In recent years, Clinton Hill and Fort Greene schools have undergone the sort of transformation that eludes frustrated educators nationwide
Area parents of an older generation made escaping the local schools into an art. Some opted for private or parochial schools; some pursued charter schools with open-district lottery admissions; and some relocated to Park Slope and Brooklyn Heights when their children came of school age. Many more relied on a time-honored tradition: forging apartment leases to assume addresses in other zones.
But now, just a few years later, parents from around the district and outside it flock to Clinton Hill and Fort Greene schools. In fact, parents now forge documents to get in to this newly desirable zone.
P.S. 11, an elementary school on Waverly Avenue, exemplifies the area’s transformation. Once troubled by low test scores, poor attendance, and chronic tardiness, the school has improved in all of those areas.
Its enrollment has grown from 488 students to 602 since 2006, and its attendance rate has risen from 91.8% to 96% in the same time. Meanwhile, its academic rating based on Department of Education metrics has risen from 6.8 to 8.1.
An important element of this turnaround, parents say, is their own commitment to the school’s success.
Sheri Holman, a mother of three and a member of the P.T.A., considers herself a participant in P.S. 11’s transformation. She was among the first in a new group of parents who chose to stay within the zone, and commit to the local school.
“We figured, we owned property there, so if we didn’t step up, who did we expect to do it?” Holman said.
But for many of her peers, sending the children to the local school still represented a leap of faith.
“At that time, it was nerve-wracking,” Holman said. “They knew the schools in Park Slope and Brooklyn Heights, but P.S. 11 hadn’t proven itself yet.”
To prove itself, the school would have to rely on a specific pattern of parent involvement, according to Dr. Jennifer Stillman, a graduate of Columbia University’s Teacher’s College whose research coveres gentrifying school districts like Holman’s.
This pattern is one that Stillman observed in every neighborhood that has integrated whiter, wealthier parents into schools that were traditionally poorer and low performing.
The gentrification in Clinton Hill and Fort Greene is well documented. The median household income has increased by over $20,000 between 1990 and 2009, and the population of whites has almost doubled in the decade since 1990, according to Census numbers.
Clinton Hill’s crop of new parents is also highly educated, and they place a high premium on their children’s academic experience. Almost a third have bachelor’s degrees, twice as many as did in 1990. A quarter of them have a graduate or professional degree, compared with just one out of ten in 1990.
Parents like Holman, who took a leap of faith right into struggling schools, are what Stillman calls “the innovators,” the first parents to buck their peer group’s tendency to leave the zone to find good schools. The “early adopters,” are the next wave; they join in and provide momentum. A third wave — "what Stillman calls “the early majority”- holds off until success is apparent, and then provides critical mass.
Stillman’s research found that the successful integration — "racial, economic, and cultural" — of this new parent group into the existing schools and is key to a school managing the kind of “turnaround” many parents seek.
“There is a key moment in a school that successfully integrates, where the early majority decides to stay,” Stillman said. In unsuccessful examples, she said, the early majority leaves for a variety of reasons, most often because they realize that the school hasn’t changed quite as radically as they thought.
While cultural changes like policies allowing parents to walk their children to class each are seen as a serious accomplishment in the eyes of the innovators, they are not enough to satisfy the early majority. This wave may expect more dramatic “progressive” measures like cross-curricular and experiential learning taking the place of the traditional curriculum.
In the case of P.S. 11, the “innovators” and “early adopters” made a few early changes that proved crucial to attracting others. One, they say, was replacing Linda Nelson, an unpopular principal who parents described as divisive, defensive, and fundamentally opposed to parent involvement.
“We mounted a really active letter-writing campaign, and there was a lot of pressure from the parent organization to replace her,” said Holman. “It got really ugly, and a lot of parents left because they thought, — I can’t deal with this.’”
The principal soon retired, and parents suspected that their campaign forced her out. When new principal Alonta Wrighton arrived, they said, it made a world of difference. The new parents were able to implement new, school-wide enrichment programs, and raise funds to support them.
In doing so, the social capital of those new parents would prove invaluable to generating revenue for the school’s enrichment.
One parent was a grant writer, and used her expertise to help raise the money that would fund P.S. 11’s new enrichment programs. Several parents who are authors contributed their works, and their connections, to the school’s annual book fair fundraiser.
And when it came to making time to volunteer, it didn’t hurt that many of the new parents enjoyed flexible work hours. Self-employed adults, who often work from home, are now 14.6% of the neighborhood, up from 5.4% in 1990, according to Census figures.
"A lot of those parents are from the creative class, which means they freelance," said Tamara Brown, a Professor of Sociology at Brooklyn College and the author of Raising Brooklyn: Nannies, Childcare and Caribbeans Creating Community, published in January. "They might work for a few months heavily and then they’re off."
"It's totally a class issue, because the parents who stay at home can be more engaged," said Kiini Salaam, a parent who was generally pleased with P.S. 11 while her daughter attended the school. "For schools in neighborhoods where there’s not a lot of resources, it’s not gonna be one in two parents who can come in and help out."
Offering a variety of ways to get involved was important to increasing parental involvement, especially among those who worked full-time or more. The PTA sent surveys to parents’ homes to how they could best get involved, making sure to include a range of options that included things that could be handled online from anywhere, said Vanessa Barnett, the school’s PTA president.
The strategy paid off. Parental involvement soared.
"Even in March, which is sort of an off month, we now have 50 to 75 parents coming to PTA events," Barnett said. "Before, we had a hard time even getting a quorum of 20 people."
It didn’t take long, either. Among parents dizzy with the anxiety of choices that may affect the rest of their children’s lives, word quickly spreads when a school seems to be getting it right.
"Parents who don’t have access to a lot of options think, —here’s a public school that’s on the rise, getting better every year,’” said Sheri Holman. “There are so few schools like that, that they become very sought-after really, really quickly."
But while parent involvement was what turned P.S. 11 around, Vanessa Barnett claims that that involvement did not rely on a privileged class.
"Your passion for your kids and your desire to make an impact cuts across all lines," she said. “We couldn’t do it without some people having connections or some knowledge of the way events work, but you don’t need an MBA for that."
The Obama administration's Race to the Top contest set states and school districts around the country scrambling for ways to reorganize, restructure or reinvent themselves in order to qualify for federal aid aimed at reconstituting school systems in the image of Mayor Michael Bloomberg's educational reforms. Nearly all the carrots dangled by the federal Department of Education, as in New York, reward reforms related to standardized testing (merit pay, grade retention, school shutdowns) or to changes in school governance (mayoral control, school "restarts," school turnarounds, charter schools).
An August New York Times poll found that only 34 percent of New Yorkers approve of the mayor's handling of the schools. That has not stopped city schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott from announcing that he will "re-task" dollars to underwrite a new round of Race to the Top-style reforms. Focusing now on middle schools, the DOE will follow its strategy for high schools: shut down struggling schools and replace them.
If the federal or city department of education really wanted to turn around struggling schools, however, they would do far better to focus not on merit pay or governance structures, but on the struggling students inside those schools – in particular the four out of ten children who struggle with learning to read. In doing so, they would also find one of the major roots of the achievement gap. Proportions of struggling readers are the same in Scarsdale as in Harlem, in Oakland as in Marin County.What makes reading disabilities a root cause of the achievement gap between rich and poor districts are not governance structures, but whether or not struggling readers get appropriate help, and when.
In keeping with the "reading wars" of the past 40 years, deliberations about the best way to help struggling readers still focus too much on phonics versus whole language reading instruction. The discussion needs to move way beyond those polarities, however, if we are ever to ensure that each child in this country is truly reading. Full literacy cannot be guaranteed by ordering up the right phonics program from the right publisher, stocking classrooms with "leveled libraries," sitting every schoolchild down for 90 minutes every day for reading and writing "literacy blocks" and then testing them relentlessly, or even by having their parents read nightly to them from birth.
These strategies cannot help those four out of ten students who struggle to read. For one thing, of those 40percent of students, half -- fully 20 percent of our population – are dyslexic, according to the International Dyslexia Association and the National Institute of Child Health and Development (NICHD.)
If 40 percent of children struggle with learning to read, and there are 1.1 million schoolchildren in the city's public schools, that amounts to 440,000 children. Half of those – or some 220,000 – are dyslexic.
In a jarring overlap of figures, that happens to be the same number of children Bloomberg cited as being in failing schools when he first took control of the public school system in 2002. Not all children in failing schools are dyslexic, of course; nor are all dyslexics in failing schools. The overlap in numbers, though, serves as a wake-up call. When the additional 20 percent of struggling readers are factored in, we are talking about close to half the children of any given school system or district who need extra help learning to read.
Most dyslexics in New York are not found in special ed. In fact, most are not found at all. Historically, to determine whether a child needs help with reading, special ed looked for a discrepancy between I.Q. and achievement level. Perversely, this assumed that reading problems would affect only high I.Q. children with low levels of achievement. However, people at any level of intelligence can have reading difficulties. This dilemma was forcefully addressed in a 2003 report by Kalman R. Hettleman titled "The Invisible Dyslexics"
In 2004 the reauthorization of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act scrapped the discrepancy model for learning disabilities with one that calls for Response to Intervention. This was based on the NICHD's recommendation that schools offer increasing levels of specialized, multi-sensory interventions to struggling readers until; they find the one that works for that particular child. These interventions can range in intensity from small-group instruction a few times a week with the regular classroom teacher, to full-time, one-on-one programs of four to eight weeks with specially-trained instructors. The Institute recommended that these interventions be tried before referring a student to special ed.
This reform has unleashed a further complication: schools or districts first direct families to whatever resources they offer to help with reading but do not necessarily provide what the struggling students actually need. In New York City, for example, principals are allowed to choose whatever services they want to offer. They usually pick one program, and if that one doesn't happen to work for every struggling reader -- which it surely won't and can't) -- many students will continue to struggle.
In her excellent book Why Can't You Teach Me 2 Read, WNYC education reporter Beth Fertig describes a typical scenario in which two schools are located in the same building. The principal of one selects a program that helps struggling readers, and the other chooses one that is not effective. Students in the second school have no access to the successful program in the first. Under the city's policy of "principal empowerment," unimproved reading scores of the second school's principal would ultimately result in his/her removal. But that could take years. Meanwhile a whole cohort of struggling readers will have passed through that school.
In short, the progression of ever-more-intensive interventions envisioned by the federal government for these children is not available in New York City, where full implementation of the Response to Intervention protocol is still two years away. Instead, parents have to doggedly extract these services from the Department of Education, often with a lawsuit. Even that usually comes at the end of a long, grueling road; for most parents, it can take a long time for them to find out why their children are struggling, much less what kind of help to ask for and how to get it.
What happens to struggling readers who don't get help? They are left in classrooms at every grade level with their bad spelling, illegible handwriting or uncertain reading skills to get by as best they can. Unsuspecting parents might exhort them to "work harder," or criticize them for "not focusing." Teachers often ascribe their reading or comprehension problems to laziness or lack of intelligence.
These children often develop strategies or subterfuges to help them get by in the classroom. Without the right interventions, though, many of these "invisible" dyslexics must repeat grades, sometimes multiple times. Little that is provided in the classroom, summer school or after-school tutoring programs for these students is going to help. Those programs simply provide more intensive or individualized versions of classroom instruction that has already not worked.
That is why the city Department of Education' practice of treating every reading and writing deficiency with even more reading and writing (much less endless testing of them!) is counter-productive. Such "hyper-literacy" leads, as one parent noted, "frustration for those who are not really reading, and tedium for those who are already fluent readers."
The hyper-focus on math and literacy in recent years has, moreover, crowded out social studies, science, the arts, and even physical education, which all offer plenty of opportunity for developing literacy and math skills, as well as ways to engage more f students, especially those for whom reading and writing do not come easily.
Can all of these children be helped? Yes, and at every grade level. It is unacceptable to keep writing off generations of students if they are not reading adequately by third grade, as has been the case for too long. It is also unacceptable that the task of finding and sorting through the available reading interventions is left to the vigilance of parents, leaving out those who cannot marshal the time, money, tenacity and emotional resources to ferret out such programs. Many of these interventions are used in school systems in other parts of the country. The fact that they are not available everywhere -- including New York -- is really more a matter of politics or ignorance than of anything else. Where they are not widely available, the students who get such help are largely those whose parents have successfully sued for it, or who pay for it privately – further evidence of the role this reading crisis plays in the achievement gap.
With so much research, so many solutions, and even federal dollars at hand, legislators and education officials have the opportunity and obligation to move decisively into the 21st century by first guaranteeing that the nation's schoolchildren have that most basic of skills: the ability to read. After all, if compulsory education forces children to attend school, shouldn't we guarantee that they are able to participate in what we are compelling them to do?
Discussion of solutions in education inevitably brings up that other major mathematical calculation: the cost. When it comes to literacy, consider that whether we spend the actual dollars or not, we pay -- either for a fully literate population or the societal costs of not having one.
Mayor Bloomberg is effectively recognizing the costs of illiteracy through his newly-established Young Men's Initiative. In short order, Deputy Mayor of Health and Human Services Linda Gibbs, who is overseeing the program, found that many of the young men, who are no longer in the city's schools, but not in jobs either, were reading at elementary school levels. To that end, she has made improved reading skills the Initiative's first order of business. Now, if we could just get the city's school system to do the same! As the mayor himself said, in announcing expansion of the Young Adult Literacy Program to help the Initiative's young men improve their reading "Too many young men in our city are stuck in dead ends, and for many of them, the problem starts and stops with illiteracy. But here's the good news: this is a problem that can be overcome."
It can but the effort will need some serious "scaling up," of course. The city's Young Adult Literacy Program serves 1,000 struggling "over-age" readers in 17 locations. As we've seen, struggling readers in the schools number nearly a half-million, spread across some 1,500 schools. If our school reform money and energies were "re-tasked," however, from the ever-expanding focus on standardized testing and governance restructurings, and redirected to provide appropriate reading interventions for every child who needs it, overall total costs could well be no more than what is being spent right now. The only difference is that those four out of ten children in our schools who need that extra help would then truly be reading.
Susan Crawford is the director of the Right to Read Project
(This story was updated on Oct. 14, 2011, to reflect additional information and statements provided to Gotham Gazette by the Department of Education.)
At the start of NBC's Education Nation extravaganza last month host Brian Williams introduced and praised one of the funders of the event, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
For the reformers, teachers, parents and politicians at Education Nation, the refrain was a familiar one. The Gates Foundation, Williams continued, is "the largest single funder of education anywhere in the world. It's their facts that we're going to be referring to often to help along our conversation."
Indeed, with hundreds of millions of dollars being poured into our nation’s schools each year -- and plans for an addition $3.5 billion over the next five to six years -- Gates has funded an extraordinary amount. Other foundations, like the Broad Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation have also gotten in on the education game, but according to reformers and teachers, the Gates Foundation, with vastly more money than any of the other foundations, leads the way.
This is certainly the case in New York City where Gates money has fueled – and at times even directed – the education reforms of the Bloomberg administration. Over the last decade, Gates has given $175 million to $200 million to the city's public and charter schools, according to the foundation.
With their donations, the Gates have taken an unprecedented role in directing reform -- setting the agenda for education policy they help underwrite, supporting the organizations that advocate for those policies and, as Williams noted, providing the facts to back it up.
"The facts are coming from someone who has a very big agenda," said Anthony Cody, a teacher and education reformer from Oakland, Calif., whose criticisms of Education Nation were published in the Washington Post. Cody worked as a middle school teacher for 18 years before working on district wide reforms for another six.
In the past , Cody said, school administrators and teachers would instigate programs and reforms and then apply for funds from philanthropies or government on a project-by-project basis. Now, the impetus for reforms often comes from foundations, and school systems, eager for funds, adapt their programs to fit the philanthropies' agendas.
Chris Williams, the press secretary at the Gates Foundation, noted that philanthropies overall are evolving, not just Gates. "The intention is to be catalytic, to help spur change where other investments haven't been able to -- to take that kind of risk," he said.
The most well-known example of foundation-fueled education reform is the small schools initiative.
In 2000, the Gates Foundation announced it would jump into education reform with a plan to create small schools. Over the next eight years, they paid districts to break up large public schools and create 2,602 schools in 45 states and the District of Columbia. In 2003, the foundation awarded New York City $51.2 million to create 62 small high schools, as part of the city's plan to shut large high schools it deemed failing and replace them with small, often themed schools.
In 2008, after investing $2 billion in the reform, the Gates announced that the program had not shown strong results, and the foundation would restructure its goals.
In some districts, such as Cody's this could lead to another change in course. Responding to budget cuts and poor reviews of the new schools, Oakland has been closing small schools and reforming large, more comprehensive schools in the last few years.
In New York, the small schools initiative has been credited with raising graduation rates, but a New School study in 2009, found that while graduation rates were up at newly created small schools, the numbers were somewhat deceptive. As small schools, which were able to select their students, reported relatively high graduation rates, some of the remaining large high schools saw surges in enrollment that created discipline and other problems. This in turn, led to a fall in the numbers of students receiving a diploma at these schools. Some of these high schools were then shut, creating even more problems for the big schools that remained open.
"While the [Department of Education] has trumpeted the success of the new small schools for at-risk students, the net gain for all high school students is much smaller because the majority of high schoolers still attend large schools," the study found.
The Department of Education itself, however, says the successes are just that and can’t be ignored: Over the last four years, graduation is up 20 points, according to department spokesman Matthew Mittenthal. "It's not just a number, but tens of thousands more students graduating and attending college" he said.
Mittenthal countered the New School study with another report, conducted by independent research firm MDRC -- which has received millions in funding from the Gates Foundation including money for this particular study -- that found that "by the end of their first year of high school, 58.5 percent of [small schools of choice] enrollees are on track to graduate in four years compared with 48.5 percent of their non-[small school} counterparts, for a difference of 10.0 percentage points. These positive effects are sustained over the next two years."
The study also found that by the fourth year of high school, the small schools "increase overall graduation rates by 6.8 percentage points, which is roughly one third the size of the gap in graduation rates between white students and students of color in New York City."
The critics, however, remain skeptical.
"Across the country, a lot of [small] schools are being closed -- they're incredibly expensive and inefficient -- but we're still creating more,” Leonie Haimson said.
Haimson is the executive director of Class Size Matters, a New York City advocacy group that promotes smaller class sizes. Having fewer students in a classroom, Haimson said is "one of the few education reform ideas that has been proven to work," but is not a part of the foundation's reform agenda.
It also has not been a priority for the Bloomberg administration. Class sizes in the city this year are the largest in a decade, a teachers union study found.
"There's never been a time in history when one foundation controls the narrative so much," Haimson said and criticizing the Gates for acting on policies that she says are based on "completely unreliable facts" that they have supplied themselves.
Williams explained that the Gates -- like most foundations -- has a "strong theory of action, of change. We make investments that align with it." But he denies there is no expertise to back up its philosophy. "Our education team is filled with former educators. these are people who have been in schools, who know how schools operate," Williams said.
And he said the foundation does adapt to evidence. "One of the things we learned from that experience is that school structure isn’t enough, the schools need really good teachers in the classrooms," Williams said. "It's an evolutionary process, [the small schools initiative] guided us."
As a result, the Gates' amended agenda focuses on accountability -- teacher accountability for their students' achievements, as measured by test scores. Numerous critics have lambasted the Gates for tying students test scores to teacher’s jobs, in the name of accountability. Tests of a third grader’s reading level is just that — a test of whether the third grader can read, not whether or not the teacher can teach, said Diane Ravitch, an NYU professor of education and frequent critic of Bloomberg education policies.
Last month, the city dropped its effort to rank teachers on the basis of test scores, saying it would leave devising a teacher evaluation system to the state.
The Gates agenda also stresses student choice, which allows children and their families to select their schools, with charter schools a major part of the mix.
Under Bloomberg, charters have proliferated in the city with the active encouragement of the Department of Education, which has gone so far as to give the publicly funded, privately run schools place in Department of Education buildings. About 45,500 students attend 136 charters in the city.
In New York City, though, choice goes beyond that. Students entering elementary school who do well on a standardized test can choose from a variety of schools, and the city to a great extent has eliminated neighborhood high schools, compelling eighth graders and their parents to choose school s and apply to them.
"More frequently, it’s the schools that pick the kids and they’ll avoid the kids with the lowest scores because they just can’t risk it. Some schools become dumpling grounds and then they are closed. You'd think after nine years of Bloomberg reforms, we wouldn’t be closing any schools, but we are," said Ravitch. "At what point do they begin to talk about adding some instructional plan? They don’t," Ravitch said.
At a forum at the New School earlier this year, many people criticized the school choice system for high school but said despite its many failings it represented an improvement over the days when students had to go to their neighborhood school -- and students in poor neighborhoods usually went to poor schools.
Of course many of the change in New York City have come about as a result of mayoral control -- and Gates has also been an enthusiastic supporter that. In 2009, as Bloomberg sought to get the legislature to renew mayoral control of schools, a group called Learn -NY popped up to lobby for the extension. While billed as a grassroots group, Learn-NY got $4.1 million from Gates – the man, not the foundation -- and millions more from another billionaire, Eli Broad.
The donations did not become public knowledge until after the legislature had granted Bloomberg's wish.
The Gates reform agenda has gained support not only in New York City, but on a national scale, too. The Obama's administration's funding competition for schools -- Race to the Top -- is notably in sync with the foundation's reform agenda of accountability and choice.
Last year, New York state won $700 million in funds from the Race to the Top program. For its piece of the pie, New York agreed to tie teacher evaluations to student test scores, as well as promising to make curriculum changes and develop a more reliable statewide testing system.
States that were interested in the funds had to submit lengthy applications detailing their educational policy. To help states tackle the 350-page application — a significant task for resource-strapped governments — the Gates Foundation gave 15 states "that have demonstrated commitment to the components of the foundation’s College Ready strategy” $250,000 grants to pay for consultants to write their applications." Other states interested in that sort of grant money had to agree to eight additional policy stipulations before applying.
"The situation that we have is that the entire public sector is being systematically starved of resources that are needed," Cody said. "In those situations, you make those institutions vulnerable to agencies that offer money." Over the last three years, the budget for the New York State Department of Education has been cut by 30 percent, according the then state's education commissioner, David Steiner, in December.
City school gave seen their budgets cuts as well, leading to fewer teachers, larger class sizes and the layoffs of some 670 aides and other school employees last week.
With billions spent on public education every year, a few hundred million expended nationally may seem small, but Ravitch said the relatively small amount of funds can drive reform because they are discretionary.
"Most money goes in the school is committed," she said. "There’s very little discretionary money."
So while the considerable public funds will keep the heat on, pay for pensions and employee health care, and buy textbooks, the money that for anything new comes almost entirely from philanthropy.
Williams agreed. "We can commit dollars where others can't," he said.
In December, New York announced that it would request another $18 million over the next four years from foundations to fund a fellowship of experts who would decide how exactly the state would use its $700 million Race to the Top. Of that, $3.5 million has already been raised, including $900,000 from the Gates Foundation.
Despite all of Gates' money, Williams sees a robust debate amongst education reformers, in New York and elsewhere. When philanthropies fund significant research, there is always reason to worry about the integrity of the findings, he said. But, he added, Gates works hard promote independent research.
Ravitch has her doubts. Because the Gates funds organization that advocate for Gates' policies, there is little discourse or review from the education community, she said, commenting, "They exist in an echo chamber." "They've been saying that this will be the solution to our problems for 20 years. We're failing and yet we're doing the same thing," Ravitch said before paraphrasing Albert Einstein: "I think that's the definition of insanity -- when you do the same thing and expect different results."