As the Department of Education closed nearly two dozen of the city’s worst large high schools at the height of the “small-schools boom,” one of the critics’ most common complaints was that the educrats were doing too much, too soon.
A new report that tracks thousands of students who entered the small high schools created on Mayor Bloomberg’s watch makes you wonder what would have happened had they done even more, faster.
From 2002 to 2008, the Department of Education closed 23 large high schools, and in their place opened 216 small schools, many offering such specialized themes as sports management or environmental studies. A good chunk of the reorganization was paid for with $150 million in grants from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
The breathtaking pace of change was certainly justified — the huge, dysfunctional high schools that Bloomberg’s team closed, such as Martin Luther King High in manhattan, were dangerous academic wastelands where the idea of someday graduating was often a sick joke.
Graduation rates were often well below 45 percent in the closed schools. At Theodore Roosevelt HS in The Bronx, it was 3 percent in 2006, its last year.
But naysayers — including me at times — wondered whether moving so swiftly would cause more harm than good.
The report, from the nonprofit-research organization MDRC, argues that the reforms were worth the risk. Students in the new, small high schools, the study shows, are making it to the high-school finish line at a much higher rate than at those old, large schools.
Just as important, more of these kids graduated than their classmates in other city high schools. The results were especially positive for black and Hispanic students, who were most often the victims of the awful academic conditions at the schools that closed.
“The present findings provide highly credible evidence that in a relatively short period of time, with sufficient organization and resources, an existing school district can implement a complex high-school reform that markedly improves graduation rates for a large population of low-income, disadvantaged students of color,” write the report’s authors, Howard Bloom and Rebecca Unterman. (The report was also funded by the Gates Foundation, a fact that critics will surely use to discredit it.)
Are these small schools perfect? Of course not. In fact, the MDRC report adds to the growing evidence that, while New York City is graduating students at a higher rate than a decade ago, most of these kids are still not ready for college.
This is sobering stuff, and city leaders must clearly keep their eyes on the issue. But the fact that we’re even worried today about how tens of thousands of city youngsters are doing in college classes is a reminder of just how far the needle has moved in Gotham.
Getting to where most of our students are not only graduating from high school but excelling in college will require the same sort of boldness as we saw during the small-schools push. Bloomberg and his would-be successors should read the MRDC report from the vantage point of those whose job it is to drive change.
Many large high schools that made room for these smaller-school programs closed amid a loud uproar from “community” leaders who urged more time to fix the same schools that had wildly failed students for decades. If finding consensus had been the goal (as opposed to moving boldly to help students), thousands more young men and women would be trying to survive in the world without a high-school diploma right now.
Too much, too soon?
Change can be bumpy in a city like New York, especially when it comes to public schools. It’s often easier to block anything from happening than it is for us to allow our leaders to stake out strong and compelling positions.
This report is yet another reminder that sometimes the fights are worth it.
Joe Williams is executive director of Democrats for Education Reform and father of a student in a 5,000-student city high school.