The public schools asked 800 parents if they feel welcomed when they visit their kids’ schools. Surprise! 96 percent answered in the affirmative.
That was one of the positive findings of a survey conducted by these people, members of the New Haven Public Schools’ (NHPS) Community Engagement Team and reported on with pride at Monday night’s Board of Ed meeting.
(Left to right) Louis Campbell, Josiah Brown, Dominick Maldonado, and Deborah Frankel are, respectively, a social development expert with the NHPS, the head of the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute, a NHPS grandparent and head of the Columbus Academy PTO, and a seventh-grade English teacher at Katherine Brennan. They are part of the 25-member Community Engagement Team (CET) established in December 2006 so all “stakeholders” in the public schools — teachers, students, parents, administrative staff, and community members — will hear and respond to each other’s needs and communicate more effectively.
Frankel, who is in her second year as a Teach for America appointee and plans to stay in the NHPS system afterwards, said being in a group where there are multiple perspectives on issues is invaluable.
“We’re still a work in progress,” said Josiah Brown of the CET, with one important piece missing, he said: “Students. We’d like to have some of them on the committee, which is continually evolving, but with their schedules, it’s hard to find kids who can make the commitment.”
The group was organized by the BOE’s director of communications, Catherine Sullivan DeCarlo (right), and the Title One supervisor, Patricia Avallone (pictured), in response to a recommendation of a Stupski Foundation review of the NHPS three years ago.
Schools superintendent Reginald Mayo credited the Stupski Foundation with helping to put into place human infrastructure such as the CET. He said that is one reason the NHPS placed first out of 12 in a recent independent survey of the state’s urban educational systems conducted by Cambridge Associates.
“This is one of the ways a district gets better and better,” he said, “building on the feedback and the recommendations of parents and staff. And we’re doing it.”
Mayo and the board were eager for this good news to get out into the public arena. Establishing positive media relations is one of the goals of the CET.
Yet it is also aware, to use Dominick Maldonado’s phrase, that “people are missing from the table.”
High-profile criticism of Mayo’s parental involvement strategies, particularly as pertains to disciplinary policy, has been recently in the news by the vocal parents advocate group, Teach Our Children, several of whose members were in the BOE audience but did not speak.
When asked if they had been approached to sit at the table, that is, to join the Community Engagement Team, the group’s founder and consultant, Gwendolyn Forrest, replied that she didn’t think so. Would participation interest her group?
“I’m just here to take notes on this,” she replied, “and I’ll bring it to the group.”
BOE staff suggested that TOC has known about the CET for a long while and if its members were interested in the group as a forum for their issues, they could have asked to be represented already.
At a dramatic confrontation with the superintendent two weeks ago, TOC extracted a pledge from Mayo for a monthly one-on-one meeting. Officials at the Board said they didn’t think that the first meeting had yet taken place because of the scheduling demands on the superintendent as he works on budget cuts.
For the full results of both the external survey of parents and an internal survey of BOE employees, click on the BOE website, beginning Tuesday afternoon.
Future plans of the CET call for more study of their data, more refined surveys and for making people whose first language is not English feel more comfortable in the schools. To that end, a parent involvement workshop, conducted entirely in Spanish for Latino families, will take place on May 28 from 6:00 to 8:00 at the Fair Haven Middle School.
Previous installments in the Independent’s series on parental involvement in local schools:
Mom’s Business Grows, Along With Xena
7 Parents Get Their Own “Head Start”
Moonlight Readers in West Rock
Joshua’s Parents Take Him To “Foie Gras” Service
Parents Question Skittles Suspension
Parents Want Say On Suspensions
Son Gets Pills; Suspension Policy Targeted
Dad Goes To The Top, Gets Results
Parents, M&Ms Join In Math Lesson
Brandon Aims For The Blue Shirt
Night-Shift Waitress Hangs Up Apron
Dad Meets The Teachers. All Of ‘Em
Ms. Lopez Moves Brandon’s Seat
Night-Shift Waitress Gets Xena To Class On Time
Fifth-Graders Get “Amistadized”
Board of Ed To Parents: Get Involved!
If the survey is valid, it is good that parents feel welcomed in NHPS. It is also good that the Cambridge study has high hopes for the district.
It is good that the city is now using district performance data more widely. It is good that there are select instances of principals around the district who are really focused on getting their kids to be able to master the basics of reading, writing, and math.
These all are positive steps toward a healthier district.
But let's be clear about what the mission ought to be:
Most (90%+) students should be able to meet the state academic goals at every grade level from kindergarten through high school.
At the end of high school, the vast majority of students should be applying to and entering 4 year colleges.
A couple of caveats:
"Graduating" a lot of kids, most needing 1 to 2 years of remedial education for college, does not count as a success. Pushing them out the door is not the answer. NHPS needs to assure that students graduate from 12th grade with 12th grade skills.
The pace of progress (as measured by CMTs and CAPT results)is not nearly fast enough. And if more evidence is needed other than the excellent testing indicators that CT. has, just ask senior administrators at our local colleges whether most kids from NHPS come in ready to learn at the college level. It's not even close.
Incremental gains performance are not acceptable if we are to reduce poverty significantly in our city within 10 years.
Foundational or input gains are those that suggest that better results are coming at some point down the road. Examples might be an improvement in the attitude of parents about the system, creating a system of accountability, implementing a plan for the district's use of data, all are positive steps. But they are not enough. Alone these moves and other do not guarantee dramatically better outcomes in our lifetime.
For those who are satisfied with the level of incremental progress that we are seeing in New Haven, compare Hartford's strategy to New Haven's as described in this recent Courant editorial:
HARTFORD COURANT
Raising The Bar
May 5, 2008
"The Hartford Board of Education has imposed on city schools the toughest graduation standards of any district in Connecticut. This is a bold move for a city whose schools scored the worst on statewide mastery tests nearly a decade ago.
Every high school student in Hartford, beginning with the class of 2012, will need a minimum of 25 credits to receive a diploma. Students must also pass an end-of-course exam, do a senior-year project or internship, and take classes in world languages and the arts.
The new achievement measures surpass the increased requirements proposed last fall for all public high schools by the state Department of Education.
The city's decision to raise its expectations shows its unflinching faith in the ability of its students to close the achievement gap.
The higher standards are an element of Superintendent Steven J. Adamowski's ambitious plan to convert the district into a high-performance all-choice system, offering a wide range of educational options. The plan is expected to kick into high gear this fall. These are exciting times for Hartford schools, and we are rooting for their success."