(Updated: 7:51 a.m.) One “failing” school, Urban Youth, will reopen as a charter; another, Katherine Brennan, as a reconstituted public school with a longer year and new rules.
The leaders of top-performing Davis and Edgewood Schools will get new flexibility to do more of what they’re already doing right.
And Principal Iline Tracey (pictured) got encouragement to continue whipping King/Robinson School into shape.
That was the word Monday afternoon as officials announced the first batch of long-awaited “grades” of city schools.
Mayor John DeStefano and Superintendent of Schools Reginald Mayo (pictured) made the announcement Monday at the John Daniels School on Congress Avenue.
The schools will serve as pilots for the city’s nascent school reform drive. Schools will be given individualized management plans — possibly including extra resources or different work rules — based on their performance.
The city picked seven schools as the first to be graded — and to undergo changes that will come to the whole system in coming years.
Principals and teachers from across town filled the lobby of the Daniels school to hear about the changes afoot. At the entrance of the bilingual school, a student held the door open and extended a greeting: “Buenas tardes.”
The New Haven schools’ announcement came on the same day that President Obama sent a proposal to Congress that would overhaul the No Child Left Behind Act. Obama’s new vision is closely aligned with the reforms unfolding in New Haven, DeStefano noted. Both models grade schools not only on student test scores, but on other factors such as attendance, graduation rates, and school environment. Obama’s education blueprint calls for rewarding top-performers and intervening with failing schools. So does New Haven’s.
“I don’t think there’s anything more fundamental to the health and well-being of this city” than school reform, said DeStefano in a short speech. He and Mayo unveiled what changes are in store for the seven pilot schools.
The Top 2 Tiers
Principals at the top-performing Tier I schools — Davis 21st Century Magnet School and Edgewood Magnet School — will be given more autonomy.
That means Lola Nathan (at right in photo), the principal at Davis, will have encouragement to build on the pioneering work she has done eliminating the racial achievement gap; recruiting and developing talent; involving parents in the school; drawing up individualized plans for each student’s improvement based on continual monitoring of test scores, in conjunction with teachers and parents; bringing back the “Comer” social-development method; and generally making it a fun place. (The Independent has been tracking Davis’s progress this school year; click here to read those stories.)
“It’s very exciting,” said Bonnie Pachesa, the principal at Edgewood (pictured with special ed teacher Deidre Prisco), “Not all schools are the same, and not all schools need the same resources,” she said.
Pachesa said she’d like to use her newfound freedom to run a more creative curriculum that’s less focused on the Connecticut Mastery Test. That means building on a partnership with the Yale Center for British Art, which is doing a pilot program with Edgewood students this year, she said.
Middle-ground schools will be placed in Tier II. Officials graded John C. Daniels and King/Robinson schools in this tier. Specific changes were not yet available for those schools. All Tier I and II schools must put together a new management plan before the spring.
“To me, it’s good news, because we’ve always been at the bottom of things,” said Principal Tracey.
Tracey is credited with whipping the King/Robinson School into shape after it formed through a merger in 2004. Under her leadership, the school graduated from a federal “low performer” watch list by posting double-digit gains on test scores several years in a row.
Tracey said she just found out Monday morning that her school had been selected. She shared the news with staff at a 3 p.m. meeting. They were “elated,” she said — because of how far the school has come. While students don’t post as high scores as Edgewood kids, they started at a different place, she said. They started out at rock-bottom. Now the magnet school, which focuses on the International Baccalaureate model of education, has earned some attention as a regional model. The school serves about 475 students in grades pre‑K to 8. At least 35 percent of students come from other districts, she said.
Tracey said she told school leadership Monday to start coming up with ideas for how things should change in the fall at her school.
According to the new teacher’s contract, teachers in Tier I and II schools can vote to change work rules. Any changes need 75 percent approval by that school’s teachers. The superintendent and the teacher’s union leadership both have the right to reject any changes that they believe are not “in the best interest of students.”
The Biggest Challenge
Tier III has two categories: Tier III “improvement” schools will get extra resources and more guidance from Mayo’s office. Failing schools, dubbed Tier III “turnaround” schools, will be closed and reopened under new work rules.
Officials picked one school as a Tier III “improvement” school, not a “turnaround”: Barnard Environmental Studies Magnet School in West River.
By contract, teachers in Tier III schools have less say over the changes than teachers in Tier I or II.
Teachers who’d like to return to Barnard in the fall will face new rules: Eat lunch with students. Participate in an hour-long collaborative session with other teachers every day. Conduct “advisory groups” for students in grades six to eight. Establish student portfolios to keep track of their progress. Those portfolios will be monitored monthly.
Two other “turnaround” schools will undergo dramatic transformations.
Urban Youth Middle School, on Dixwell Avenue, will become a charter school next fall. The principal will be reassigned. A Stamford-based social service outfit called Domus will run it. It will have an extended school year.
So will Katherine Brennan School in West Rock. Brennan, too, will be reconstituted, but it will continue to be run by the public school system. Work rules will change. The school day will be lengthened to eight hours for students, eight and a half hours for teachers. Teachers will receive 10 days of professional development before the school year begins, two extra days during the year, and and two days of “reflection” at the end.
Two generations ago, Brennan was the site of an ambitious experiment of a different era: the launching in the 1960s of “community schools” that stay open into the night for kids and their parents to use.
For the three Tier III schools, teachers won’t get to vote on the changes above. By contract, management was allowed to dictate those changes, as long as they were handed down by Monday’s deadline. Teachers got packets with the new work rules Monday. Their jobs are guaranteed — but not at the same school.
Teachers at Tier III turnaround schools have about a month to decide whether they want to reapply to continue teaching in the same school, said Dave Cicarella, teachers union president. They’ll find out by the end of this school year whether they get accepted, or have to change schools. Along with the longer school days would come an increase in pay. All students will stay in the same school.
Cicarella met with teachers at Katherine-Brennan at 3 p.m. Monday, when they got the news about major changes afoot. A couple of teachers had issues with the reforms right away because the longer school days would conflict with their daycare needs, he said. The rest of the teachers were a mix of anxious and excited, he said.
Unlike in other cities, New Haven’s reforms have brought a new level of cooperation between the school administration and teachers union. Cicarella stood up Monday to applaud the plans.
The selection of the seven schools was a management decision, Cicarella said. But “these are decisions we participated in, and these are decisions that we completely support.”
Three main factors went into grading the schools: student performance on standardized tests, student growth on those tests, and student “engagement.” Mayo also looked at three qualitative factors, including whether the school has strong leadership and is ready to take on reforms.
The “Matrix” Revealed
In grading the schools, the most emphasis was placed on absolute performance on tests, then growth on those tests. School environment — defined by attendance and how students fared on a survey filled out by their teachers — was a smaller factor in grading the schools, said school reform czar Garth Harries.
NHPS
Unlike other school districts, which use an A to F grading scale for schools, New Haven chose a 3‑D matrix (pictured). It looks like a bunch of balloons, or bubbles, on a map. Tier I schools fall in the upper right-hand corner of that map; Tier III schools sink down below to the left-hand corner.
For example: Edgewood School had high test scores and high growth in test scores, so it landed on the top right corner, which is Tier I. Urban Youth had low scores and low growth, so it landed on the bottom left, Tier III. King-Robinson had high growth, but average test scores, so it landed in the middle, Tier II.
Click on the map to take a closer look at how the elementary schools fared.
No chart was provided for the city’s high schools. Harries said Mayo decided not to grade any high schools for the pilot project because they didn’t have a good way to measure students’ “growth.” For a detailed explanation at how the schools were graded, click here.
Starting in November, Mayo will issue grades to all 47 city schools annually.
Parents were informed of Monday’s news through a message from “School Link” at 5:30 p.m. Parents at the seven pilot schools will be invited to meet with staff about the changes at their schools in the last week of March, Mayo said.
Margaret Holmes, the parent rep from Urban Youth on the citywide PTO, said Monday evening she didn’t know any details about the changes in store for her 7th grader, but she welcomed the chance to make the school better “organized.”
For more coverage of the city’s school change effort, visit the Independent‘s school reform section.
Katherine Brennan is generally paired with the Clarence Rogers Schools. Will both schools be turn-around schools, or just the upper grades that are housed in the Brennan building?