Over at eduwonk, guest blogger Michael Goldstein points us to an inspirational trailer for a documentary, Whatever It Takes, about a new small school in the South Bronx. This is American education's favorite past-time - find inspirational principal/teacher and tell an uplifting/touching story about how kids from tough backgrounds beat the odds. Preferably, someone easy on the eyes like Hilary Swank or Morgan Freeman plays the lead.

I see two problems with this phenomenon: First, it's almost always the case that these heroic tales leave out some critical details. While I'm sure the school profiled in "Whatever It Takes" is doing important, laudable work, let me fill in the blanks about the process for selecting the first cohort of students to the Bronx Center for Science and Mathematics. As I explained in When a Lottery is Not a Lottery, some "unscreened" small schools in NYC - including the Bronx school profiled in this movie - have required students to fill out applications to verify that they made an "informed choice" to attend the school; students who the school reports as making an "informed choice" received first preference in the "lottery."

To apply to be part of the first entering class at the Bronx Center for Science and Mathematics, students were asked to provide their most recent report card and two letters of recommendation, one from an 8th grade teacher and one from a guidance counselor, principal, or assistant principal. The application also asked for the student's test scores, retention history, and involvement in advanced courses during the 8th grade. Finally, applicants to the "unscreened" school profiled in "Whatever It Takes" had to answer the following essay questions:

1) What are three things your teachers would say about you?
2) What makes you want to attend a school that will demand your very best academically and will expect you to work harder than you probably ever have before?
3) What are five future goals you have for yourself?
4) Mention the title and authors of some books you would like to discuss during your interview.
5) What are some activities to which you belong either in school or outside of school?

You can decide for yourself whether this should be called an "unscreened" school. But data from their most recent School Report Card suggest that the Bronx Center for Science and Mathematics isn't serving a population typical of the South Bronx: only 18% qualified for free lunch, 0% were in full-time special education, .9% were in part-time special education, .9% were English Language Learners, students had an average daily attendance of 90.5% in the previous year, and 53% and 51% of students entered 9th grade proficient in reading and math, respectively.

Here's the second problem: We do teachers and schools a great disservice by clinging to the teachers/principals as heroic, self-effacing figures storyline. This argument is best made in a New York Times op-ed, Classroom Distinctions:

The most dangerous message such films promote is that what schools really need are heroes. This is the Myth of the Great Teacher.

Films like “Freedom Writers” portray teachers more as missionaries than professionals, eager to give up their lives and comfort for the benefit of others, without need of compensation. Ms. Gruwell sacrifices money, time and even her marriage for her job.

Her behavior is not represented as obsessive or self-destructive, but driven — necessary, even. She is forced into making these sacrifices by the aggressive neglect of the school’s administrators, who won’t even let her take books from the bookroom. The film applauds Ms. Gruwell’s dedication, but also implies that she has no other choice. In order to be a good teacher, she has to be a hero.

(...)Every day teachers are blamed for what the system they’re just a part of doesn’t provide: safe, adequately staffed schools with the highest expectations for all students. But that’s not something one maverick teacher, no matter how idealistic, perky or self-sacrificing, can accomplish.

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Graduations are sacred events in American society. They mark an important transition, and graduates and their loved ones are justifiably proud of their accomplishments. For this reason, it’s a very tricky thing to comment on news stories connected to graduations. One doesn’t want to appear to be denigrating the achievements of the graduating students, many who have overcome substantial odds to obtain a diploma.

Over the past week, Joel Klein, Chancellor of the New York City Public Schools, has been making the rounds at the graduation ceremonies of some of the small high schools in NYC. Regular readers of this blog know that eduwonkette has been sharply critical of some of the “turnaround” myths constructed about these small schools, pointing out that they enrolled students who were better off academically than the students in the large high schools they replaced. At my urging, she held off on posting about the Chancellor’s e-mail to teachers about the graduation ceremonies at Bronx Lab School, one of the small schools which replaced the larger Evander Childs high school, about which she has posted repeatedly.

Jenny Medina files a story in today’s New York Times on the graduation at the Urban Assembly School for Law and Justice in Brooklyn. Much of the piece describes the extraordinary time and effort put in by the staff in order to achieve a graduation rate of 93% among the senior class. The principal, who is leaving for another position, describes herself as “exhausted,” and expressed concern that her staff could not maintain the intensity required to do their jobs well.

”You are taking a bunch of hyper, type A perfectionist people and giving them a herculean task,” she said. “People have to work much too hard to do what we are doing. People cannot work at this level all their lives and nobody is prepared to do something at a level of mediocrity.”

Ms. Medina writes that the Chancellor “seemed unconcerned that so many of the teachers at small schools were working such long hours.”

”'When people are part of the world of changing things for children, they don’t view it as work,' he said, pointing to members of his own staff who log 14-hour days.”

An uncharitable critic (that would be me) might note that one of the reasons that the Chancellor’s staff must work 14-hour days is to clean up after his many missteps and mistakes. Such a critic might also point out that the average salary of the members of the Chancellor’s staff is $113,000, whereas the average salary among the teachers at the Urban Assembly school for FY 07 was $49,000.

But let’s take the Chancellor at his word. If you’re changing the world for kids, why would only 14 hours a day be enough? Why not 19 hours a day? Don’t the Chancellor and his staff really care about changing things for children?

We need to disrupt this ridiculous myth that expects superhuman effort from educators in order to achieve success for kids. Almost all of the teachers I know work very hard, and struggle to maintain a balance between their professional responsibilities to the children they teach and building and maintaining a life outside of their work. We don’t need cartoon-like superhero educators; we need a system that supports teachers to work hard and honestly at their craft, without the risk of burnout after a couple of years.

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With the release of Scott McClellan's tell-all, everyone's been asking whether the press did its due diligence on the Iraq war. Closer to home, last week's Newsweek article provides similar occasion for us to reflect on the press coverage of small schools over the last six years.

Let me first throw in my prejudices about small schools - I like them. I followed the first wave of small schools that opened in the 1990s, and was thrilled when the Gates Foundation put up millions of dollars for the second wave. And I am willing to believe that students will be more attached to school in smaller schools.

All that said, what should we make of the endless parade of glowing stories about how much better small schools are doing than their predecessors? If any of these reporters had perused the basic stats, they would have uncovered that these schools are not serving the same population. (Needless to say, in my excitement about the Gates Foundation's grant back in 2003, I did not anticipate that small schools would have the effect of clearing out the old students, replacing them with higher achieving ones, and pushing the leftover students into increasingly crowded large schools.)

Over the course of the year, I've made tables comparing the new and old populations at three different NYC high schools that have been converted into small schools: Evander Childs High School in the Bronx, Bushwick High School in Brooklyn, and now Morris High School in the Bronx, the subject of the Newsweek article. As stunning as the differences between the old large and new small school populations is the fact that few reporters covering small schools (save Sam Freedman, who sadly wrote his last column this morning) have bothered to ask if these populations were different, and if so, why.

Why has the press missed the boat? I'm not sure. Here are some ideas:

* Math is Hard: Reporters are trained to write and report, not to analyze data. It's unsurprising that they've avoided the city's statistical treasure troves. But that answer is unsatisfying to me - these are all bright people.

* Positive Story Starvation: Jay Mathews offers a different answer in reflecting on reporting about KIPP, "I understand why we education reporters try to make KIPP sound like more than it is. We are starved for good news about low-income schools. KIPP is an encouraging story, so we are tempted to gush rather than report. We don't ask all the questions we should." Maybe this explains some of the puff pieces, but still falls short of a full explanation.

* All City Kids are the Same: Perhaps the problem runs deeper than training and optimism. Too many people assume that because the kids in the old school were black and brown and poor, and those in the new school are as well, they must be the same.

* Everyone Loves Individualization: skoolboy weighs in with this thought: "The small school model is so appealing because it taps into a variety of modern narratives. Small schools are personal, provide more customized (i.e., middle-class) educations, and therefore can compensate for the breakdown of families and other social institutions in central cities. In this view, whoever is served by these schools is better off than they were before, and those who were in the schools before just get ignored."

* Power and Money Talk: Small schools are backed by big foundations. Money buys, and helps to influence, evaluations conducted by firms that are contract dependent. Money also buys PR - and a lot of money buys the best PR money can buy.

Any thoughts?

The table below shows the characteristics of the entering 9th graders at Morris High School before small schools started opening there, and the characteristics of 9th graders at the new small schools: the School for Excellence, the High School for Violin and Dance, Bronx Leadership Academy, Bronx International High School and the Morris Academy for Collaborative Studies. Particularly notable are the lower concentrations of full-time special education students, students qualifying for free lunch, students who were below grade level in reading and math, and English Language Learners (with the exception of Bronx International, which is a school specifically for ELL students). If you click over to the links above, you'll see this was also the case with Evander Childs and Bushwick High School.

Characteristics of Entering 9th Graders, Morris High School and New Small Schools

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Mike Klonsky is back with the second half of his guest post. His first post can be found here.

Public school reform could not help but be affected by power and influence of the Ownership Society Anschluss that went full-tilt at all public space, including public schooling, eight years ago.

Deb Meier, reflecting on her early notions of small schools, posted this on her blog:

I thought small schools was one reform no one could do harm with… I saw them as representing new ideas and new relationships between the constituents to schooling. I thought of Ted Sizer's little Parker School in Fort Devons, Mass, and a half dozen other little schools I immediately loved. I forgot about the little independent bookstores in my neighborhood that have been replaced by the Barnes and Nobles of the world.

But when the small-schools movement that she helped launch in the ‘70s met up with the Ownership Society and its top-down strategy for urban school reform, it became clear to many of us that we had to take a fresh look our own change strategies. As Jessica Siegel wrote in the Village Voice: “…what for Meier was an innovation has become, for Klein and Bloomberg, a bulldozer.”

In the last chapter, we offer some strategic and tactical ideas about public school reform and how we can work to both save and transform public education. They include an analysis of the role of teacher unions, and building opposition to NCLB’s testing mania and privatized school management. A key piece in all of this is community organization and fighting to keep public schools public.

And a new study funded by the Annenberg Institute seems to back us up on that. It finds:

-Organizing is helping to expand the capacity of urban public schools to provide a successful earning environment.

-Organizing is contributing to higher student educational outcomes.

-Organizing is helping to expand equity and school capacity in historically underserved communities through targeted district- and state-level policy and resource interventions.

So, in the words of the old labor agitator, Mother Jones: “Don’t mourn. Organize.”

Thanks again to Eduwonkette for letting me guest blog and I hope you will read our book.

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We're well into Small Schools 2.0, which makes it an opportune time to reflect on the similarities and differences between the two small school reform waves. Joining us to discuss this issue is Mike Klonsky, author of a new book on small school reform and the blog Small Talk.

Thanks to Eduwonkette for inviting me in as a guest blogger to talk about our new book, Small Schools: Public School Reform Meets the Ownership Society. She hasn’t told me yet how much $$$ I have to kick back her way. Just put it on my tab, 'Kette.

Susan Klonsky and I write from the perspective of long-time educators and school activists who were heavily influenced by democratic schooling (and de-schooling) movements in the ‘60s, including the Freedom Schools and Citizenship Schools that were central to the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia in the ‘60s.

The early small schools efforts in New York, Philly, and Chicago were filled with much of the same transformational spirit and sense of purpose. Mainly created by rebel teachers and supported by community-based organizations, the early small schools, beginning with Deb Meier’s Central Park East in 1974, had the potential to be much more than replicable models of corporate-type restructuring (in the Starbucks sense). For us, they were primarily ways to engage whole school communities in the education of children.

Many of the new small schools were democratically run and focused on making kids more visible and on building a professional community of teachers. Even the early charter schools that followed, pioneered by progressive thinkers like Ted Kolderie, Ted Sizer, Joe Nathan, Albert Shanker and Ray Budde, looked nothing like today’s chains of Edison and KIPP schools. Words like autonomy and choice didn’t mean what they mean now under the Bloomberg/Klein reforms in N.Y. or Daley/Duncan Renaissance 2010 in Chicago. Autonomy meant teachers would have more power over their teaching/learning environments and be freed up from stupid rules, while choice meant expanding choices and options within local schools for students with diverse interests and ways of learning.

Our book tells the story about what happened when that movement ran head-long into the "Ownership Society" (to use George Bush’s own campaign slogan) with its penchant for eroding public space in favor on shock-and-awe privatization, standardization, and school closings. The early small schools visionaries couldn’t have imagined their efforts to create a critical and innovative force within public education being taken over by corporate-type school operators and program vendors. They wouldn’t have dreamed of chains of small schools, bankrolled by the world’s richest men—schools actively excluding ELL kids or students with disabilities for the first two to three years.

How could this have happened? Is there a way out of the quagmire? More on this to follow.

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Test your skills with this word problem:

A comprehensive high school in New York City has an enrollment of 900 9th graders. The NYC Department of Education decides to close the school and replace it with 5 new small schools, each of which will enroll 108 9th graders. How many 9th graders are left over?

Extra credit, Part I: Imagine that the NYC Dept of Ed closes 2 comprehensive schools in one year with enrollments identical to those above. Now how many 9th graders are left over?

Extra credit, Part II: Where will the displaced kids go to school?

If you've got your noggin on, you know that the answer is 360 kids, and that if we close two schools, we now have 720 displaced kids who need a place to go to 9th grade. This is, in part, the subject of Sam Freedman's NYT column yesterday. His column provides a hint on Extra Credit, Part II:

More broadly, the problem is the outcome of Department of Education decisions to open scores of small, niched schools in the area, close large ones perceived as academic failures and leave the excess students to land in traditional schools like Richmond Hill that, while relatively successful academically, were often overcrowded to begin with. In this version of education reform, it is never hard to tell the winners from the losers.

I know what you're thinking - doesn't anyone have a calculator? The NYC Department of Ed seems to have forgotten that matter is neither created nor destroyed in a chemical reaction - and the kids don't disappear, either.

Update: For more on high school reorganization hiccups, see the Gotham Gazette's Wonkster and this article in the Village Voice.

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