Birks Pivots From Shake-Ups To Tweaks

(News analysis) On the first day of school, a few minutes late, Superintendent Carol Birks stepped off a yellow bus at Lincoln Bassett Community School and strode down a line of 20 cheering adults slapping high-fives. At the end of the line, she noted that the ride had been far less bumpy than what she remembered of her trips to school as a child.

The offhanded remark reflected how Birks is thinking about the task before her as she begins her first full academic year in charge of New Haven’s school system.

For starters, there was a touch of her pumped-up enthusiasm — an energy that she has used to get parents chanting “#OneNewHaven” at community forums and administrators dancing in sync to YouTube clips at transition-team meetings.

And there was a reference to her childhood growing up amid boarded homes and empty factories in Bridgeport’s East End — a reminder that she has used to inspire students at awards ceremonies and disarm reporters at tense press conferences.

Most of all, there was her underlying belief that New Haven’s school system is largely functioning as it should, that it is in need of adjustments, rather than an overhaul.

The bus might have missed its drop-off time, but that could be fixed. The ride, overall, was smooth.

Birks didn’t arrive at that assessment right away. During her first five months on the job, she had to take drastic steps to close a $19.3 million budget deficit. But now that she has focused on fixing what was broken, cutting the shortfall in half, Birks is turning her attention to tweaking what’s working.

Unfinished Business

Almost a decade ago, New Haven undertook a ​“school change initiative” aimed at closing the gap on test scores, halving the dropout rate and giving every student the knowledge and finances to succeed in college.

To achieve those goals, the district instituted a number of reforms, including a ​“portfolio model” meant to distinguish schools with themes and give principals flexibility in running them, tough evaluations meant to hold teachers and administrators accountable and train them to improve, and engagement with the wider city meant to provide wraparound services and other supports outside class.

Since then the district has made progress. But it hasn’t checked off any goals yet.

• More students are passing standardized tests. But two-thirds are still behind in language arts, and four-fifths are behind in math.
• The dropout rate has fallen by 45 percent since 2010. But one in five kids still doesn’t get a diploma on time.
• The college matriculation rate has nudged up by 11 percent. But one third of graduates still don’t attempt higher education and one-quarter of those who do enroll can’t make it to sophomore year.

Birks said she believes that she can get the wheels turning to complete what’s been left undone.

In the hallways of Benjamin Jepson Magnet School, halfway through her Thursday morning tour of schools, Birks told the Independent that she wants to focus on continuing to close the budget gap, training the entire staff, and focusing on children’s social-emotional development.

“We want to build on the work,” Birks said. ​“I was one of those students, who grew up in Bridgeport and really struggled. I was able to make it, and I believe that everyone can with the power of education. I just want to inspire, encourage, and put the right systems, structures and practices in place to create an educational system that’s premier for all these students.”

The trick will be seeing if she can get the rest of the district — the politicians, the teachers, the parents — on board.

“The great struggle — and it would be for anybody — is how does [Birks] maintain productive relationships when you can’t please everybody,” observed Ed Joyner, one of the Board of Education’s two elected members. ​“When you’re working in a city this size, with so many competing interests, you need to be able to convince the great majority of people that what you’re doing is fiscally sound, educationally valuable and ethically defensible. But you need to do all of that while battling political forces.”

“I know some great superintendents, but I don’t know any that wouldn’t have struggled with what she’s facing. She inherited a system in chaos: a fragmented school board and a multimillion dollar deficit,” Joyner continued. ​“I think she’s done a pretty good job considering what she’s been up against. Next year will be very telling.”

Public Relations

In her first few months on the job, Birks proved she’s willing to make tough decisions. She closed a high school, consolidated alternative education and shuttered a pre-kindergarten program, and she sent lay-off notices to three dozen teachers and dismissals to hundreds of part-timers. But more tough decisions, ones that could come at a political risk, remain ahead.

Board members said that closing the deficit needs to remain a top priority.

“It is important for the board to stay focused on the budget concerns and to ensure that the decisions are fiscally responsible and stay as far away from affecting classroom success as possible,” said Tamiko Jackson-McArthur, the school board’s secretary. ​“Making the courageous decisions needed to make this happen doesn’t come without some sleepless nights, but they must be done.”

As cost-cutting continues, some are wondering what it all amounts to. So far, Birks has tried out a number of slogans — ​“Children First,” ​“Continuous Learning,” ​“One New Haven” — but she hasn’t articulated an overarching vision for what New Haven Public Schools should become.

Even in her reorganization over the past five months, Birks hasn’t set district goals. Instead, she defaulted to the state’s idea of what makes a good school system, saying she was making cuts based on what could make our numbers look better.

For the year ahead, Birks said, she is waiting on the school board to give her direction on where to focus her attention.

‘We’ve had some goals that are draft goals. We want to get them approved [by the Board of Education] and enacted into practice, so that we as a community know what they look like, sound like and feel like,” Birks said. ​“We need to work collaboratively to make sure we all rally around what they look like. You have more ownership when you get people involved in the district.”

It’s understandable that Birks hasn’t wanted to get ahead of the consensus, given the months of conflict around the superintendent search and public rebukes by the board.

In November, during a public job interview of sorts, Birks said she wanted to work collaboratively with charter schools, setting off a firestorm of opposition. In the end, she barely got the role, coming out one vote ahead in a tense meeting, as thousands of signatures lined the room, parents shouted shame and the two elected board members nearly came to blows.

Months later, almost all the board members publicly criticized Birks for dismissing part-time employees, calling her decision ​“a stumble” and ordering her to reverse course. News cameras were invited; Birks wasn’t.

After those conflicts, Birks has largely outsourced the task of setting the district’s vision. She said last week that she’s waiting for a report from the transition team and goals from the school board. In fact, she said she purposefully removed herself from the process to avoid any charges of meddling.

“I tried to stay out of it because I want it to be a transparent process,” she said. ​“That’s why I’m focusing on the core.”

Bumps

Some parents questioned whether the transition team Birks picked by hand would come to any conclusions she wouldn’t approve.

Sarah Miller, a mother of two children at Columbus Family Academy and a member of the watchdog group NHPS Advocates, said she worries that the district is pulling resources away from programs that could benefit students to protect political interests.

“For over a generation, the school district has served political interests first, doling out jobs and contracts as political patronage. District leadership needs to declare that era over and make decisions on behalf of children, even when politically inconvenient. The aim of the school district is to educate children, not advance private and political interests,” Miller said. ​“The district needs to establish budget priorities that put kids first in practice, not just in rhetoric. We also need to celebrate, protect and learn from pockets of innovation and achievement within the district that are serving kids well.”

Other parents said that they feel engaged in the district’s decision-making for the first time.

“Generally speaking, I didn’t always feel that the district did enough,” said Citywide Parent Team President Krystal Augustine. ​“However I do feel now that they are trying. And that, I support. They seem to be willing to have parents at the table.”

The school board, too, appears to have better defined their respective roles, after board members and the superintendent had a candid chat at a recent retreat. Since then, Mayor Toni Harp has said that the board will provide clearer direction, specifically by updating the district’s policies that Birks can then execute.

“Change is an iterative process, so some of these things won’t be actualized right away. You have to get people on board, look at research and get staff,” Birks said. ​“It’ll be interesting to see what comes back from the transition team and getting us, as a community, to really organize ourselves for collaborative work together. We need to create different structures so people can be invited into the conversation.”

School Reform

Birks is dealing with the same wariness from the teaching staff.

Last week, in her first district-wide event, Birks invited every public-school employee into the Floyd Little Athletic Center near Hillhouse High School for a convocation to kick off the year. Behind a drum line, Superintendent Birks and Mayor Harp processed in, waving like royals at the teachers in the stands.

The event featured gospel choir melodies, thumping dance routines, and moving speeches from Rep. Rosa DeLauro, Parent Team President Augustine and TAPS Teacher of the Year Lauren Sepulveda. Birks got the crowd to its feet with a Black Eyed Peas jam, presented a slideshow of abstract charts and asked attendees to post a picture of a lighthouse in their offices to remember why they were in the profession.

While some of the staff said they appreciated the uplifting message at the start the year, others said they called it a waste of time. After months of chaos about layoffs, teachers said they just wanted to get back to the classroom, where they could do their best to minimize political interference.

It’s tough to say how teachers’ opinions were split on the convocation, except that there was loud applause when Board of Education President Darnell Goldson apologized for making their jobs difficult. ​“Thank you for surviving us,” he said.

After years of instability, during which teacher morale took a beating, the district’s faculty should now be able to return their attention to their classrooms while union leaders focus on professional development, said Dave Cicarella, head of the American Federation of Teachers local.

“The dust has settled. The central office folks are in place, and we’re now off and running with the new school year. What we hope to do is get back to the big-ticket items of school reform,” like evaluations for every staffer and time for training and curricular development, he said. ​“We know what we’re doing well, but we need support and improvements. We need to get back to the roots on that.”

Much has changed since school reform was first instituted. A major federal grant has dried up, and central office has been reorganized with top administrators coming in from Hartford, New London and Waterbury.

For the first time, assistant superintendents will be outside of the administrative union, which some are expecting could mean tougher evaluations for principals who are no longer colleagues with their supervisors.

Along with that extra oversight, Birks plans to make sure principals are set on what it means to have a ​“portfolio” of schools. When she has asked top administrators to describe how they view the district’s portfolio model, she has gotten a multitude of answers.

“We want to unpack what is really New Haven’s portfolio strategy? What’s loose and what’s tight?” she asked. ​“Regardless of whether your school has a STEM theme or an arts theme, there’s certain things that need to be taught.”

For the principals’ supervisors, Birks plans to create an ​“executive leadership training academy,” a monthly session that will focus on helping the districtwide supervisors, directors and assistant superintendents in Central Office build on their strengths.

Cicarella said that Birks’s higher-ups make up a ​“nice blend” of outside hires who have ​“fresh ideas” and internal promotions who are already ​“familiar with the work.” He added that he’s looking forward to reviving standing committees that haven’t met since Harries departed, where union reps and administrators can collaborate on curriculum, instruction and evaluations.

“That was the strength of school reform. Whether it was professional development or better use of schedules, we had committees we could work things through,” Cicarella said. ​“Those structures remain in place. We just have to get them up and running.”

Whole Child

Birks also plans to redouble the district’s commitment to students’ development.

In the 1960s, New Haven committed to the Comer model of development, which holds that schools should explicitly teach socio-emotional, psychological, ethical and linguistic development, not just the cognitive skills needed for math and reading. But after a half-century, that model is followed to varying degrees in different buildings.

In particular, Joyner said, the district needs to revisit how staff are trained to handle the effects of poverty, homelessness and violence.

He added that the district might need to rethink the school reform goal of sending every student to college, focusing instead of vocational training that can prime a graduate for a well-paying career, and it needed to figure out a working model for alternative education after Birks claimed three prior high schools — New Light, New Horizons and Riverside — had low attendance and graduation rates.

“The old ​‘at-risk’ kid didn’t look at it from an international perspective. That meant something from a poverty lens and often a racial lens. Now, we have to see through a number of perspectives: language, gender, orientation, religion. Schools have to be responsive to it all,” he said. ​“Right now, we’re paying for stuff, but we have no idea whether or not it has an impact on students. Evaluators could say it’s great and it’s wonderful, but I need to know if the program services kids.”

Birks said she hopes to revisit the way that the district works with mental-health providers, whether they’re working with students inside school or at their own offices.

“Internally, the district has a ​‘whole child’ framework for how we approach social-emotional learning, but we could be working together as a broader community on our collective vision. We want everyone working towards the same goals,” Birks said. “[Practitioners] are open, they’ve said that. They want to be in a unified framework.”

Same goes for early childhood education, Birks said. She said that she wants to get daycare, preschool and pre-kindergarten programs all working together, starting the work even earlier.

“Again, what are the standards that we’re all working towards? Regardless of whether it’s All or Kin or Lulac Head Start, the majority are going to come to New Haven Public Schools. It’s in our best interest to look at,” Birks said. ​“We need to work more collaboratively with the Early Childhood Council as well as other providers, so we have one New Haven way.”

An ambitious undertaking, like universal pre-kindergarten programs for every child in the city, is still a ways off, Birks said.

“I think we need to organize ourselves first,” she said.