Dropout Nation

Even as Dropout Nation continuing covering the results of this week’s elections, your editor has given plenty of thought to New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s plan for turning around the Big Apple’s worst-performing schools. There have been plenty of sparring between the new mayor and staffers for predecessor Michael Bloomberg (whose approach included shutting down failure mills and replacing them with smaller operations), while the New York Times and other outlets (along with former Chancellor Rudy Crew, who attempted a similar overhaul before Bloomberg succeeded in taking control of the district 11 years ago) have weighed in with their own skeptical conclusions about the effort.

But then came Chalkbeat reporter Patrick Wall’s report this morning that one of the schools being targeted for turnaround, the long-woeful Boys and Girls High, has already undertaken the effort in its own special and rather old-fashioned way: By coercing struggling kids to transfer to other schools. Instead of working hard on providing struggling kids with reading and math remediation as well as revamping teaching staffs, the new principal of the high school, Michael Wiltshire, is allegedly working with guidance counselors to coax the kids into the Big Apple’s notorious collection of alternative high school ghettos (where kids are even less likely to be provided high-quality teaching and curricula). So far, according to Wall, 30 students have agreed to the “voluntary” transfers, which will help the school magically boost its performance (in the form of graduation rates as well as test scores) because those kids aren’t counted in the cohort. Unless de Blasio and his schools czar, Carmen Fariña, fire or discipline Wiltshire, even more kids will be pushed out by school year end.

From where your editor sits, none of this is surprising. Pushing out students is as old a trick as socially promoting struggling students from grade to grade — and one that can be especially effective for high schools because of how graduation rates are calculated. A child who “transfers” to an alternative high school ghetto or goes into “homeschool” won’t count against official numbers (even though they probably should since, well, the transfer is often a result of systematic failure to provide kids with high-quality education). This is why so many districts are so diligent in launching alternative high schools and General Education Development programs in the first place. A report released three years by A Better Way Foundation on Connecticut’s pushout activities determined that one-third of the 30,000 students in the Nutmeg State’s GED programs were aged 16-to-18, essentially should have been in high school; only 17 percent of them ever left those programs with a not-good-enough diploma.

At the same time, it is almost hard to blame Wiltshire for his alleged atrocious actions. After all, the school turnaround plan his bosses at the old Tweed Courthouse and City Hall are putting in place — a rehash of failed approaches tried by others both in New York City and elsewhere — give him few options to actually undertake a successful turnaround.

Under de Blasio’s School Renewal Program, the Big Apple will use something akin to the transformation model allowed under the federal School Improvement Grant program in order to revamp 94 perpetual failure mills. The city will spend $150 million to develop partnerships with community groups, extend instructional time in schools by one hour, develop “strong parent-community collaboration”, and provide teachers with more so-called professional development. The hope is that these steps will somehow lead to schools improving their performance without having to take tougher steps such as replacing laggard school leaders and low-quality teachers working in those classrooms.

As you would expect, de Blasio and Fariña offered few details on how the New York City Department of Education would develop these partnerships, how the schools would collaborate with families and communities, or what kind of professional development the teachers would attain. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing — if done properly.

The mayor could build upon the arrangement struck between the city and New Visions for Public Schools, which works with 75 of the city’s schools to improve student achievement (as well as run its own charters), as well as team up with Johns Hopkins University’s Talent Development initiative. But that would mean giving those organizations (along with community outfits on the ground) control over school operations and even letting them hire and fire teachers; given de Blasio’s adherence to the traditionalist line (as well as his desire to keep happy the United Federation of Teachers branch of the American Federation of Teachers, this isn’t going to happen.

The city could actually build strong ties to families by implementing a Parent Trigger provision allowing for them to either take control of failure mills or force the district into developing programs that will help their kids. This is something that some families in the Los Angeles Unified School District have done so far with some success, as have families in Adelanto, Calif. But again, this would mean giving families real decision-making power in schools and letting them lead on rebuilding cultures. That won’t sit well with de Blasio, Fariña, or with the UFT. So that is also a nonstarter.

Even the professional development idea would work — if such training actually were effective in the first place. Decades of data have proven that this isn’t even close to reality. Just 132 of 1,200 professional development programs surveyed by the U.S. Department of Education focused on reading, math and science; only nine actually met federal What Works Clearinghouse standards for quality and outcomes. Meanwhile there is little evidence that site-based professional development teams — in which teams of teachers meet to brainstorm and learn from one another — works either. Given that most professional development is done by university schools of education and their professors (who have done such an awful job of training teachers in the first place), this isn’t shocking.

Meanwhile de Blasio’s plan doesn’t actually address some key problems that go far beyond the failure mills. This starts with the Big Apple’s continuing struggle to ensure that eight-graders, especially those from black and Latino households, are reading proficiently and on grade level before entering high school; that issue, by the way, is why Boys and Girls (along with other high schools in the Big Apple, are struggling mightily in the first place). As Contributing Editor Michael Holzman would say, focusing on early literacy would help in the long run. But the city just decided to bring back Balanced Literacy, the failed approach to reading instruction, despite evidence that it does little for kids in most need of help on this front.

There is also another approach de Blasio and Fariña could embrace: The shutdown of failing schools and replacing them with smaller operations staffed by new leaders and teachers. The success of this approach was validated once again last month by MRDC in its continuing research on that effort. That, however, won’t happen, because de Blasio thinks shutting down failure mills is the worst possible thing — even when it is evident that keeping them open isn’t working for kids, their families, or their communities.

So the likelihood of de Blasio’s plan working out is zero and none. But again, this shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone. Districts have used the approaches offered up in de Blasio’s plan for decades — and have failed miserably. As Dropout Nation noted last year in its review of results for schools in the SIG program — most of whom use the transformation model being applied by de Blasio — just three out of every five middle- and high schools being turned around under the $3.6 billion program have made some sort of progress in improving student achievement in reading; in fact, a third of schools being turned around under SIG actually experienced declines in their performance.

The long-term evidence is cause for even more disillusionment about de Blasio’s plans. A mere 11 percent of California elementary schools forced by state officials to undergo turnarounds made “exemplary progress” three years later, according to Andy Smarick (now of Bellwhether Education Partners) in his famed Education Next treatise on school turnarounds. Just eight percent of laggard traditional district schools and nine percent of failing charter counterparts identified in 2003-2004 were successfully turned around six years later, according to the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. Meanwhile the education landscape is littered with numerous examples of school overhauls that haven’t made educational death traps any better for kids. This includes Emmerich Manual High School in Indianapolis and Eastside High School in Patterson, N.J., of Lean On Me fame.

There are plenty of reasons why school turnarounds fail to work out. One lies with the fact that the turnarounds are overseen by the very districts that managed the schools into academic failure in the first place. Expecting a failing district with incompetent central office staffers to somehow revamp failing schools — especially when it isn’t overhauling its own operations — is simply insane. Even in the case of New York City, which has succeeded under the tenure of Bloomberg and his cadre of school czars in improving student achievement, the obstacles to turnarounds in the form of near-lifetime employment laws and teacher dismissal policies that keep even criminally-abusive teachers in classrooms, make overhauls harder to undertake than they should be.

The other reason why de Blasio’s plan won’t work is that it doesn’t address the underlying toxic cultures that are a root reason why schools are failing in the first place. Culture, especially that which is toxic, will overcome any one individual’s effort to go against the grain and can even overcome the efforts of a rival culture to put it asunder; this is especially true in situations in which the methods by which one can easily remove the elements of culture cannot be used easily (if at all). A principal who cannot remove laggard teachers from classrooms will have almost no success in fostering cultures of genius that nurture the potential of struggling and high-performing kids alike. [Update: Today, de Blasio struck a deal with the UFT that technically requires teachers at the schools to reapply for jobs; but given that there are no limits on the number that can be rehired, don’t expect much in the way of personnel changes.] Given de Blasio’s and Fariña’s unwillingness to push hard for systemic reform — and the mayor’s explicit rejection of the successful efforts of the Bloomberg era — school leaders on the ground are being asked to perform miracles without the tools to make realistic progress.

What will likely end up happening under de Blasio’s plan is what is starting to happen now with Boys and Girls High: Principals being discouraged by Tweed from kicking laggard teachers out of classrooms and into the displaced teacher pool will simply resort to coaxing struggling students out of their schools into alternative school and GED programs that serve as way stations toward dropping out. In some cases, they will use “voluntary” transfers. In others, they will use the city’s complex and arbitrary school discipline code to suspend as many of the kids deemed unteachable as encouragement to flee. The performance of the schools will improve dramatically even as the lives of the children they no longer serve do not.

The kids, especially those from poor and minority communities (who, by the way, look like de Blasio’s own progeny), will be condemned to the economic and social abyss. The communities in which they live will continue to suffer. But at least de Blasio gets to say that he’s not doing what Bloomberg has done. Not that this is worth anything to any of our children.