City Weighs School Change 3.0

About to embark on a new era of school reforms, New Haven finds itself at a crossroads in deciding exactly who should drive the change — and how.

Should a new series of reforms double down on autonomy for schools and put principals at the helm?

Or should it pull back to a central authority and let the superintendent pick the direction?

Essentially, should New Haven run as one district or as a portfolio of individual buildings?

Two top officials appear to be leaning toward different answers to that big question.

Superintendent Carol Birks had been trying to get all the schools working together toward a unified vision of “#OneNewHaven,” while Mayor Toni Harp is advocating for schools to have more leeway in pursuing their independent vision of reform.

Their divergence fits into a broader national debate about shaking up the way school districts traditionally run. A little-seen grad student in the mayor’s office has been pushing for New Haven to consider a ​“portfolio strategy,” a controversial model of reform that’s been assailed by striking teachers this year in Los Angeles and Denver.

Under the portfolio model, superintendents stop issuing mandates for every building to follow and instead oversee a network of autonomous schools, where principals are given more say over whom they hire and what they teach.

In exchange, the schools are also punished or rewarded based on how they perform. If student achievement flatlines, principals are expected to take the blame, and their schools could be redesigned, taken over by third-party managers or even closed.

The professors who thought up the strategy equated schools to ​“stocks and bonds.” They said education systems could be most effective by diversifying their holdings and then regularly rebalancing their ​“portfolio,” investing in winners and selling off losers.

Over the last decade of reforms, New Haven has adopted parts of that strategy for its own school change initiative.

The city offers a wide array of choices to parents, including dozens of themed magnet schools and several charters, and it lets principals allocate their site-based budget. For a while, it turned schools over to outside companies — and in one case, even the teachers union — to experiment.

But the city didn’t follow through on the model’s other components, like rewriting the budget formula to assign a dollar value to each kid, giving schools complete control over their lesson plans and freeing employees from mandatory trainings and work rules.

New Haven’s reforms notched significant progress over the past decade, but they never reached any of the stated goals. Both sides are now debating why not. Was the last round of reforms misguided? Or did it not go far enough?

At this week’s school board meeting, Mayor Harp called for the committee that once created New Haven’s pioneering reforms to be reconvened. She tasked them with deciding whether a few schools should be let loose do their own thing, as a pilot to see whether following the ​“portfolio strategy” more closely might benefit city students.

(Click here to download the text of the resolution.)

In a 4‑to‑1 vote, school board members passed the resolution reestablishing the ​“joint reform committee” of administrators, teachers and parents. They asked them to take up the idea of the ​“portfolio strategy,” but they left a final decision about what to implement up to another committee.

An ​“explainer” follows on what’s at stake.

What was School Change 1.0?

That was New Haven’s moment in the sun. Plagued by widespread criticism over the state of the schools and the limiting effects of political patronage, then-mayor John DeStefano and then-superintendent Reggie Mayo hammered out a landmark contract with the teachers union that won national plaudits.

The union helped develop a process that rigorously evaluated teachers and paved the way for failing ones to be fired — as long as they received extra help in their last chance to improve. The contract included other experiments, too, like cross-training for principals at charter schools.

The American Federation of Teachers actively participated in the negotiations, portraying it as an example of how teachers unions can participate in improving education rather than just blocking new ideas.

School Change 1.0 also included the launch of New Haven Promise, which seeks to prepare students for college from an early age in part by guaranteeing their tuition will be covered if they meet academic and attendance goals.

As an assistant superintendent, Garth Harries helped draw up and implement all those reforms.

Harries, a former McKinsey consultant, had made the jump into public education by carrying out a portfolio strategy in New York City under reform icon Joel Klein, where he created new schools and shuttered others.

To carry on the reforms, New Haven’s school board selected him as the next superintendent in 2013. He proceeded to draw up School Change 2.0, which got closer to executing the portfolio strategy by turning over more budget control to school sites and bringing in outside contractors to support students’ social-emotional growth.

What exactly is the portfolio model?

Where the traditional model sees schools as permanent fixtures in a community, the portfolio model treats them as temporary investments that only stay around as long as they perform.

Where the traditional model expects superintendents to carry out district-wide initiatives that refine one system of schooling, the portfolio model creates a range of options that specialize in addressing diverse student interests.

Where the traditional model runs all its schools in-house, the portfolio model brings in outside managers to try out new ideas.

That’s how Kelvin Roldan, a policy assistant in Mayor Harp’s office since June 2018, thinks about the differences between the two systems.

Roldan, a former state representative who’s being paid an $81,600 salary by the city, is now studying New Haven’s use of the portfolio strategy as part of the field research for his doctorate at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Though he’s only spoken publicly about his ideas twice, he’s been driving discussion about the portfolio model that led to this week’s resolution.

Developed at the University of Washington’s Center on Reinventing Public Education, the portfolio model has seven elements:

1. Quality options for families to select across neighborhood boundaries
2. Autonomy to choose staffing and curriculum, with potential opt-outs from district services
3. Weighted-student funding to give schools total control over budgeting
4. Alternative talent pipelines to hire and evaluate teachers
5. Support from outside contractors to benefit students
6. Accountability for student achievement to decide which schools to expand or replace
7. Engagement to hear input from parents on their school options

Overall, Roldan summed it up that the portfolio model is ​“agnostic to process,” looking only to hold schools ​“responsible for outcomes.”

Katrina Bulkley, an education professor at Montclair State University, has studied the portfolio strategy. She said that the underlying assumption behind it is that school employees don’t have ​“the incentive to try to improve,” because they have a tenured position in a multi-million dollar building.

The change behind the portfolio model, Bulkley said on a recent episode of the ​“Have You Heard” podcast, is that if a district tries to ​“make [schools] contingent, not permanent, … then you are always having, as a school, to prove yourself, to prove that you are meeting the goals of the system, whatever those goals are.”

What do opponents dislike about it?

Ed Joyner, the one board member who voted against the resolution to bring back the joint reform committee, argued that the portfolio model is better oriented for a corporation than for a school system. He said that the strategy got started ​“when business people took over schools.”

“They didn’t have the depth of understanding for what it takes to teach kids, as well as how poverty affects education,” Joyner said. ​“It’s kind of sad when we can use all those buzzwords and get people fascinated with them.”

Lauren Anderson, an associate professor of education at Connecticut College, pointed out that some of the places that have adopted the portfolio model, like Denver and Oakland, saw teacher strikes this year, often in direct response to the portfolio strategy’s outcomes.

In Los Angeles, Alex Caputo-Pearl, the president of the United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA), referenced the ​“portfolio model” explicitly in a newspaper op-ed about why teachers were walking out. He said their superintendent’s secret plan to reorganize the city into 32 independent networks would have created unequal outcomes for students.

“‘Decentralization’ is a common refrain in so-called portfolio districts — like New Orleans, Newark and Detroit — cities that are riddled with a patchwork of privatization schemes that do not improve student outcomes,” UTLA wrote in a statement. ​“They do, however, degrade the teaching profession and create chaos for parents and students trying to navigate the system.

“In a competition-based portfolio model, clusters of schools compete against each other for resources and support, creating a system of haves and have-nots and exacerbating segregation and equity issues,” UTLA went on. ​“Getting rid of central oversight and accountability would allow the unchecked spread of the worst of the charter-sector abuses: not serving all students, financial scandals, misuse of public funds, and conflict-of-interest charges.”

Anderson said that there’s also not much research showing that strict adherence to the portfolio model actually works. ​“There isn’t an amazing track record of success out there,” she told the Board of Ed on Tuesday.

That’s backed up by the heads of the National Education Policy Center, William Mathis and Kevin Welner, who say that ​“the focus on governmental structural changes is a false promise, distracting from real needs and deferring needed efforts to address true inequities.” They suggest that districts should instead tackle poverty head-on, which they said can still be done with a decentralized model that adequately funds the neediest schools, encourages stability in leadership, uses a meaningful and relevant curriculum and personalizes its instruction.

What’s new about this now? Didn’t we try all this already in School Change 2.0?

That depends on whom you ask. New Haven does offer a range of choices to families and holds its teachers to a rigorous evaluation process.

But many of the big decisions are still made at the district’s Meadow Street headquarters, after the district failed to follow through on the more controversial aspects of School Change 2.0.

Harries’ budget team tried to implement a ​“weighted-student funding” model that assigns a dollar figure to each kid, which follows the student from school to school. But pushback from parents and teachers halted that proposal from going forward.

While serving as Mayo’s deputy, Harries also initially created a system that ranked schools into three tiers, like the portfolio model suggests, but he eventually distanced himself from that system, saying it didn’t account for differing needs across the system.

Still, as superintendent, he continued to name turnarounds. Those schools scrapped their current work and practically rebuilt the school, picking a new teaching staff and changing the work rules.

From the start of New Haven’s reforms, that sometimes meant turning control over to a social service agency (for the Urban Youth Center, later known as Domus Academy), or a for-profit charter company (for Roberto Clemente Academy).

In one case, even the teachers union had a chance to try running a building. At High School in the Community, all 31 teachers had to reapply for their jobs, and 10 weren’t invited back. They also narrowed the focus to a law and social justice theme, and they changed the evaluation of student work from standard report-card grades to mastery-based portfolios. Most radically, students would set their own pace for learning.

But teachers began to grumble about their role in running the school, and eventually Harries forced out the entire leadership over protests.

Even though the experimental school bucked the idea that students should graduate in four years, High School in the Community has struggled to award its students diplomas. In 2014 – 15, for example, only 62.1 percent of students had finished even after six years. Last year, that landed the school on a state watchlist for creating too many dropouts.

(Matthew Brown, the building leader at High School in the Community, pointed out that the state’s graduation rates are a lagging indicator, and he said that there have been two consecutive years of double digit gains that put last year’s four-year graduation rate at 75 percent. ​“During these same years, HSC has seen equally dramatic decreases in chronic absenteeism, increases in the numbers of families selecting it as a first choice among magnet schools, and has broadened its magnet theme to include a stronger focus on leadership, public policy and service through a large federal magnet schools grant,” he added.)

Most of the turnarounds from School Change 1.0 and 2.0 are still lagging behind: Wexler-Grant and Hillhouse were both put under state scrutiny this year for their continually low scores, while Lincoln-Bassett and Brennan-Rogers saw their scores nosedive. But two turnarounds have rocketed upwards recently: Clinton Avenue made big enough gains to surpass the district average this year on the state’s accountability rubric and Hill Central is following close behind.

In recent years, New Haven has stopped naming its own turnaround schools, relying on the state’s accountability system to determine which schools need an overhaul.

By 2016, after a failed plan to break up Hillhouse High School into three academies and a proposed partnership with the charter school network Achievement First, Harries was driven out of office by his critics, leaving some of his most far-reaching reforms from School Change 2.0 unfinished.

Overall, a decade later, none of the three goals from school reform has been fully accomplished, though there have been signs of progress. More students are now passing standardized tests, but more than two-thirds of elementary students are still behind in reading and even more in math. The dropout rate has fallen dramatically, but one-fifth of high schoolers still don’t get a diploma on time. And the college-going rate has nudged up, but one-third still don’t attempt higher education, and even among those who do, one-quarter of college freshmen quit within a year.

Yet according to one comprehensive study of New Haven’s reforms, the schools that had bottomed out the tiers showed the most significant gains — at least in the early years.

A 2014 review by the RAND Corporation found that the lowest-ranked schools were the only ones to show a statistically significant improvement in math and reading scores, compared to similar districts. But those lowest-ranked schools also continued to earn significantly lower marks from students and teachers in surveys that didn’t narrow over time, even after controlling for school characteristics like poverty or math scores.

What could be different in a portfolio-driven School Change 3.0?

Currently, most of New Haven’s principals feel that decisions overall are being made at the school level, rather than at the district’s Meadow Street headquarters. Roldan found that out from an anonymous survey of 26 building leaders, saying it was especially true for academics, but not as much for staffing and budgeting.

If principals are given more autonomy in the future, they’ll also have to take more accountability, Roldan said.

“Accountability is directly tied to school autonomy,” Roldan wrote in a recent report to the Board of Ed’s Teaching & Learning Committee. ​“School accountability is the process of holding schools to specific student outcomes and evaluating schools on the basis of those outcomes.”

The teachers union contract currently allows for dramatic reconstitution of failing schools. But the tiering system was paused in late 2013, after the third year of reforms. Roldan reported that he’d talked to an anonymous current district leader who argued the system ​“focused on the numbers, not the work,” calling it ​“well intended” but ​“punitive.”

Dave Cicarella, the president of the teachers union, said that tiering schools again is a non-starter, because low marks tarnished a school’s reputation almost irreversibly.

“No matter how we messaged it, the image was of a bad school,” he said. ​“The teachers and principal can be good, but parents said, ​‘I don’t want my kid to go there.’ That became the reality, and we had to do away with it. It was just uncomfortable for everyone.”

With all these potential reforms, board member Joyner said he doesn’t understand why Roldan is setting the board’s agenda.

“I resent that someone can write a report that we didn’t even ask them to write, present it to a committee and have it come to the board,” Joyner said. ​“That’s not a good way to do business if you ask me. If we do this, it should be done as a result of everybody being thoroughly informed and not creating additional problems by being an add-on to getting this system on track.”

Who will decide which direction School Change 3.0 now takes?

At its special meeting on Tuesday night, the Board of Education voted to hand that responsibility over to the joint reform committee.

According to the union contract, that committee will have eight members: three teachers picked by the union president, three administrators picked by the superintendent and two parents picked by the superintendent.

The contract says the superintendent will chair the committee, but cannot take any votes.

Board President Darnell Goldson said that meant Birks could have a large say in which direction the district’s reforms go, along with how quickly or slowly they’re implemented.

So, what does the superintendent think about all this?

Before she even took the job, Birks has talked up the uniqueness of New Haven’s array of school choice. At one point during the search, she drew a ferocious backlash for publicly saying that she’d be open to working more closely with local charter schools. And on the first day back this school year, during a convocation for 3,000-plus employees, she put up a slide directly from the University of Washington’s research on the portfolio model.

But Birks also said that, even though she backs the gist of the portfolio model, she’s looking for what’s ​“loose” and what’s ​“tight.” She said she approved of her predecessors’ decision to let principals to develop units around a magnet theme, but she said the district now needs to check back that it’s following uniform policies.

As the district readies for a new budget formula, a curriculum audit and a long-term strategic plan, Birks is trying to strike a balance on school autonomy.

For instance, Birks said after Tuesday night’s meeting, schools should still choose which discretionary positions to fill, but a new staffing model will assign essential roles more equitably across schools. Principals should still choose which people to hire, but all faculty on the payroll will need the same basic training for the job’s demands, including a recent unit on sexual harassment that Birks said hadn’t been administered for six years. And teachers should still keep up their magnet-themed elective classes, but the fundamental math and literacy curriculum need to meet the state’s requirements.

Birks said the reform committee will need to deal with ​“a lot of complexities” as it considers this proposal. As she leads the panel in figuring out the right level of centralized control over schools, she said, she’ll try to be ​“deliberate, intentional and thoughtful.”

And what about the union?

Cicarella said that terms like ​“autonomy” and ​“portfolio” can have multiple meanings. So he’s waiting to hear more specific proposals at the committee level. He added, though, that he didn’t envision upending the role of Central Office in the way the University of Washington’s model describes.

“Autonomy is certainly a good thing, but we can’t have 50 schools doing 50 different things,” Cicarella said.

“When we moved to school-based budgeting, that gave great discretion. But there’s certain things that come with the district. The math and literacy curriculum have to come from Central Office, and professional development should be relatively uniform,” Cicarella went on. ​“I’m absolutely not suggesting that everything needs to be done in lock-step, from the top down. But that’s where I think it’s good to have a certain foundation. There are things we all need to do, but Dr. Birks can still give leeway to schools within flexible parameters.”

Why take on these reforms on now?

Goldson said that the district is currently out of compliance with the teachers union contract, which mandates the joint reform committee.

At the board meeting, Birks said that the committee’s work shouldn’t get ahead of the district-wide strategic planning process that she’s bringing in a top-dollar consultant to run. Joyner said he felt like the proposal had been sprung on them.

That led some to see the committee’s reestablishment as an election-year ploy. The proposal was ​“rushed for no apparent reason,” said Sarah Miller, a parent in the activist group NHPS Advocates, who suspected a political motive.

“It’s an election year, and there is deep concern about our schools,” Miller said. ​“This has the appearance of seeming to be doing something, yet it seems potentially harmful.”

Will anything actually change?

Goldson said that’s for the the joint reform committee members to decide. He pointed out that the resolution that the board passed on Tuesday night doesn’t require the committee to actually adopt the ​“portfolio strategy.” It just has to consider whether it should pilot giving a few schools more autonomy.

But critics wondered why the school board has asked the committee to consider the portfolio strategy at all if it doesn’t really want it.

“Schools already have autonomy, to some extent. If that’s all it is, what’s the change?” Miller asked. ​“If they’re not looking to follow Kelvin [Roldan’s] recommendations, why do anything? Why create a committee for something that you don’t actually want to do?”