STOP THE PRESSES!  This is a REALLY important study (www.mdrc.org/publications/560/overview.html) related to one of the most vexing problems in American education: what to do about dropout factories – the 2,000 large, failing high schools (about 15% of the national total) that account for more than half of our nation's dropouts. 

 

Since 2002, NYC (thanks to the courageous leadership of Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein) has shut down 20 dropout factories, "opened more than 200 new secondary schools, and introduced a centralized high school admissions process in which approximately 80,000 students a year indicate their school preferences from a wide-ranging choice of programs. At the heart of these reforms lie 123 new "small schools of choice" (SSCs) — small, academically nonselective, four-year public high schools for students in grades 9 through 12. Open to students at all levels of academic achievement and located in historically disadvantaged communities, SSCs were intended to be viable alternatives to the neighborhood high schools that were closing." 

 

Below is Jay Mathews's article about the study and here are excerpts:

The New York City study, by MDRC, one of the most respected research firms in education, looked at 123 "small schools of choice" created this way in the past eight years. Their students had better graduation rates and lower failure rates than similar students who did not attend those schools.

The small schools of choice, or SSCs, took students of all kinds (about two-thirds of them below grade level) and had about 100 in each grade. The report by Howard S. Bloom, Saskia Levy Thompson and Rebecca Unterman, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, said the schools enrolled a total of about 45,000 students. More than 80 percent were from low-income families. More than 90 percent were black or Hispanic.

Instructional teams competed for permission to open the schools in space supplied by the school district. "Structures such as reduced teacher load and common planning time (in which teachers meet together to discuss their students' progress and problems) were recommended to ensure that all students were known well and to promote strong, sustained relationships between students and teachers," the report said.

"By the end of their first year of high school, 58.5 percent of SSC enrollees are on track to graduate in four years compared with 48.5 percent of their non-SSC counterparts, for a difference of 10.0 percentage points," the study said. "These positive effects are sustained over the next two years. By the fourth year of high school, SSCs increase overall graduation rates by 6.8 percentage points, which is roughly one-third the size of the gaps in graduation rates between white students and students of color in New York City."

The report notes that the positive effects were seen in "a broad range of students, including male high school students of color, whose educational prospects have been historically difficult to improve."

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NYC success suggests better fix for urban high schools

Jay Mathews, 6/25/10

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/class-struggle/2010/06/nyc_success_suggests_better_fi.html