HSC’s Future Course Remains Up In The Air

A three-year union-run experiment is coming to an end at High School in the Community (HSC), and it remains to be seen who’ll be in charge come September.

HSC is preparing to leave a state network of ​“turnaround” schools at the end of this school year. State, district and school officials are considering how to assess whether or not the experiment in management by the teachers union was a success, and how the school should be run going forward.

Connecticut’s Education Department will give HSC a small grant next year to help it transition out of the network, officials said. Meanwhile, New Haven school officials must decide who will run the school in September. School leaders said they plan to discuss ways to boost the school’s sagging graduation and college enrollment rates, before the next school year.

In 2012, HSC — a low-performing magnet school on Water Street — joined the ​“Commissioner’s Network” of state-funded ​“turnaround” schools. That meant it would receive an extra $1.5 million from the state for each of three years as well as a major structural overhaul. The city turned over management of the school to the local union branch, the New Haven Federation of Teachers (NHFT).

In addition to new management, HSC tested out ​“mastery-based learning,” meaning students would move up to the next grade when they are ready, not necessarily at the end of each year. At the end of each stage, students compile ​“portfolios” to show they have mastered that level of education — which means they can take less than or more than four years to finish high school.

HSC will continue to receive state funding next year at a reduced rate that will allow the school to ​“focus on sustainability” and maintain improvements made over the past three years, said Department of Education spokesperson Kelly Donnelly.

State, district and school officials plan to meet this week to discuss the parameters of that ​“step-down year,” she said. The state does not yet know whether the union will continue to manage the school. It should know a ​“range” for the grant once it figures out the exact needs of the school in order to ​“make sure they’re able to move forward” after leaving the network, according to Donnelly.

“Forced Marriage”

When asked by the Independent whether the union will continue to run HSC next year, Superintendent Garth Harries gave a noncommittal response: ​“Everything is possible. Nothing is off the table at this point.”

That decision will likely be made in the ​“coming months,” he said. He said union leaders ​“are interested in continuing to lead the school.”

The school was plagued with tensions In the first year of the turnaround, because of disagreements about NHFT president Dave Cicarella’s (pictured) day-to-day role in the building. HSC had been a teacher-run school since it opened in 1970, with teachers democratically electing their peers to leadership positions. When the union took over, some teachers argued that the new management was leaching some of their own authority.

That problem largely dissipated in the second and third years of the turnaround, said five-year HSC building leader (aka ​“principal”) Erik Good. Union leaders, teachers, administrators, students and parents sit on a board to ​“preview” potential hires from within the district.

“We have hired a lot of people” without disagreeing on ​“who’s running the process,” Good (pictured) said. And a seven-person governance council of school and union leaders meets monthly to run the school.

“As long as HSC is going to be teacher-led, it makes sense to have the union to act as an administrative lever,” he said. Otherwise ​“it’s harder to get the attention of people you need to get the attention of in the district … It helps to have an advocate to help push for things that make sense for the school.

But at the same time, he said, the ​“NHFT/HSC partnership lacks a vision.” It began as a ​“forced marriage” and each partner ​“went into it with different expectations on how things would work,” he said.

The occasional ​“tension points that come up” could be resolved more easily if the two came up with a ​“constitution or contract or [set of] norms” to have in writing ​“this is how you see our conversation working,” Good said.

Cicarella said a vision statement ​“could be something that’s worthwhile.”

But, he said, ​“we’re pretty clear what our vision is: transferring to mastery-based learning.” Exiting the commissioner’s network, officials have to decide exactly ​“what things are staying in place and what is changing” to best achieve that vision, he said.

Mastery Learning

After the first year of the switch to mastery-based learning, zero of 44 students completed their freshman year at HSC, causing some parents and students to panic.

That number rose, as people adjusted to the new system.

HSC freshman Gabriella Santiago (pictured) has been able to take some sophomore-level classes in her first year of high school. ​“Mastery-based learning is better for me,” she said. ​“I usually catch on to things rather quickly.” She uses the extended hours during the day to finish her schoolwork, using her teachers as resources.

“That’s how I started to take sophomore classes,” she said.

Good said the school can do a better job at being more ​“systematic in the assessment of kids” who are new to HSC, ​“having a conversation with parents and with kids upfront about, ​‘This is where your skills lie and where they need to be.’” Many students who got to the school during the first year were ​“expecting one thing and seeing another thing,” as administrators worked out the kinks of the new system.

Some students — especially those who came to HSC after a year of high school somewhere else — left the school system altogether. ​“They didn’t want the alternative they were facing. For some of them, it was the last option,” Good said.

District and school officials said they will meet to discuss the significant dips in the school’s four-year high school graduation rates and college enrollment rates between the 2012 – 13 and 2013 – 14 academic years — after two years of the experiment.

The four-year graduation rate dropped from 56.9 percent to 47.5 percent; college enrollment dropped from 69.2 percent to 57.8 percent.

Cicarella said it seemed ​“a little bit unfair” to only look at four-year graduation rate as a measure of success, since school leaders undertook mastery-based learning with the expectation that students would graduate when they were ready. ​“If they need an extra year or half year … they shouldn’t be punished for it,” he said.

He said five- and six-year graduation rates would be more appropriate data, as well as other qualitative measures. (Good said the five-year graduation rate is closer to 55 percent and the six-year graduation rate is around 65 percent.)

“Rather than just look at the numbers, what about where the kids are?” Cicarella said. A student who ​“graduates in 4.5 years at mastery level for all subjects” is better off than one who finishes in four years barely passing classes, he said. ​“Let’s see students who have graduated: where are they on the spectrum of mastery?”

At the same time, reported student, parent and staff satisfaction with the school culture has increased, according to district surveys. Last academic year, 64 percent of students responded favorably to all questions in the survey, compared to 60.4 percent the year before.

Parent satisfaction hopped from 71.1 percent to 73 percent in the same time period, and teachers from 78.7 percent to 82 percent.

Following The Money

Good and Cicarella both said they have some ideas for how to scale back without the state grant.

Part of the grant funded ​“eagle time” — extra time throughout the week for student learning and teacher professional development.

Now all HSC teachers work extended days Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays to provide students with extra time in the classroom. They also stay an extra two hours Mondays and an hour every other Friday to prepare for their classes.

Good said the modified version, without the state grant, condenses the extended days. The new proposed schedule would have some teachers stay an extra 90 minutes Mondays and an extra hour Wednesdays for professional development. They would also stay an extra two hours and fifteen minutes Tuesdays and Thursdays to teach students.

After each year of the experimental turnaround, the union and school have ​“looked at stuff honestly, things we feel we need to change,” Cicarella said. This year is no different, he said. ​“We knew eagle time would be funded for three years,” Cicarella said. ​“Some of the stuff was temporary.”

HSC is one of five schools receiving money from a pool of $300,000 in total grants for the upcoming year from the Nellie Mae Education Foundation and Great Schools Partnership’s New Personalized Learning Initiative. In addition to the money, HSC’s staff will receive intensive coaching in personalized instruction.

This support will supplement some of the lost eagle time, Good said. ​“But there’s still teacher work to be done.”

HSC’s state funding will be extended a fourth year to help the school transition as it ends the turnaround process. After school leaders know exactly how much the small state grant amounts to, they can look to the district to ​“see where can we plug the gap,” Cicarella said.

“Ultimately we need to be sustainable on existing resources,” Harries said.

The district’s budget draft reports that the school’s per pupil funding is likely to decrease next year from $12,961 to $12,342. As district Chief Financial Officer Victor De La Paz explained at a recent Board of Alders committee meeting, all 17 magnet schools are seeing a reduction in per-pupil funds next year.

They can receive more state money, he said, by maximizing their enrollment before Oct. 1, which would put a total additional $1.6 million in play.

HSC has been the only magnet school failing to draw hordes of kids from the suburbs and is consistently under-enrolled. But over the last three years, the number of local students applying to the school has steadily increased and the number of suburban students increased at first and then leveled off this year. HSC received 405 applications for about 300 seats next year, including 279 from local kids and 126 from suburban kids. That’s a total increase from 394 applications last year, including 259 from local kids and 135 from suburban kids.

Last year, Good said the increase boded well for changing public perception of HSC. And it could eventually mean a bump in funding.

Good said the school scrapped a few preliminary strategies for teaching and learning, for lack of time to implement them. For example, administrators had discussed starting a ​“peer observation process” to supplement traditional instruction.

“We acknowledged that was something we needed to do when we had more time,” Good said. ​“Next year, maybe.”