In their new book, “Exam Schools” (Princeton University Press), researchers Chester E. Finn Jr., and Jessica A. Hockett toured some of the best public high schools in the nation to figure out the formula for success. One of their choices: Townsend Harris in Queens, a Top 10 entry in The Post’s list. What they found:
Townsend Harris High School re-emerged in 1984 from the ashes of what was for decades Gotham’s most selective high school, albeit only for boys. The original institution, known as Townsend Harris Hall and shut down by Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia in 1942, traced its origins back to 1848. Its history was bound up with that of the City College of New York, and it boasted many distinguished alumni (multiple Nobel and Pulitzer prizewinners and more).
Some of these alums agitated for years to resurrect their beloved school but made little headway until the 1980s, when they were able to enlist the high-powered intervention of the president of Queens College and the Queens borough president. The trade-off was that the revived high school would be located there rather than Manhattan.
After operating in temporary quarters for a decade, in 1995 the new Townsend moved into its own attractive six-story building on a corner of the college campus in Flushing.
The building was designed for about 1,000 students, though the school now enrolls 1,100 and most classes nudge the 34-pupil limit in the citywide teachers’ contract. Indeed, it’s a bit snug. Fifty-five teachers share some 42 classrooms (and labs, music rooms, etc.), and the closest thing to a robotics lab is located in a former boys’ restroom.
ADMISSIONS MAZE
Despite tight quarters in a city where space is always hard to come by, Townsend Harris is flooded with eager applicants (about 5,000 for 270 9th-grade openings), of whom many (around 1,200) meet its very demanding threshold requirements for admission. It does not, however, control its own admissions — though it wields considerable influence over who ends up enrolling.
Since 2004, New York City’s method for matching 8th-graders with places in the system’s 650-odd high school programs in almost 400 buildings has been, in its way, rational and generally fair, but it’s also seriously complicated. It’s intended to foster school choice on a citywide basis and to minimize “gaming” and influence peddling en route into Gotham’s competitive-admission schools and programs.
Unless they want to attend one of the city’s 20-some charter high schools or its myriad private and parochial schools, every 8th-grader in New York must pass through a centralized placement system before landing somewhere for 9th grade. There’s no longer an automatic default into a “zoned” or neighborhood high school.
Modeled on the medical field’s “match” procedure for placing newly minted doctors in residency programs in specialties of their choice, the New York system asks every 8th-grader to list 12 high school programs in order of preference. Many of these are open to all comers, and listing one of them as top choice pretty much guarantees entry into it. But hundreds of programs and schools (including Townsend Harris) are “screened,” meaning that those running such a school or program establish its admission prerequisites and then rank their (eligible) applicants in order of the school’s preference, based on its own distinctive criteria.
The school doesn’t know where the applicant ranked it, and the applicant doesn’t know where the “screened” school to which he/she applied ranked him/her. Then the “big computer in the sky” seeks to match students with programs in order of each’s preference for the other. After all this, the student receives a single placement.
This works pretty well for most kids. City data indicate that some 83% of applicants (for 2011–12 high school entry) got one of their top five choices and another 9% got one of their other choices. But, for a host of reasons, almost one-tenth of 8th-graders fail to “match” anywhere during the main selection cycle and must present themselves in person to arrange individual placements — rarely into desirable screened programs — by the Education Department’s Office of Student Enrollment.
High-demand academic schools like Townsend face a different problem — and complicating wrinkle — namely, that the city also operates what amounts to a parallel admissions process for nine of its most competitive high schools, including the illustrious original big three: Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, and Brooklyn Tech.
These plus five newer academic high schools have their admissions determined strictly by student scores on the Specialized High Schools Admissions Test (SHSAT), which some 28,000 youngsters take each year and for which many eager families spend serious money to “prep” their children, as if for the SAT.
This separate admissions system enables students to apply to both the test-based schools and the regular 400+ high school programs, and it’s possible to end up being matched with one of each.
That’s what happens to many Townsend applicants, which is why this school’s “yield” — those who actually enroll there — is about half of the 600 or so kids who are matched to it. The other half wind up attending one of the “exam” schools or a private school. The reason, of course, is that Townsend Harris’s applicant pool contains many of the same kids who are applying, and often getting admitted, to Stuyvesant and the other “exam” schools.
After all is said and done, here is a statistical profile of those who end up at Townsend Harris: two-thirds are girls, one-third boys; 51% are Asian (both East and South Asian); 27% white; 12% Hispanic; 6% black; and 4% multiracial. Half the kids come from homes where English is not spoken, and many are products of an earlier ELL (English Language Learners) program, though Townsend itself does not have such a program. Only a handful of its pupils are disabled, but two in five qualify for subsidized lunches.
INSIDE THE SCHOOL
In many respects, today’s Townsend Harris mirrors the classic image in New York and other major seaboard cities of a school for upwardly mobile immigrant families that want their children to get a first-rate education and attain careers and lifestyles that improve on those of their parents. A century ago, the original Townsend Harris was apt to enroll Jewish kids whose families came from eastern Europe. Today, they’re mostly from Asia and Latin America. But their hopes and dreams are much the same.
The kids are all smart high achievers, with near-perfect attendance and graduation rates. School leaders take pride in not being an “exam school” because, they say, the citywide high school entrance test is basically an appraisal of intellectual aptitude, not actual accomplishment. By placing heavy weight instead on middle school grades, state assessment results, and attendance, Townsend Harris feels it ends up with students who have demonstrated the capacity to be serious and successful, not just brainy.
The school retains a surprising number of “classical” elements, some pressed by alumni at the time of its reincarnation, others encouraged by founding principal Malcolm Largmann (an English teacher who selected the original teaching staff) and former Queens College president Saul B. Cohen. These include two years of mandatory Latin or Greek instruction and a required college-level “great books” course on the college campus — co-taught by college and Townsend instructors — during senior year. (Seniors must also take six additional credit hours at Queens College.)
Other distinctive curricular features include a heavy, schoolwide emphasis on writing in almost every class — teachers note that many pupils enter with scant experience in serious English composition — and at least 40 hours a year of mandatory community service.
Eleven hundred students is small by New York high school standards — Stuyvesant enrolls 3,000 pupils and Brooklyn Tech a whopping 5,000 — and kids and parents alike remarked on the appeal of this relatively intimate scale. It might be seen as a trade-off for classes with as many as 34 pupils, and the large class sizes clearly burden teachers who assign lots of writing, independent-study projects, and what the school calls “collaterals” (research papers, pupil presentations, etc.).
Budget cuts and hiring freezes have shrunk the staff from a total workforce of about 85 a few years back to 75 today. School leaders have done their best to preserve teaching slots, instead taking reductions from the ranks of administrators and support staff. When reduced resources meant there was no money to pay teachers additional stipends for the school’s unusual eighth period (for “enrichment,” i.e., tutoring, club advising, etc.), two minutes were shaved from every other period so that the school’s full program could be preserved within the 34-hour (and 10 minutes!) work week that the United Federation of Teachers has negotiated for all New York City instructors. (Many teachers voluntarily stay later, however, to work with pupils and take part in activities, not to mention the extra time spent evaluating mountains of student work and preparing lessons.)
The teaching staff is loyal, turning over not more than two or three individuals a year, and those we met appeared exceptionally bright, well educated, and enthusiastic. Their average tenure at Townsend is 16 years; almost everyone has at least a master’s degree; and more than a quarter have experience in business, science-related work, or university teaching. Several of the younger instructors are Townsend Harris alums, delighted to be back at a school that served them well.
It seems to be working. The school’s Advanced Placement test-taking and passing rates are impressive. The class of 2010 had SAT scores averaging 1923 (out of 2400). Pretty much everyone goes on to four-year colleges, about half within the city and state university systems, the other half to a wide array of costlier (and often more prestigious) institutions, frequently with scholarship aid. The school gets top marks on the city’s evaluation systems and on a host of national rating and ranking systems.
WHAT WE LEARNED
All this has been accomplished in 25 years in Queens. But how? What sets Townsend Harris apart from not only its neighbors but most of the 20,000 public high schools in the nation?
Besides selective admissions, the school benefits from a close affiliation with Queens College — it’s right on the campus — and from a dedicated faculty, a demanding curriculum (much of it at the college level, some of it taught by college professors), effective leadership, longer-than-average days, loyal alumni and a coherent mission. From the beginning, it demanded more of its students. Essentially all of its graduates go on to four-year colleges, many of them to highly-selective colleges, often with financial aid.
The school is also impressively diverse, with a full measure of low-income students — and more that a full measure of Asian-Americans and of girls. (A large fraction of its pupils live in Queens, the most ethnically diverse area in the country.)
Because it’s an entire school, i.e., not a “program” or collection of advanced courses within a “comprehensive” high school, its entire culture and ethos are compatible with high standards and serious study. Kids are motivated to work hard. It’s safe to be smart. The place is orderly and well-behaved, yet friendly and relaxed. The teachers expect quality work — and themselves work hard to “stay ahead” of their mostly-very-able pupils. They stick around, too. Not much faculty turnover.
Whereas many selective-admissions high schools have a science-math focus (that’s evident at some famous New York institutions such as Bronx Science and Brooklyn Tech), Townsend Harris is oriented to the humanities and — hearkening back to the 19th century roots of its predecessor school — actually requires its honors students to take two years of Latin or Greek!
Townsend Harris is unique in some important ways — selective admission above all — but it also illustrates some important qualities that most good schools already have and many more should have: a coherent mission, a dedicated team, high standards and expectations, students and teachers who chose to be there, instructors who believe in their students, bona-fide ties with a university, a solid core curriculum, supportive parents — and a degree of insulation from the goofier regulations and procedures of a vast bureaucracy.
Excerpted from “Exam Schools: Inside America’s Most Selective Public High Schools” by Chester E. Finn Jr. and Jessica A. Hockett. © 2012 by Princeton University Press. Reprinted by permission.