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Harries, Tracey admit setbacks, pitch plan to state board.
HARTFORD — Three years after the state launched a $2.1 million effort to “transform” Wilbur Cross High, nearly half of kids are still chronically absent, and English-language learners lag way behind their peers. Now the city’s making a second try with a new state-backed “turnaround” plan.
The first try started three years ago, with Cross splitting into four “small learning communities.” The new plan calls for creating a fifth “small learning community” at Cross, the city’s largest comprehensive high school. The plan calls for pulling aside 150 incoming English-language learners and other freshmen into a new “International Academy” inside the 1,400-student school.
The plan won approval from the state Board of Education at a meeting Wednesday at the State Office Building in Hartford.
Cross was one of three schools to gain acceptance Wednesday to the state Commissioner’s Network, a group of low-performing schools that get extra state money and supervision in exchange for agreeing to make changes aligned with the state’s vision of reform. The board approved “turnaround plans” for Cross, Dunbar School in Bridgeport, and DiLoreto Magnet School in New Britain. New Haven now has two schools in the Commissioner’s Network: High School in the Community, a union-run turnaround school, was one of the first batch of four schools to join the network when it was created last year.
The turnaround plans are designed to offer “bold and transformative strategies that are necessary to turn around schools that, to date, have been insufficiently successful in their improvement efforts,” according to the state.
The new plan comes at the end of a a three-year plan to “transform” Cross using a $2.1 million state-sanctioned School Improvement Grant (SIG). The plan involved changing the principal, extending learning time, and splitting the school into four “small learning communities.” Assistant Superintendent Garth Harries said Wednesday that Cross is making some improvement, but he acknowledged that Cross has failed to create “strong and viable” small learning communities.
The next plan will be carried out by a new leader. The school system plans to hire a new principal to replace Peggy Moore, who is retiring after running Cross for three years. Now Cross is applying another $2.1 million in new state funding over three years to support the new turnaround plan; the total budget has not yet been approved.
The district decided to pursue the smaller program at Cross this year rather than launching a full-fledged “turnaround” of any entire city schools. (Read more about that here.)
Chronically Absent
Harries trekked up to Hartford Wednesday with Director of Instruction Iline Tracey (pictured above) and Pedro Mendia-Landa, the district’s supervisor of English language-learning, to pitch their plan to the state. At 1 p.m., they walked into the carpeted hearing room, sat down before the U‑shaped formation of board members, and propped up three matching iPads on the desk.
State education chief Stefan Pryor (pictured), who lives in New Haven, too, asked them to start by identifying the challenges facing the school.
Harries and Director of Instruction Iline Tracey acknowledged that despite the state’s past intervention, Cross is still failing a lot of kids.
“We have a problem around attendance,” Tracey said, especially among black and Hispanic males.
Only 82 percent of English-language learners show up to school on a given day, compared to 93 percent of students districtwide.
Chronic absenteeism is through the roof: 45 percent of kids missed 10 or more days of school, which “translates to a tremendous amount of learning loss,” according to a turnaround proposal New Haven schools submitted to join the Commissioner’s Network.
“What we find is that a lot of our students are not engaged” in school, Tracey reported.
The more school kids miss, the more likely they are to have a GPA below 3.0, and the more likely they are to miss out on the city’s free ticket to college, New Haven Promise, the proposal notes. The college scholarship program requires a 90 percent attendance rate and a GPA of 3.0 (with a few exceptions).
“Troubling” Graduation Rates
The proposal speaks much more frankly about Cross’s struggles than school officials have done in public, when they have sought to hold up Cross as a success.
The chronic absenteeism has led to “troubling” graduation rates, the proposal reads. While more kids are graduating from Cross, “far too many students drop out after failing to earn the required credits for graduation due to poor attendance and low academic performance.”
A state report card last year revealed a wide gap between the black and Hispanic dropout rates. At the time the Independent initially wrote about it, the school principal and the school system’s superintendent said they were aware of a black-Latino achievement gap, but had not been aware of the graduation gap.
The district’s turnaround plan cites a wide gap between English-language learners, most of whom are Hispanic, and their native English-speaking peers. Only 41 percent of English-language learners in the class of 2011 graduated from Cross within four years, 17 points behind the schoolwide average.
The gap is widening: Since the 2009-10 school year, the school performance gap between English-language learners and all students at Cross has grown from 19.3 to 23.4, as measured by the state’s new report cards.
These problems surfaced in an internal audit, and were later affirmed in a state audit as part of the Commissioner’s Network application process.
The application lists “school leadership” as the first area of challenge. “Frequent leadership changes over the last decade have prevented there from being a coherent and consistent vision for Wilbur Cross over time,” the proposal reads. “This, in turn, has led to a challenging school culture.”
Cross got one of the two lowest scores in the district on a school climate survey. Only half of kids at Cross said they “feel good about this school,” according to the proposal. Kids aren’t the only unhappy ones: Only 44 percent of teachers and percent 62 percent of parents said they would recommend the school to peers.
The audits also cited a disparity in the quality of instruction in lower-level classes and honors and Advancement Placement classes.
“The highest quality instruction is available to some but not all students at the school,” the report reads. “The stigma of ‘lower-level” tracked classes needs to be eliminated.”
Harries said the Advanced Placement courses tend to draw more talented teachers and better-prepared kids. While Cross has a strong AP program, he said, there a lot of kids for whom Cross does not offer anything special.
Harries, Tracey and Mendia-Landa (pictured) gave highlights of these findings in remarks before the state board. Then they announced their new proposed solution.
New Haven proposes bringing in a New York-based partner, Internationals Network for Public Schools, to help build the International Academy at Wilbur Cross. The Internationals Network will help create a “school within a school” focused on creating a small and engaging environment that will help English-language learners.
The academy will start with two cohorts of freshmen: 60 English-language learners and 90 other freshmen. Each group will be self-contained. The ELL group will start small, with the intention of adding new arrivals who enroll later in the year. Students will stay with the same group of kids throughout high school.
The kids will share the same set of teachers, who will work together on interdisciplinary projects designed to better engage kids in school. Tracey said that in some classes at Cross, “what we’re teaching them is not relevant or engaging.” The interdisciplinary, project-based approach aims to get kids more excited about school — so they show up to school more and don’t drop out.
New Haven pitched a $2.1 million, three-year plan to launch the program. It calls for hiring Internationals Network of Public Schools as a partner for $224,000 per year. The organization runs 17 high schools and small learning academies in New York City, California’s Bay Area, and Virginia, according to its website. The group designs high schools and trains educators to help “recently arrived immigrant English-language learners.” In New Haven, the group will not be directly managing the school; it will be helping to train teachers, support staff, and help Cross undergo a “paradigm shift” in supporting and teaching kids.
Students will apply to the International Academy on a voluntary basis. He said despite creating a self-contained program for English-language learners [ELL] at Cross, “our intention is not to send all of our ELL students in New Haven to Cross.”
Most ELL high school students do attend Cross; quarter of the incoming class will be English-language learners, Harries said. He said “we don’t anticipate changing the demographics of Cross by that program.” Students in the International Academy will still have access to honors and AP classes, Harries said.
The goal is to “reinvent the Wilbur Cross experience,” first for kids at the International Academy, and then for the rest of the kids in the school, he said. The teachers in the International Academy would spread best practices to the rest of Cross, beefing up the other four “small learning communities.”
Harries said he hopes the small-school setting will engage kids whom Cross has had trouble reaching; he said it will be built on the “successes” of schools-within-a-school in other places. At his previous post as a top adviser to New York schools Chancellor Joel Klein, Harries was the architect of New York’s effort to create small high schools.
Board member Terry Jones commended Harries for the Cross proposal. He called it a “a stroke of genius” to use the Commissioner’s Network to create a school within a school.
Board Chair Alan Taylor (pictured), however, was skeptical.
“The successes of small schools” is not a solid premise, he said. Some experiments have failed nationally.
Harries conceded that similar experiment have “failed in some places” and “folks like [the] Gates [Foundation] have backed away from them because implementation was not thoughtful.”
But “there is good evidence that the small-school approach in New York City was successful,” he said.
The key, he said, is implementing the idea well.
Asked about how the program will be built at Cross, Harries said the plan will start with placing a new leader in the school. Then the principal, along with an interview committee including a parent and a teacher, will choose an “academy leader” to run the program.
The board approved the plan by a unanimous vote.
Commissioner Pryor applauded the district for its application.
“High school reform is not for the faint of heart,” he said. “The thoughtful approach is to be commended.”
It’s not clear how much money Cross will receive. High School in the Community, which has about 240 kids, received a half-million dollars for capital improvements when it joined the network, plus a $1.5 million-a-year grant from the state, though that amount was later cut slightly due to mid-year rescissions. Cross asked for a much smaller amount for its 1,400 kids, $700,000 per year.
The budget the legislature approved this week includes $27.5 million to expand the Commissioner’s Network from four to up to 21 schools over the next two years. How much money each school gets will be “based on the model chosen, number of students served, and selected strategies as outlined in the schools’ turnaround plans,” according to state education spokeswoman Kelly Donnelly.
Schools stay in the Commissioner’s Network for three years, with an option to remain longer based on how the “turnaround” effort goes.
The problem is not just leadership at the school. It's leadership at the BOE. To deny the extent of the problem for years mirrors what the BOE did with education in general until the feds started waiving federal dollars around. The state is now waving money around and in a "stroke of genius" WC will get another bite at the apple of reform. Whatever.