Columbia University and assigned full-time to the school.
According to Agosto, the northern Manhattan neighborhood of Washington Heights does not have major youth organizations, such as Girls Clubs or Boys Scouts. It is a very densely populated community of 300,000 people in two and one-half square miles and has one of the largest unmet day care needs in the city. The majority of community members are 18 years of age and younger. Yet, it is a highly entrepreneurial and ambitious community. It is an area rich in potential for piloting the concept of a school that not only provides for the community’s teaching and learning needs, but for health and social services needs as well.
There are 35,000 students in the District and most schools are overcrowded at 125 percent of capacity. Nevertheless, the need for children’s services is so acute here that the community has willingly set aside space in the school for these purposes. I.S. 218 is open 10 – 12 hours a day, 6 days a week, year around (except for traditional holidays). Whereas the regular schools have a school year of 180 days, community schools are open 300+ days per year.
Community schools are transformed schools based on a committed partnership between the school, school district, parents and social services providers. These schools combine the best educational practices of a quality school with a wide range of in-house services (Children’s Aid Society. Building a Community School, 1997). According to Freeman, "The stigma of receiving mental health services is minimized in the context of a community school because social workers and psychologists are well integrated into the totality of services that all children receive. Here, early identification and intervention is possible through schoolwide screening and students at high risk and in need of mental health services can be easily identified."
Moses stressed that community schools are deeply imbedded and invested in the families of the community and that CAS is a partner—not a collaborator or co-located activity within the school. Such a partnership requires a community vision and a commitment to resolve problems that arise from this relationship. This arrangement would not be possible if the Board of Education did not recognize that the facility belongs to the community. Through the partnership, the $6,500 to $8,500 per student investment from the Board of Education in the students’ education is augmented by approximately $900 per student raised by CAS from private foundations (about 80 percent) and other public funds (20 percent from sources, such as 21st Century Learning Community Schools, Safe and Drug Free Schools, etc.) for health, optical, dental, and mental health services, before and after school, summer programs and staff development. The Technical Assistance Center helps replicate the IS 218 model at other schools and share the Society’s accumulated wealth of experience learned in operating community schools.
According to Moses, "If categorical funds are spent differently, you could get more bang for your buck. For example, in creating mental health clinics, the government spends about 20 percent on the facility and 20 percent on outreach and referrals. Forty percent of government funds could be saved by putting these services in the schools."
The school of over 1,500 students is divided into four academies of approximately 370 students each that are, in turn, divided into "advisories" of about 18 students each. The academies are: Community Service; Business Studies; Math, Science, and Technology; and Expressive Arts. The extended-day program complements the classroom experience with teacher-led after school activities, including an extended-day academic curriculum, a library, a weight lifting and dance program, community internships and activities to link students with postsecondary institutions. In the after school hours, students in the Business Studies Academy can hone entrepreneurial skills by managing the school store while those in the Community Service Academy learn mechanical skills and respect for the environment through the repair of abandoned bicycles to be donated.
Summary
AYPF participants provided feedback on the trip. In general, they liked the opportunity to observe the different facets of school reform offered at each site and valued the "efforts to transform education for disadvantaged students." They recognized the complexity of the public school system and suggested that opportunities should have been provided to talk with NYC school officials to further clarify and provide context.
The focus on developing smaller, more nurturing learning communities for adolescents in order to attend more explicitly to their social and development needs as well as their academic needs was among the recurring themes and observations. Each of the schools visited was small by New York City standards, with the exception of I.S. 218, which has subdivided its total student population into smaller academies. Information was provided about the impact of small schools on students by Norm Fruchter of the Institute for Education and Social Policy, lead evaluator of the New York Networks for School Renewal. Fruchter has found higher completion rates, lower drop out rates and lower mobility in these smaller learning environments.
An undercutting concern was the need to address the problems of large neighborhood (zoned) schools, and to expand access to quality education programs such as those available in the more competitive citywide magnet schools. It appears that there is great interest in these "locally brewed schools of focus" and the New York City Schools central administration propelled along by community advocacy groups and community partners seems to be providing the necessary conditions for their expansion.
Experiments with different levels of flexibility and autonomy seem to be encouraged or permitted. The hiring autonomy provided to options schools, such as Bread and Roses and CPESS, seems to guarantee a more dedicated faculty. The ability of educators and community groups to create new schools, programs and academies seems to ensure the infusion of new ideas and possibilities.
Although the conditions for reform may be favorable, it is evident that the networks of support that exist for all the schools visited are very critical to their continuous improvement and to the expansion of similar reforms throughout the system. It was also clear that strong community partnerships are at the core of each school’s existence, as well as dedicated leadership in the form of committed educators (teachers and principals) and community leaders who have been given the flexibility by district and citywide leadership to attempt these reforms.
C. Warren Moses of the Children’s Aid Society, warned the group that the range of schools visited on this field trip might lead us to believe erroneously that small schools are the answer. According to Moses, "Making all schools more effective and more intimate ought to be our priority. In fact, the percent of New York City students who have the opportunity to attend effective and small schools is a tiny fraction of the 1,100,000 students that we are trying to educate. Also, by placing too many unrelated schools in one building, we add to the sense of alienation, not the sense of community. I.S. 218 is an example of how a large and complex environment can be enhanced and made more intimate and more effective."
Contact Information
Rosa Agosto, Past Director
Richard Negron, Current Director
Hersilia Mendez, Assistant Director
Community Schools Technical Assistance Center
4600 Broadway
New York, NY 10040
(212) 569-2866; fax (212) 544-7609
Patrick Burke, Principal
Eric Gernent, Assistant Principal
Michael Mehmet, Assistant Principal
High School for Economics and Finance
100 Trinity Place
New York, NY 10006
(212) 346-0708, fax (212) 346-0712
Mariana Davenport, Schools Coordinator
New York ACORN for Community Empowerment
(ACORN) Schools
88 Third Ave., 3rd Floor
Brooklyn, NY 11217
(718) 246-7900, ext. 219; fax (718) 246-7939
Carol Foresta
Director
Bread and Roses Integrated Arts High School
6 Edgecomb Ave.
New York, NY 10025
(212) 926-4152; fax (212) 926-4317
Norm Fruchter
Institute for education & Social Policy
New York University
726 Broadway, 5th floor
New York, NY 10003
212-998-5874; fax (212) 995-4564
fruchter@is2.nyu.edu
Ms. Heather Lewis
Co-Director
Center for Collaborative Education
1573 Madison Avenue, Rm. 20
New York, NY 10029
(212) 348-7821; fax (212) 348-7850
heatherlewis@cce.org
C. Warren Moses
Associate Executive Director
The Children's Aid Society
105 East 22 Street
New York, NY 10010
(212) 949-4800
pmoses@childrensaidsociety.org
Tom Pendleton, Executive Director
Mala Thakur, Director of Workforce Development
New York Citywide School to Work Alliance
84 William Street, 14th Floor
New York, NY 10038
(212) 803-3325; fax: (212) 952-1358
malabt@aol.com
David Smith, Principal
Central Park East Secondary School
1573 Madison Ave.
New York, NY 10029
(212) 860-8935