New York City Provides Its High School Students Grossly Unequal Access to the Curriculum

New York City has mayoral governance in its public schools. As a central part of the school reforms imposed during Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s three terms, the New York City public schools instituted universal school choice for students in high school. While students with very high scores can test into the city’s limited number of exclusive magnet high schools, most students apply to an array of less selective high schools. At the same time Bloomberg introduced school choice for all high schoolers, his schools chancellor broke up the large high schools serving thousands of students into smaller high schools that were, in many cases, “co-located” into the old high school buildings.   The new, small schools limited admission to several hundred, not several thousand, and promised personal attention to their students.  Every student was to be known and feel known by the adults at the school. A new, short and readable report by Clara Hemphill on the overall impact of New York’s small high schools of choice was just published by the New School Center for New York City Affairs.  There are successes and failures.  Hemphill suggests ways that New York City can address the inequities that persist.

Hemphill explains: “While the graduation rate has steadily increased over the past decade, the proportion of students receiving an Advanced Regents diploma—one commonly used measure of college readiness—has stagnated.  In 2014, just 18 percent of students starting New York City high schools four years earlier earned Advanced Regents diplomas.”

A serious problem is the limited curricula provided in many of the small high schools: “Today, 39 percent of the city’s high schools do not offer a standard college-prep curriculum in math and science, that is, algebra 2, physics and chemistry.  More than half the schools do not offer a single Advanced Placement course in math and about half do not offer a single Advanced Placement course in science… Roughly 21 percent of New York City high school students attend schools that don’t offer courses in both chemistry and physics.  Many of these are the new small high schools that proliferated during the administration of Mayor Michael Bloomberg… (Three years of science is a graduation requirement in all city high schools.  Students at schools that don’t offer the full complement of college-prep sciences meet that requirement by taking one of these sciences, usually biology—or as it’s known in New York schools, ‘living environment’—and supplementing that with courses such as forensics or general science.)”

“The result,” writes Hemphill, “is an intense bifurcation of the city’s public high school system—one that parents frantic to get their children into top high schools are acutely attuned to.  Looking at statistics from August 2014, the Center for New York City Affairs found that 48 percent of the New York City public high school students receiving Advanced Regents diplomas are clustered in just 25 schools.  At 100 other schools, on the other hand, not a single student received an Advanced Regents diploma…  While white and Asian students make up less than one-quarter of citywide public high school enrollment, they constitute roughly 70 percent of the students at the top city high schools awarding Advanced Regents degrees.  At the 100 schools where no Advanced Regents diplomas were awarded, the student body was 92 percent black and Hispanic.”

Hemphill explains how these disparities have evolved over time.  While in a high school with 3,000 students, even if only one percent of students are prepared to take advanced math or chemistry or physics, it is economically worthwhile to offer at least one advanced math or chemistry or physics course.  The percentages are very different, in a school of 400 students: “In a high school of 400 kids, however, the comparable critical mass for creating advanced classes has to be much larger than just 1 percent of the students before it makes sense to commit the necessary time and effort.  Sometimes, that critical mass simply doesn’t exist… (F)or many students, the die is cast before they arrive in 9th grade… It is very difficult for students to overcome poor preparation in elementary and middle schools.  Most students who enter 9th grade with weak math skills don’t catch up: If they go to college, they must take remedial classes.”

The new report from the Center on New York City Affairs suggests a number of relatively simple, though probably in some cases costly ways to address the problem.  They include hiring math specialists across the city’s 5th grades, investing heavily in math instruction in all middle and high schools, and offering non-math-based “conceptual” chemistry and physics for students with poor math backgrounds.  One rather obvious idea for students in small schools co-located in one building is to provide shared advanced courses in sciences and mathematics—introducing campus-wide economies of scale to  overcome the limitations of the small schools.

The report addresses one of the most serious problems facing school districts where children who are far behind have become concentrated.  Over time the high school curriculum becomes scaled back when not enough well prepared students come through the system to fill advanced courses at the high school.  In what is perhaps the most easily conceptualized example, if a school district facing serious underfunding cuts back its elementary and middle school instrumental music program, sooner or later, there won’t be enough young musicians to fill the high school orchestra. In the same way, Calculus gets eliminated from high school math offerings when not enough well-prepared students come up through the system to fill even one classroom at the high school.  Disparities in access to curriculum are the very definition of inequity.

Extraordinary New York Report Explores Impact of Child Poverty on School Achievement

The role of child poverty in school achievement is a topic that makes people bristle.  Poor children do well all the time, we are told.  Poor children learn just as other children learn, and we should not point the finger at their poverty as if we are blaming them or their parents.  I believe that most people who care deeply about the injustices in today’s public school policy know that poor children do, in fact, learn and thrive all the time, excel at school, and contribute later as our society’s leaders in the whole range of citizenship, leadership, academia and business.  But a half century of data is also incontrovertible: in the aggregate, scores on standardized tests correlate with family wealth, and students living in deep poverty are likely to find their academic lives affected by their economic circumstances.

An urgently important new study from New York’s New School for New York City Affairs, A Better Picture of Poverty: What Chronic Absenteeism and Risk Load Reveal About New York City’s Lowest-Income Elementary Schools, updates a 2008 study that opened the public’s eyes to the role of chronic absenteeism in school achievement in New York—where more than 90,000 students—20 percent of elementary school students in New York City Schools—were discovered to be chronically absent—missing a month or more of school every year.  “A groundbreaking 2008 report by the Center for New York City Affairs at The New School cast a penetrating light on the then-underappreciated but shockingly widespread problem of chronic absenteeism in the city’s public schools.  It found that chronic absenteeism—defined as being missing from school for at least 10 percent of the academic year—was particularly widespread among the city’s lowest-income students, hindering their success in school.  The new report updates and refines that original research.  It shows that despite measurable progress in recent years, a dispiritingly high 19 percent of elementary-grade students are still chronically absent from school.  Moreover, it describes what we for the first time define as ‘persistent chronic absenteeism’—widespread absenteeism that has continued for at least five consecutive school years, a problem plaguing nearly 130 schools with elementary-level students.”

In the years since the 2008 report, a task force appointed by former mayor, Michael Bloomberg, has worked with the schools and successfully reduced chronic absence, but the numbers remain alarmingly high:  “Despite the good work done in New York City to reduce chronic absenteeism, the number of chronically absent elementary school students still hovers around one in every five students; some 87,000 children from grades K to 5 were chronically absent in the 2012-13 school year.

In the new report, researchers from the New School considered the gound-breaking 2010 research by The Consortium on Chicago School Research that identified 46 “truly disadvantaged” schools in that city and then looked at similar research conducted in 2012 in Philadelphia.  They set out to discover whether a group of “truly disadvantaged” public elementary schools could also be identified in New York City: “Using 2009 U.S. Census American Community Survey data aligned to school catchments, Center staff identified the 10 percent of schools with the highest levels of family poverty and male unemployment.  This yielded 77 elementary and K-8 schools serving particularly high-poverty families in neighborhoods already known to be low income.  Using Department of Education data, we looked at the statistical effects of transient and homeless students and families receiving government support.  We also mapped the number of public housing complexes and homeless shelters in each school’s catchment.  And we obtained geographic data from the Administration for Children’s Services, allowing us to measure the intensity of investigations and foster care placement in the area each school was serving.  We then layered on numbers that gave us a picture of the health and climate of each school, including principal turnover, teacher turnover, student mobility, suspensions and analysis from the Department of Education’s Learning Environment Surveys.”

The results: “We saw almost immediately that poverty alone is not destiny.  Although each school was serving students living among some of the highest levels of poverty in New York City, the similarities ended there…  PS 140 Eagle School in the Morrisania section of the South Bronx is one of the five schools in our group struggling to make headway academically.  The school shoulders 14 of the 18 risk factors, including high unemployment and high student mobility.  The neighborhood poverty rate is nearly 85 percent and almost 18 percent of the school’s students are in temporary housing.  Principal Paul Cannon says his children do not really know what poverty means. They don’t feel deprived, at least not yet. Visiting his school, this does seem clear.  The children giggle and eagerly participate in class, hands up and answers tumbling out when Cannon quizzes them on a vocabulary word or a science term.  They clearly love their principal.  Whole lines of children squeal and give him two thumbs up as they pass in the hallway…  But there are some dark numbers underneath that cheer.  Some 40 percent of Cannon’s students are chronically absent, year after year, and PS 140’s academic progress is stalling.”

Several innovations are being implemented by the new mayor, Bill de Blasio and his appointed schools chancellor, Carmen Farina.  The New School researchers judge the plans promising, but they offer suggestions based on their research to ensure that new programs—as implemented—succeed in reducing chronic absenteeism. The researchers urge the Chancellor and her administration to recognize that the city’s “truly-disadvantaged” schools need to be prioritized to qualify for the wraparound services as part of 100 new Community Schools the district has pledged to launch.  These are schools with health, dental, and mental health services provided right at school—along with social and employment services to support parents, Head Start and Early Head Start programs or other preschool services right in the school building, and enriched after school programming.  The researchers warn about major challenges to implementation, however: “The reality is that many truly disadvantaged schools may lack the administrative capacity they need to be included in the first wave of the city’s new community schools.”  Strong leadership will be required for such school transformation.

Researchers strongly recommend that the de Blasio administration prioritize further development of  “the Worker Connect infrastructure, which allows city agencies to share valuable information about families with which they’re working to improve coordination and services.  The city’s Department of Education is only now becoming part of this system.  As they do, the hope is that schools will be able to work more easily with other important agencies, including the Department of Homeless Services and the Administration for Children’s Services, which may have huge influences in their students’ lives.”

The new report is accessible, rich, and filled with stories of the work to reduce absenteeism in particular schools. It has a section on the implementation of a large student and family mentoring program and another on the challenge of homelessness in a huge city like New York.  It examines a number of models for Community Schools and explores the challenges including the coordination of collaborating social service agencies and funding streams.  It’s implications reach far beyond the schools in New York City.  I urge you to read it.