Testimony
on
the Establishment of New, Small
Secondary Schools in New York City
Randi Weingarten
President
United Federation of Teachers
City Council Education Committee
June 16, 2004
SUMMARY:
The UFT supports the establishment of new small schools in the
>The UFT is quite critical, however, of the way in which the DoE has established scores of new small secondary schools in
>Therefore the UFT recommends:
>There must be a comprehensive, realistic plan that places new small schools in appropriate settings where they can be reasonably accommodated.
>The DoE must respect the desire of the many diverse communities to have their own high schools, with organic links to the neighborhoods in which they are located.
>The DoE needs to establish transitional centers for "over the counter" students new to
>The DoE must support all schools, large and small, when they are successful in meeting the academic and social needs of their students.
>New schools must be created at a pace that allows for appropriate oversight and ensures that every new school is a good school which will provide a quality education.
>Lastly, the DoE must provide the prospective principals and staffs of new school the time to properly plan and prepare for the school’s opening.
The UFT has a long and proud tradition of support for educational innovation. We are a union of over 100,000 educational professionals who care deeply about the young people we teach, and we never stop looking for ways to improve their instruction. Our 1.1 million students bring a vast array of academic and social needs to our classrooms, and we have to find the teaching methods and the school support structures which will help us meet the different needs of every one of these students.
The UFT has supported efforts to establish new small schools in the New York City public school system because we believe that a diversity of schools - large and small, academic and career technical, comprehensive and focused on a curricular theme - is required to meet the different needs of our many students. Each type of school brings its own particular strengths, and each serves students with particular needs well.
In a small school, it is easier to create a nurturing, family like atmosphere in which teachers and students get to know each other well, and it is easier for the school's educators to work together collegially, as professionals, on matters of teaching and learning. On the whole, small schools have fewer problems with school safety. Small secondary schools hold particular promise for addressing the academic and social needs of students who are not succeeding in large comprehensive schools, which some students find too impersonal.
At the same time, large comprehensive high schools are able to offer a wide array of academic programs that a small school could not support, especially in advanced studies and in the more specialized subjects. For students who have yet to develop a particular academic focus, or for those ready to pursue a subject in depth, the range of choices is especially important. Extra-curricular activities, especially athletics, are also more numerous. For students who thrive in such a setting, the large school offers many opportunities for academic and personal growth.
Size does not determine whether a school succeeds or fails. There are successful small and successful large schools, and there are failing small and failing large schools. Size simply makes it possible for a school to do different things well.
It is for these reasons, that the UFT has been a lead partner in the New Century Schools project in New York City , and has been supportive of efforts to establish new small schools to complement our large schools. We need different types of schools to best serve different students. I went to a large public high school, and I taught in a large public school. Despite the current zeal "to change the status quo" at all costs, I plead with you to stop throwing out the baby with the bath water. Our vision for New York City public schools is one in which every student can attend a school where his or her fullest academic potential is realized, and every educator can work in a school where his or her fullest professional potential is realized.
But in education, how well one implements a reform is just as important as the soundness of the reform itself. The way in which the Department of Education has established the new small secondary schools in New York City has been fraught with hardship and conflict, much of it avoidable, and has placed unnecessarily onerous and disruptive burdens on both old and new schools. The DoE's administrative mismanagement is undermining what is a promising educational innovation. Specifically, the evident need to create a set number of small schools without planning for the foreseeable consequences has undermined what is a responsible policy. Thankfully, Michele Cahill is at the DoE ; without her, it would be much worse.
What has been most lacking in the DoE's approach is a comprehensive plan for the appropriate placement of new small high schools. New York City 's schools are in the midst of a severe overcrowding crisis, the result of decades of inadequate funding of the system's capital budget. The DoE compounded that problem by establishing new small schools in a way that actually reduced school capacity: it decided that it would phase out large, comprehensive high schools which had not been academically successful, and turn them into campuses of four to six small schools. Since each small school needs space for its own administrative and student support services, the actual classroom space in the building is reduced. In addition, there is a transitional problem, since more space is consumed by non-instructional services when a school building contains both a large school phasing out and several small schools starting up, than when the final change has been made.
The results of this approach were particularly disastrous in the Bronx . With increases in high school enrollment of thousands of students each year, the DoE continued to take ninth graders into most of the schools scheduled to be phased out, while shoe-horning new small schools into the very same buildings. Some Bronx high school buildings are now nearing twice the number of students they were designed to serve. The Walton campus, for example, is currently at 180% capacity, and the DoE plans to place an additional new small school in the building next year.
As overcrowding became more and more severe, school safety and academics suffered. Walton, and the other overcrowded Bronx high schools sharing their buildings with large numbers of small schools - Columbus, Evander Childs and Stevenson - all ended up on the Impact School list as schools with severe safety problems which require special security interventions.
The school buildings became divided into ‘haves' and ‘have nots ,' as students in the new small schools have smaller classes and receive extra services and equipment, while students in the large high school feel slighted by the impending closing of their school. On the Columbus campus, for example, the large, comprehensive high school was forced to adopt an academically disruptive end-to-end schedule, where half of the school attended from 7 to 12 in the morning and the other half from 12 to 5 in the afternoon. Meanwhile, all of the small schools in the building had regular school days. In Wingate High School , the part of the building occupied by the new small school was freshly painted, while the rest was untouched. What message did that send? Conflict between the schools, the educators and the students sharing the building began to mount.
In Brooklyn and Manhattan , a different set of overcrowding problems emerged. The phase out of the old comprehensive high schools began on schedule, so there was adequate space in those buildings for the placement of the new small schools. But there were too few new small schools to absorb all the incoming ninth graders who would have gone to the phased out schools. Large numbers of students were deflected to other high schools in these boroughs, severely overcrowding them and bringing all the attendant safety and academic problems. Fort Hamilton , Lincoln , Madison , Midwood , and Murrow were particularly hard hit. Many schools which were once successful, such as Canarsie , Sheepshead Bay , Tilden and Washington Irving, were undermined and began to tip toward failure; all four of these schools ended up on the Impact School list for additional security because of their severe safety problems. My own home high school, Clara Barton, long the school of choice for African-American and Latino parents in North Brooklyn , has been seriously damaged. If this is a process in which we create good new schools, but turn existing functioning large schools into failing schools, what will the students of our city have gained?
Let me be perfectly clear here. The UFT wholeheartedly endorses smaller class sizes and up-to-date learning technology for the new schools. What we find unacceptable is that these supports, which are essential to the learning of all students, are being provided to some, rather than to all.
There are a number of other serious problems with the way in which the DoE has created the new small schools. The scope of the new small schools project in the Bronx was far too broad, as successful high schools, such as DeWitt Clinton and Columbus, were initially included among those which would be phased out.
Far too little time is being given to the leaders and staffs of the new schools to undertake the extraordinarily complicated tasks of putting together a new school from scratch. Prospective principals and teachers have not even been freed up from the current positions in existing schools, and many are doing these tasks on their own spare time. Surely the work of creating a new school is far too important to be treated as such an afterthought; elsewhere in the nation, school founders are freed up for as a much an entire year to properly prepare the new school.
And there are real questions of whether or not the institutional capacity of the system to establish quality new schools is being outstripped by an extraordinarily ambitious schedule of creating scores of new schools each year. Already there are a few new small schools, almost entirely staffed by novice educators, which are experiencing serious difficulties. The experience of the existing small schools on the Erasmus campus, which ended up on the Impact School list this year for its severe safety issues, and will now be reorganized into a second generation of new small schools, should serve as a warning of what can happen when such schools are established without due diligence and care. It seems that a political and public relations agenda, rather than an educational agenda of what is best for kids, is driving the decisions to proceed at such a rapid pace.
As a result of all of this, educators felt beleaguered. They believe that they have been placed in untenable situations and that their often heroic work on behalf of their students is either unappreciated or not fully supported by the DoE .
The creation of new small schools is not a zero sum game: we can support and advance both large and small schools. What is needed for our students to enjoy both the promise of new small schools and the advantages of large comprehensive high schools? Here's what has to happen:
First, there must be a comprehensive, realistic plan that places new small schools in appropriate settings where they can be reasonably accommodated, and which places all students in school buildings which can reasonably accommodate their numbers. Such a plan must include the acquisition of substantial amounts of new space, for school capacity in New York City is being far outstripped by student numbers. In order to prevent a recurrence of the problems we have seen the last few years, the UFT has called upon the DoE to do impact studies, based on objective standards and produced and disseminated in a public and transparent manner, before placing any more new small schools in buildings that also house other schools.
In the last few months, the DoE has made the first steps in this direction with its plan for placing students in the Bronx high schools, but much, much more remains to be done on this issue, both in the Bronx and in the rest of the city. Why, for example, can't the Celia Cruz HS of Music be found a home on the campus of Lehman College with which it works so closely, rather than be placed on an already severely overcrowded Walton campus? And as Andy Wolf has argued in the New York Sun , the DoE must learn to respect the desire of the many diverse communities which make up this great city to have their own high schools, with organic links to the neighborhoods in which they are located. Eva Moskowitz made exactly the same argument in championing a new East Side high school a few years back.
Second, the DoE also needs to establish transitional centers for "over the counter" students new to New York City who enroll during the course of the school year. As it now stands, the academic programs of large schools are continually disrupted by thousands of students being registered, in dribs and drabs, over the course of the school year. And those students do not receive the education they need when they are dropped into classes half way through the academic term.
Let me give you an example of the mishandling of this problem. The Chancellor's HS District, done collaboratively with the UFT, had redesigned Eastern District (now known as the Grand Street Campus) and George Washington High Schools , two of the lowest performing schools in the city, and at each site created four 500-student schools that are quite successful. Now the DOE has decided to renege on its promises and sharply increase the size of the "small" schools at each site by admitting large numbers of "over-the-counter" admissions over the course of the year. All the gains made by the staffs will be eroded.
Third, the DoE must send the clear message that it recognizes the merit and the place of the entire panoply of schools that make up this vast system. School communities need to know that so long as they are successful in meeting the academic and social needs of their students, their place in this system is secure. And school communities need to know that there will not be separate classes of schools with different levels of resources and that they will be fully supported, according to the needs of those students and the mission of the school. The DoE has taken a step forward this year by providing campus grants to all of the schools, old and new, sharing a school building, but more needs to be done. In particular, space needs to be equitably shared, so that no one school bears an unfair burden of the severe overcrowding our schools face.
Fourth, new schools must be created commensurate with the ability of the system to ensure that every one is a quality school, with these safeguards in place, that will provide the very best education to its students. It is imperative that the DoE establish and maintain a timetable for the creation of new schools which allows the prospective principal and staff the time to properly plan for the school's opening. And it must free up enough time of those working in other schools for them to undertake these tasks.
With these protections, we can continue to support the expansion of innovative small schools, but not at the expense of other successful schools. Thank you for this opportunity to lay out the UFT's concerns on this important question.
