{media_1}A teacher disclosed the drawbacks of a tough new job evaluation. A new school budget got the OK with a boost of extra state money. And a principal outlined efforts to “reset” the culture of a misbehaved 5th grade.
It wasn’t the usual board meeting of mayoral appointees in charge of city schools. It was a meeting of a parallel board in charge of another set of New Haven public schools — charter schools in the Achievement First network.
And it felt quite different from your garden-variety New Haven school board meeting.
The meeting took place at Amistad Academy Elementary School on Edgewood Avenue.
Board members gathered there last Wednesday to make decisions about five charter schools they oversee, all part of a network run by the not-for-profit charter operator, Achievement First.
The charter schools are public schools that operate outside the New Haven school system under their own charters, which are authorized by the state. The state’s 17 charter schools, funded by the state on a per-pupil basis, exist only so long as the state renews their charters. In return for the extra state scrutiny, they get extra curricular freedom and autonomy.
Achievement First’s board meetings are public. But unlike city school board meetings, they tend to happen outside of the public eye. Last week’s meeting offered a window into some similarities between the districts, and some major differences in their mentalities and inner workings.
The meeting featured an open, trusting conversation between on-the-ground educators and the board members who govern them from afar. Principals offered a frank take on what’s working and not working in their schools, including behavioral problems among certain students and a lack of “buy-in” from staff. And they upheld Achievement First’s data-driven focus by issuing highly detailed, month-by-month reports on how their kids are doing.
The agenda followed true Amistad style, in which every moment of the day is tightly scripted: It called for welcome at 5:30 p.m., introduction of a new employee at 5:32, principal reports at 5:35.
Like most traditional New Haven school board meetings, however, this meeting did not start on time. It started at 5:40, after board members grabbed food and found seats.
{media_7}The charter school board members meet less often than the district board does — once every two months, instead of twice every month. And they eat better: Instead of the usual subs and cookies at the public schools’ 54 Meadow St. headquarters, charter board members munched on grilled panini, salad with chicken, and Kettle brand non-GMO potato chips.
Melinda Hamilton (at left in photo at the top of this story), chair of the Amistad board, kicked off the meeting. She sat in a large U‑shape of tables in the school’s community room. Flanking her were members of two separate boards. Her board governs Amistad Academy’s elementary, middle and high schools; the other one oversees Elm City College Preparatory elementary and middle schools.
The five New Haven schools have separate boards because they have two separate charters under state law. All five schools fall under the umbrella of the Achievement First charter network, which now runs 22 schools in New Haven, Hartford, Bridgeport, New York and Providence.
Board members in attendance last week included Paul McCraven, senior vice-president of First Niagara Bank. He said he inherited the post from the late Charlie Terrell, the philanthropically-minded banker who used to run First Niagara’s locally owned predecessor, New Haven Savings, before the bank was sold to an out-of-state corporation.
The boards also include local notables such as Mayor John DeStefano; Gateway Community College President Dorsey Kendrick; local funeral home owner Howard K. Hill; and City Hall accountant and union activist Harold Brooks. None of them were present for Wednesday’s meeting. DeStefano joined the Amistad Academy board a few years ago when he decided to start collaborating with Achievement First after years of bitter fights. (Click here and here for a list of who else sits on the boards.)
Hamilton opened the meeting with a routine question.
“Any public comment?”
The answer was no. There were no members of the public there, save for this reporter. The board, apparently not used to seeing the press, introduced the Independent as a special “guest.” All the other non-board members were Achievement First staff.
{media_2}First up on the agenda was the introduction of Scot Kerr (at left in photo with Director of Governance and Authorizer Relations Tony Siddall), Achievement First’s latest hire. He will serve as “associate director of governance” for the charter network, filling a recently vacated post.
Kerr introduced himself to his new colleagues. He said he came to the job as a fugitive from the publishing industry. His last assignment was with a “media buying firm.” He pledged to himself that his next assignment would be “with an organization I could be proud to work for.”
In addition to his new duties, he also took on the task of video-recording snippets of Amistad’s college acceptance ceremony earlier that day. He said he found the kids’ stories powerful.
Next, the joint board heard reports from principals. Two of the five principals issue reports every board meeting; on Wednesday the task fell to Sarah White of Amistad Academy Middle School and Rebecca Good of Elm City College Preparatory Middle School.
Both issued frank reports on developments in their schools. In contrast to the New Haven Board of Education, where staff often hesitate to speak their minds, White and Good appeared comfortable laying bare successes and failures. They also issued snapshots of their schools’ month-by-month progress with more detail and up-to-date data than traditional New Haven schools typically present to their board at public meetings.
White and Good did a quick game of rock-paper-scissors to decide who would go first. They both showed a rock, tying the game.
“Great minds think alike,” one of them said. White volunteered to go first.
First came the test scores: White said three quarters of her kids are at or near target on interim tests used internally by Achievement First. The majority of kids lagging behind regional averages fell in the 5th grade, she said. She gave a frank reason: The biggest factor hurting kids test scores, she said, is the high number of new teachers in that grade (four, with two joining after the start of school). The new teachers are “still developing” their skills, she said. One new arrival came mid-year because “we had to let one person go,” she reported.
White said reading remains “an area of particular concern,” in part because the school shifted the curriculum to get ready for the new Common Core State Standards. The national standards will be hitting the state in the 2014 – 15 school year, when the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium test (SBAC), a web-based examination, will replace the current Connecticut Mastery Test [CMT] for grades 3 to 8 and Connecticut Academic Performance Test for sophomores.
“We had not figured out reading prior to Common Core,” White said. The curriculum switch has made matters more difficult, she said.
“I’m a little worried about CMT scores,” White said, given that kids have started using Common Core materials instead of those aligned with the CMT. The switch means teachers now have to change their literature block after 10 years, White said. She said she’s meeting some resistance from staff.
Good said she has not met as much staff resistance as White has. She attributed this to her longer tenure at her school: Good joined Elm City in 2006 as a founding teacher; she has hired most of the staff in her school herself. White became principal of her school in 2011, putting her in charge of many teachers who predated her tenure. White said she has been working to “develop mindsets” among veteran teachers who haven’t “completely bought into our system.”
White flagged another ongoing issue in her school: the “culture” in the 5th grade. She attributed behavioral problems to “teacher skill” and “elementary-to-middle-school transition.” She said after students returned to the school from winter break, White and her dean of students “did an intensive culture reset,” taking students back through the “Amistadization” orientation they typically undergo only in the fall. She said the intervention has “resulted in steady and significant progress.”
Hamilton asked White how many of her students came to the middle school from an Achievement First elementary school.
White said two-thirds of her students arrived at the middle school from Amistad Academy elementary school; she said those kids’ behavior is no better than those joining the school from outside the charter network. In fact, the Amistad kids appeared to have a tougher time adjusting to middle school.
Along with her report, White provided a detailed snapshot of the school’s demographics, attendance, behavior, and all the withdrawals for the year.
Some highlights: Suspensions have dramatically decreased since October, when 100 kids received in-school suspensions and 17 received out-of-school suspensions. Ten kids withdrew from the school over the course of the year. Six transfers were considered not acceptable to the school. They included kids leaving due to parents’ concern about “school culture” and concerns about a child being held back. Seventy-seven percent of her 332 kids qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, a measure of poverty; 5 percent receive special education; 6 percent are English-language learners. Attendance has stayed above 96 percent all year.
Elm City Middle
In her turn in the spotlight, Good braced the board for some not-so-rosy test scores on the new Common Core-aligned tests. She predicted less than a third of the school would score above 70 percent on the interim English Language Arts assessments kids will take in June. That’s in line with what educators across the country are predicting: Scores will take a nose-dive when students switch to Common Core tests.
In other news, Good reported progress in teacher retention: 80 percent of her staff is returning, and the average teaching experience is five years. She reported high student retention, too: 90 percent of Elm City’s 8th graders plan to attend Amistad High, and 95 percent of 4th graders at Elm City plan to continue at the middle school, which is now right next door in the same building.
Student attendance is meeting the charter network goal of 97 percent, Good reported. “We are very proud of that.” Introducing in-school suspensions in March has helped with that effort, she said.
Out-of-school suspensions have fallen significantly, she added: At the peak, the school issued 48 out-of-school suspensions in September; in March, 48 kids were suspended in-school, and 17 were suspended out of school.
(New Haven’s Achievement First schools showed lower numbers of suspensions than their sister school in Hartford, which caught heat last week when the Courant’s Kathleen Megan’s exposed high rates of suspension of 6‑year-olds there.)
In other highlights, Elm City is making progress on a longstanding criticism of charter schools — that they don’t take nearly as many special education students. Students apply to charter schools through public lotteries; critics have noted that special education students end up transferring out of charters to rejoin the public district. Elm City recently boosted the number of special needs kids it serves: 12.3 percent of the 209 kids receive special education, an increase of 5.6 percentage points over the prior year. That puts the school on par with the New Haven district’s average of about 11 percent.
Good’s report showed an openness about internal problems not often heard in public at New Haven’s school board. Good said she is concerned about attrition: Over 10 percent of students withdrew from the school last year.
“I am worried about families pulling students,” Good said. One major reason, she said, is that families don’t want their kids to be held back a grade. Families find out that if they withdraw their kids from Elm City, “they’re able to get into their ‘right grade,’” instead of being held back, she said. “We can’t compete with that.”
She said holding kids back can have good results: Of the 30 kids graduating from Amistad High and heading to college in the fall, two are Elm City grads who were held back an extra year in the system, Good said.
Nineteen of 218 kids transferred out of the school over the course of the year, nine of them for “acceptable” reasons such as moving away or transferring to Amistad Middle. The other 10 transferred for reasons the school deems “unacceptable,” meaning the school believes it should have done better to hang onto those kids.
In a frank discussion of “challenges,” Good cited some “negative feelings” emerging around Achievement First’s new teacher evaluation. The new system told some teachers were told they had a “negative impact on students,” Good said. “It was rough,” she said.
“I want it to stay a positive thing,” she told the board.
At the end of a friendly and efficient exchange, the two principals were dismissed from the meeting.
A Teacher’s View
The board then called in a teacher for an on-the-ground report about the charter network’s new evaluation system. In Achievement First’s new Teacher Career Pathway, teachers move from stage one (an intern) to stage five (a master teacher) based on a series of more rigorous evaluations.
{media_6}Rebecca Trombly (pictured), who works at Amistad Academy Elementary School, was one of 51 teachers identified as a “stage four distinguished teacher.” She was introduced as a star teacher who’s always willing to help other teachers in the school.
The board brought her in to assess how the process went. They gave an opportunity for a classroom teacher to give input on district policy in a public setting — something that does not typically (if ever) happen at New Haven’s school board meetings.
Trombly spoke openly about what she saw as the strengths and drawbacks of the system.
She described several “long, intense” observations as part of the process. She said the rubric she was graded by was clear.
She identified one flaw in the system: She said in her evaluation, she had been frank with her coach in identifying her own shortcomings. She said that came back to bite her on the evaluations, where she was “dinged for weaknesses” that she herself had brought up to her coach. She suggested the district find a way to ensure the evaluations don’t dissuade teachers from openly discussing their weaknesses.
Trombly also described a swanky celebration she participated in in honor of her “distinguished teacher” status. She and other high-performing teachers from the area were invited to the white-tableclothed Union League restaurant for a thank you dinner. Each teacher was allowed to bring a guest. Charter network higher-ups, such as co-CEO and President Dacia Toll, made the rounds and spent time getting to know them.
“We were treated like celebrities to the point that it was embarrassing,” Trombly said. Each teacher got a Tiffany crystal apple to take home.
The event was paid for by Achievement First. Ken Paul, AF’s vice-president for development, called the Union League shindig a success.
“It’s a tradition and ritual that I think will not help but be enhanced over time,” Paul said.
Civil Rights Murals “Too Expensive”?
{media_3}In other news, Dick Ferguson, chair of the Elm City board, reported on the progress of the construction project to build a new home for Achievement First Amistad High School at the site of the former MLK School on Dixwell Avenue.
Elm City just bought the MLK school from the city for $1.5 million; it plans to tear it down and build a new one.
There will be no Project Labor Agreement (PLA), Ferguson reported. That means the contractor can hire either union or non-union labor. Ferguson framed that as a good thing for New Haveners because there will be fewer barriers to getting hired on the job.
{media_8}Amistad board member Katrin Czinger asked Ferguson a question about the murals on the proposed new school depicting civil rights leaders. The portraits pay homage to similar ones on the school that’s being torn down. Czinger said she had heard a price tag for the murals, and it sounded too expensive. She asked if it could be done cheaper.
Ferguson declined to disclose the cost of the murals. He said they were part of an agreement AF struck with the community to make way for the school. The state will reimburse 69 percent of the cost.
Back To The Classroom
{media_4}In other news, Lauren Miller (at left in photo), who’s known around town as the co-chair of the Democratic ward committee for East Rock’s Ward 9, is leaving her job as an associate in external relations at Achievement First to go to the classroom. She’ll become a 9th grade teacher at Amistad High School.
Reshma Singh, vice president of external relations for AF, gave an update from the advocacy front: With just a week before the legislative session is set to end, she said, charter schools appear to be in a “good place.” A new group of “powerful clergy supporting reform” has “been a game-changer for us,” she reported.
She announced — and a Tuesday budget vote later confirmed — that charter school funding appeared to be safe from cuts. Charter schools endured a mid-year cut to their per-pupil state funding this year due to rescissions; the legislature cut funding from $10,500 to $10,200 in the middle of the year. The new per-pupil rate has not been articulated yet but is expected to be restored to $10,500 next year.
The state budget does not have any money for new charter state schools next year (only “local” charters, a new designation), Singh reported. Achievement First is looking to open new schools in Hartford and Bridgeport, but not until 2014.
The meeting ended with video snippets of inspiring speeches from Amistad Academy’s senior signing day.
Budget OK’d, With $4M Philanthropic Boost
Then the two boards split up. They walked down the elementary school hallway and sat in two separate classrooms.
In one classroom, Elm City Board Chair Ferguson (pictured) dialed in board member Sharon Oster via a pink-cased iPhone.
Both boards approved new annual budgets for the 2013 – 14 school year. The budgets include a calculation of how much each school spends per kid. In every case, it’s a lot more than the $10,200 the state offers.
Amistad High, for example, expects to spend $16,047 per kid for its 385 students next year. The budget calls for adding $1.87 million in private revenue to the $4.53 million the school gets in public funds. Even then, there will be a shortfall of $418,000, according to the budget. To make ends meet, Achievement First plans to draw from philanthropy.
In all, the five Achievement First schools in New Haven plan to use $3.9 million in philanthropic dollars to close budget holes for next year. The total budget for all five schools is $25.2 million.
As they cruised through an agenda of school-specific decisions, board member Oster, via cellphone, raised a question of the board’s purpose. She said she has learned a lot at board meetings, but she feels a “tension” between learning and “giving back” to the schools by giving more advice. She wondered aloud if board members should be more active in the latter.
The board decided to put that existential question on the agenda for a summer board retreat.