Carnegie Reporter, Vol. 4, No. 3 | Small Schools in the Big City: Promising Results Validate Reform Efforts in New York City High Schools, page 2

“Advisory—I love it,” says David Lopez. “Teachers really know what’s going on in people’s lives.” Besides meeting with their individual student groups, every week there’s a meeting of all the advisors in the grade, so “if you’re falling behind, you have the potential of being ratted out to every teacher,” he laughs.

The advisory system effect was powerfully demonstrated at Bronx School of Law and Finance’s graduation when the time came to hand out diplomas. Each advisor stood on stage and announced the names of the graduates in their group—which was accompanied by the kind of cheering, crying and bone-crushing hugs you’d expect to find at a family reunion. Math teacher Hamlet Santos, who claimed to be the toughest advisor of all, choked back tears with every name he called, after which he was presented with a team jacket the students had emblazoned with the advisory’s chosen name: X.

Looking on, Gregg Betheil, senior vice president of National Academy Foundation¹, one of the school’s main partner organizations, remarked: “With the advisors handing out diplomas to kids they knew well, without the use of note cards or mispronounced names, this is the first time I’ve seen ‘graduation by relationship’ rather than rank or alphabet.”

Bronx High School of Law and Finance students hone their stock market skills using the virtual
trading floor.

Reforming Factories of Failure
Although law and finance is an obvious choice for a school in the business capital of the world, it’s but one theme among dozens employed by successful small schools all over the city. With 405 high schools and an enrollment of almost 300,000 this huge system can accommodate many concepts, each one aiming to meet the needs and appeal to the interests of around 450 students in many of the most underserved areas of the city, making academics more relevant, so kids will be less likely to fail or drop out.

Among the 83 small schools launched by the New Century High School Initiative are Bronx Academy of Health Careers, Brooklyn School for Music and Theater, New York Harbor School, Bronx Aerospace Academy, High School for Global Citizenship and the Collegiate Institute for Math and Science, which cater to students’ special interests and potential career paths. Other schools address critical needs, such as Manhattan Bridges High School, where enrolling students speak only Spanish, and South Brooklyn Community High, where students who are truant or who have dropped out of school are engaged in intense academic recovery and given another chance to earn a diploma.

“The New Century High School Initiative was really about reinventing urban public high school education,” says Michele Cahill, Carnegie Corporation vice-president, National Program Coordination and director of Urban Education. As a program officer of the Corporation, in 2001 Cahill played a leading role in designing the Initiative before joining the New York City Department of Education where she oversaw its implementation. She returned to the Corporation in 2007.

“New Century was launched as a new kind of partnership involving the Department of Education, the unions representing the teachers and administrators and New Visions for Public Schools—an education reform organization that works to improve schools, energize teaching and boost student achievement. Like many urban districts, New York City had some excellent high schools, but far too many students attended large, persistently low-performing schools that were anonymous, stratified, organizations lacking accountability for student achievement. Their conditions were the exact opposite of what was needed,” she says.

In 2002, newly elected New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg took charge of the school system, appointing Joel Klein chancellor. Klein immediately embraced the New Century High Schools commitment to accountability for achievement by the city’s adolescents. He transformed the effort begun with New Century into a plan to open 200 new small schools within 5 years in partnership with New Visions and other intermediary organizations.

Today, these academically rigorous schools, nearly all of which occupy the same buildings as the original failing schools (and which offer campus-wide athletic and extra-curricular programs open to students from all the smaller schools) have demonstrated that poor and minority students can achieve and graduate at high levels. The first two groups of schools to have graduating classes attained an overall graduation rate of 78 percent—nearly double the average rate of 40 percent in the schools that they replaced—compared to the current 58 percent in the city and 70 percent nationwide.

Global Citizenship principal Brad Haggerty checks on the progress of a student-created mural.

According to Cahill, analysis of student performance across New York City found that those who entered high school below academic standards were most negatively affected by school size of 1000 or more and most likely to graduate from the city’s small schools. Importantly, large size combined with a high concentration of academically under-prepared students was a recipe for failure. These two factors explain over 40 percent of the variance in graduation rates among schools.

School is far from the only problem for the system’s failing students. Many had been affected by adverse circumstances such as recent immigration, interrupted education, gang involvement or abuse, all of which hinder resiliency and make it hard for kids to connect with school. Meanwhile, alienated teachers struggled within the impersonal bureaucratic structure of low expectations and large teaching loads. While school size has little or no effect on students who are already equipped to be successful, attending a small school can be tremendously helpful to those who are less prepared to succeed.²

Small schools make it possible to support underprepared kids from high-risk environments and create the conditions where other strategies can be put in place to boost teaching and learning effectiveness. “New Century schools benefited from the overarching New York City focus on strengthening school leadership,” says Cahill. “Chancellor Klein committed Department of Education resources, including places in the city’s new Leadership Academy, to provide dedicated and trained principals to the new schools. New Century resources were then freed up for professional development for teachers. Importantly, all these vital elements—new schools, new principals and new and better prepared teachers—came together at one time.”

Bob Hughes, New Visions president, credits the culture of “disciplined innovation and continuous improvement” that make possible the “incredible journey” students and staff at these schools are now taking together. “Carnegie Corporation’s investment not only has affected the schools, partners, students, families and communities involved, it also has heavily influenced the overall work of the DOE,” Hughes maintains. Based on New Century High School Initiative progress, New York City has deepened its commitment to small schools years ahead of the mayor’s original timetable.

Next page: But there’s much more going on than a widespread effort to simply shrink the size of urban high schools, Hughes explains.

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¹ A New York State high school Regents diploma is earned by passing a series of courses in specified subjects, and scoring 65 or better on a standardized test for each course.

² Evaluation of the New Century High Schools Initiative, Policy Studies Associates, Inc., June 2006