Mayor Michael Bloomberg
Corrected on 9/18/2007: An earlier version of this story misspelled teacher Jon Martin’s name and incorrectly stated that the campus of the Academy of Urban Planning was on the city’s dangerous schools list.
The school day is almost over at the Academy of Urban Planning high school in Brooklyn, and the students in teacher Jon Martin's senior seminar class are a bit restless. Dorothy Barrett and another senior are discussing voting rights. Beneath a quote from Plato that reads, "No law or ordinance is mightier than understanding" is a poster with the class goals for the semester: "Write a college level paper and score an equivalent of a 3 on the practice AP exam."
There was a time when Barrett, 19, doubted that she could even finish high school, much less go to college. As a sophomore, she became pregnant and briefly thought about dropping out. But since transferring to the Academy of Urban Planning, she has passed all five of the required state exams for graduation. (She is retaking one exam in the hopes of getting a diploma with the state's highest distinction.)
Her personal turnaround mirrors that of the school she now attends. The academy is housed in the same building that five years ago was known as Bushwick High School. Bushwick had one of the lowest four-year graduation rates of any school in New York—a dismal 23 percent. And violence plagued the school's hallways.
Then, five years ago, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg took control of the city's school districts, launching a flurry of reforms that led to Bushwick's being divided into four smaller schools. Though the mayor's takeover has faced its share of criticism, its early results have been promising enough that the New York City Department of Education was presented with the Broad Prize in Urban Education today, an award that carries $500,000 in scholarships for graduating seniors. The Broad Foundation, a Los Angeles-based philanthropy group, has bestowed the annual prize since 2002 to large urban school districts that have made significant gains in academic achievement, particularly among disadvantaged students.
The other four finalists—Long Beach, Calif.; Bridgeport, Conn.; San Antonio, and Miami—will each receive $125,000 for scholarships. This was the third straight year that New York City made the list of finalists. Bloomberg and Chancellor Joel Klein accepted the award at a ceremony today at the Library of Congress in Washington.
This latest recognition of the turnaround in New York's public schools could embolden other cities with failing schools to mimic similar reforms. (This fall, for example, the new mayor of Washington, D.C., took control of that city's schools.) But it's unlikely that New York's Broad Prize will silence critics of mayoral control of school districts.
In 2002, as part of his campaign promise to turn around one of the nation's most ailing school systems, Bloomberg dissolved the city's 32 school districts and named Klein, a former federal Justice Department lawyer, as schools chancellor. Thanks to an unprecedented infusion of money from the city and state as well as private donations—including millions from the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation—the city was able to open new schools, hire more teachers and principals in hard-to-staff areas, and raise salaries.
Large, failing neighborhood schools—about 60 of them—were phased out and replaced by more than 200 smaller secondary schools that cap grade-level enrollment to about 100 students. Under Bloomberg's control, the system, with more than 1.1. million students—already the nation's largest—has ballooned to around 1,400 schools with principals who now exercise greater control over budget and curriculum practices.
Bushwick is an example. The school struggled with violence, overcrowding, and low student achievement ever since a blackout in 1977 led to mass looting and arson in the surrounding community. Bushwick eventually grew to house more than twice the number of students it was built to serve. A physical education teacher who arrived at the school in 1996 remembers unruly kids who would pummel him with eggs and the school's courtyard being littered with syringes. "This place was wild," he says, likening the experience to being thrown into a den of wolves.
Bloomberg's takeover split Bushwick into four smaller high schools: the Academy of Urban Planning, the Bushwick School for Social Justice, the New York Harbor School, and the Academy for Environmental Leadership. They each occupy a different floor of the original Bushwick building, and each has its own principal, cadre of teachers, and specialized curriculum.
Monique Darrisaw, the principal of the urban planning academy, recalls crying the first year she moved into her new role. She and the other administrators faced a wall of opposition from parents and students who were skeptical about the new schools. But with only around 500 students in grades nine through 12, Darrisaw and her staff—like the other three "Bushwick" schools—have been able to forge closer bonds with students. In these more intimate environments, kids are embracing themes of social justice and environmental leadership and picking up skills like computer graphing and mapping that they can use after graduation. The smaller school size lets Darrisaw get close to her students. A former teenage mother herself, Darrisaw attends her pupils' baby showers. She and her staff sometimes go shopping for clothes when students can't afford a prom dress. When a student recently marched into her office, she asked "Why didn't I see you last week?" The boy offered an appearance-based excuse—"I didn't get a haircut." Darrisaw deftly countered by reminding him that he could have called her cellphone and she would have gotten one of her aides to give him a haircut.
The smaller school size is intended to do more than just let the faculty get to know its students. Under the city's plan to give greater autonomy to principals, Darrisaw, like other principals, is under intense pressure to raise attendance, test scores, and graduation rates. Beginning this year, schools will receive grades on a "report card." If Darrisaw's school fails to pass muster, she could lose her job. While Darrisaw doesn't approach the role of principal as a CEO, as the mayor likes to say, she nevertheless thinks principals should be held accountable for every student. "I definitely feel a lot of pressure," she says. "But I feel kids deserve the best, and if I'm not giving them the best, then I should leave."
Ernest Logan, president of the city's union for school administrators, has embraced reform under mayoral control but worries that not all schools are equipped to handle the weight of them. As examples, he cites principals who now can hire their own teachers but don't have a human resources staff to help with the paperwork, and principals who are in charge of classroom spending but lack the training and understanding of the budget process. Under the mayor's Leadership Academy, about 160 new principals are running schools.
"We embrace the idea of accountability," Logan says. "But one of the concerns I have is, if you're off track, who helps you get on track?"
The pressure has also trickled down to teachers. New York City employs nearly 80,000 teachers. Tim Evans, who has taught social studies for four years at the urban planning academy, keeps track of every student's progress on practice exams on spreadsheets that tell him about their strengths and weaknesses on a variety of topics. "I don't like it," he says. "Not because it's more work for me, but because I view education as a qualitative profession that's about relationships and curiosity and questions. The new philosophy is trying to quantify everything. [The chancellor's office] doesn't care if a girl got into a fight with her mother the night before."
"I make no allusions that I don't teach to the test," he says. "I do. Because I know that is how Ms. Darrisaw is going to be held accountable and that is how I'm going to be held accountable."
Indeed, many of the criticisms of Bloomberg's reforms challenge whether its infusion of businesslike accountability comes at the expense of the experience of education. Bloomberg's administration also has come under attack for making decisions without enough input from parents and teachers—such as ordering a ban on cellphones in schools that parents say keeps them from reaching their kids in emergencies and, for a while, forcing all schools to follow a rigid set of practices that even mandated how books should be shelved.
David Bloomfield, a professor at Brooklyn College, is a parent who heads the Chancellor's Citywide Council on High Schools. Echoing other parents and educators, Bloomfield warns that it's too early to say which, if any, of the reforms are working. "I think the mayor deserves credit for tackling the problems of urban education and attempting creative solutions and certainly increasing funding to a great degree," he says. "But as to whether these reforms are actually going to stick and have a notable result in achievement...I just think it's too early to be raising the flag of success and saying mission accomplished."
Even Darrisaw admits that while her school has made achievement gains, it is far too soon to declare victory. The academy's courses are mostly just the basics of high school, and there are not enough AP classes. Education experts call it a lack of academic rigor that is typical of most small schools that don't have access to the resources of larger schools. Darrisaw has sought to fix the problem by partnering with the other Bushwick schools to increase their collective course offerings. Now, one AP Spanish teacher takes the native-language speakers and another teaches beginners.
Discipline has improved at the urban planning academy, but the students still have to go through metal detectors each morning. And while the graduation rates have improved campuswide, almost a third of students at Darrisaw's school are not graduating in four years. There are students like the one who arrived at the academy after being kicked out of a nearby school. He says two boys tried to jump him for his sneakers. A trained boxer, he punched one of the boys and broke his nose and jaw. At the academy, the student's behavior has improved, but he hasn't passed the English or math exit exams. Teachers worry whether he will graduate on time. "There's still a fight for his soul," Darrisaw says.
Meanwhile, Dorothy Barrett—the 19-year-old who was thinking of dropping out a few years ago— is considering a two-year college and a career in nursing. The academy's more intimate environment and supportive teachers, including one who used to call every morning to wake her up, have helped her stay on track, she says.
When the bell rings, Barrett and the other students are reminded to think about a research paper. Last year, the school made a presentation to the city's police commissioner, Raymond Kelly, about police brutality and racial profiling, an event that garnered media attention. Dorothy will have time to think about a research paper later, but for now all she can think about is her 10-month-old son downstairs. She grabs her book bag and runs down several flights of stairs to the campus day care center, where workers care for nine infants; the youngest is 2 months old. Thinking once more about what makes the Academy of Urban Planning special, Dorothy says, "Everyone here is like a family."
