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June 22, 2010

City’s small high schools lift graduation rates, report concludes

by Maura Walz, at 10:11 pm

The city’s small, non-selective high schools significantly boost disadvantaged students’ chances of graduating, a new report concludes.

The report (available in full below) is the latest in a series of studies from New York-based research firm MDRC and funded by the Gates Foundation, which put $150 million into the growth of small schools in the city. Replacing large, struggling high schools with small ones has been one of the centerpieces of Schools Chancellor Joel Klein’s reform efforts.

For the group of students researchers followed, the small schools had a nearly 69 percent graduation rate, compared to a roughly 62 percent rate for students in the study’s control group. Researchers reported that the positive impact of enrolling in a small school began during students’ freshman year and was sustained over the next three years. And, the study found, the benefits applied to a wide variety of students, including low-income students of color.

The study looked at the academic records of a subset of the small schools launched under Klein — about a hundred “small schools of choice.” The schools were chosen because more students applied to them than the school had room for, and thus admissions were determined by random lottery. Researchers could thus compare students who applied and enrolled in the small schools to those who applied but were assigned elsewhere.

Researchers defined the “small schools of choice,” or SSCs, as the 123 small schools opened between 2002 and 2008 that do not select students based on their academic performance. Of those, 105 met the random lottery criterion. (The city opened an additional 93 small schools between 2002 and 2008, but those were either academically selective, transfer schools for the most struggling students, or combined middle and high schools, which the study did not examine.)

Students who weren’t admitted to the small schools tended instead to enroll in schools that had more students and had been open for longer, the report found. Even so, 12 percent of the students in the control group attended large schools broken down into “small learning communities” that mimic the small school environment. And a quarter of the students in the control group attended schools that were launched under Klein. Because of those variations, the report notes:

First, this report does not provide a straightforward comparison of small schools to large schools or new schools to old ones, but rather a comparison of SSCs to a range of contemporaneous alternatives. Second, the comparison is drawn at a point when the system was undergoing a wholesale transformation. Neither the SSC “treatment” nor the counterfactual experience had yet reached a “steady state.”

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  • Mr. Who

    I work in one of Klein’s new small high schools. The higher graduation rates are a scam. Principals use “credit recovery” to get the graduate rate that Klein is pressuring them to get. NYC is one hell of a depressing school system to work in.

    It’s sad and frustrating to go to my school’s graduation and see so many kids who did even show up for class and who don’t have the knowledge and skills to make it in this world–graduating. Good job Klein! We did it!

  • Invictus

    and off the graduates will fly high and will go to illustrious colleges/universities thinking that they are “prepared” for the real world.  The only “preparation” that was given is how they accumulated credits without having worked for it.  

    Their once dreams of high paying jobs will disappear when the mirage of reality sets in.  In behalf of many of these “fuzzy” achievement math and “fuzzy” rosy life expecting children, Thank you Mr. Bloomy and the Astute Klein.  

    PS:  and these people claim that the budget is scary and yet spend these invisible $$$$$$ in glossy presentation filled with fluff and color.  

  • http://www.SpecialEducationMuckraker.com Dee Alpert

    This report comes to highly questionable conclusions,.

    1. SAT scores are not given. Recent reports indicate that 75% of CUNY students now require remediation. Since the vast majority of CUNY students come from NYCDOE schools, it would appear that NYCDOE high school diplomas are being granted to students who, in fact, should not have received them.

    2. NYS Comptroller audits over the past 20 years have shown that Regents and RCT exams – graded by staff of the schools which students attend – suffer from significantly and inappropriately inflated grading. Unfortunately, this means that credit accumulation, passage of Regents exams and graduation from high schools in NYS do not necessarily reflect actual student accomplishment. SAT scores cannot be manipulated or inflated by NYCDOE high schools, whether large or small and thus represent one legitimate source of information regarding what students can actually do. The NYCDOE’s SAT scores have not improved over the past few years. Thus it is legitimate to question whether NYCDOE students, including those in these new small high schools, have learned enough, and can do enough, to warrant graduation or whether something else is going on. The NYCDOE’s NAEP scores for high school students have also not improved meaningfully. “Credit recovery” schemes, or scams, are reportedly rife throughout the NYCDOE system, and according to a NYC Comptroller audit issued within the past year, records showing which course grades were earned via regular class attendance, exam passage and, where required, Regents exam passage, do not exist for the students studied in this report. Thus even credit accumulation numbers and statistics appear to be based on a very questionable foundation.

    3. The student discharge data given on p. 117 is at significant variance from the discharge data provided by the NYCDOE earlier this year. The variance is so great that it could account for the entire difference claimed as a positive effect of the new small high schools in this study. Inasmuch as NYCDOE discharge data is unaudited and unverified, this in and of itself warrants taking the study’s conclusions with a large grain of salt.

    4. Reading this study, one would never guess that the NYCDOE concededly (and illegally) allowed ELLs and students with disabilities to be entirely excluded from the new small high schools for their first two years. This would tend to indicate that there is some very serious problem(s) with the data utilized.

    5. The study also does not take into account the NYCDOE’s unfortunate pattern of steering low performing middle school students into both transfer schools and alternate/GED programs. The latter is often illegal given the age of these kids unless NYSED grants a waiver to allow a student under 17 into one of these GED or GED-vocational programs. However, no information has been made available regarding the no. of students in these programs/schools at all, much less their ages and NYSED does not publicize the no. of waivers it grants in this area to the NYCDOE.

    All in all, the data the study omits and the unaudited/unverified status of most NYCDOE student-related data makes its conclusions extremely iffy … at best.

    If and when the NYCDOE starts to routinely release SAT scores for all high schools including the new small ones, we can begin to rely on course accumulation and graduation numbers with some confidence insofar as they may merit use for any purposes whatsoever. Since the NYCDOE has this data and could (and should) have made it available to the authors, we can only assume that the numbers would not be useful in what is obviously a most serious exercise in positive spin.

  • http://nyceducator.com NYC Educator

    Great analysis by Dee Alpert. The blatant, self-serving manipulation of data is the typical Tweed MO and really ought to be part of the story. Did the report mention that the Gates foundation has since abandoned the small school movement as a failure, or did the folks who produced this highly selective self-congratulatory report forget that as well?

  • Pogue

    Small schools are a sham.  Credit recovery is rampant and the work required to get a credit is minimal.  90% attendance rates are a sham, too.  Show us statistics of a school day’s period by period attendance.  Sheesh, even Bill Gates bailed out on this failed experiment.

  • Michael Fiorillo

    Dee Alpert and NYC Educator,

    On the contrary, these small schools have been extremely successful: as intended, they have helped fragment the system, and ruptured the connection between neighborhoods and their schools (something the DOE is now busy doing with middle and elementary schools), they have (with the UFT leadership’s assent) cast adrift hundreds of experienced teachers, creating a sense of insecurity and fear within the profession.

    Please recall that Joel Klein was hired for his background in breaking up “monopolies” (not that he did much of a job breaking up Microsoft in the Clinton administration). Part of the Big Lie of ed deformers is that public schools, rather than being community resources, are “government monopolies.” Klein was explicitly hired to destroy it, and on their terms has done an admirable job. Let the PR department handle that education stuff; the really important people from Harvard and McKinsey are focused on governance and power.

    These people have only failed if you think their real job has been to oversee the education of the children of NYC. But that was never the intention. Their real job is to soften up, weaken and ultimately break the system down , creating opportunities for politically and ideologically-connected entrepreneurs to dig their hands into the multi-billion dollar cookie jar, and to make sure that the social engineering aspects of education are in the hands of reliable people.

  • A former NYC teacher

    Well said, Michael. I wish more people would be aware of what is really going on in our society. We are just pawns in this much larger agenda.

  • Pingback: HechingerEd Blog | Small schools mean big progress, says MDRC report

  • http://www.davidcbloomfield.com David C. Bloomfield

    The conclusions in the MDRC study are incorrect, misrepresenting the research data. If you look at Table 3.7 of the report and text on pp. 53-55, there are clearly stated qualifications to the “finding” of a 6.8% increase in graduation rates. See p. 55: “small size of the sample . . . limits the precision of its findings” and “the limited duration of follow-up . . . minimizes its conclusions.”

    So the study’s editors lifted the inconclusive finding (based on the first, most insulated cohort) and trumpeted it up front in the Overview, Executive Summary and press release as TRUTH, which was then carried over by most in the media, partially as a result of Gates embargoing the material so no one outside of its recommended circle of hand-picked commentators could read it prior to release.

  • Mitch

    I work in a Brooklyn school with over 3000 students. Our graduation rate last year was 68%, and we did it without Bill Gates or his money. Also, is anyone going to follow up with the college enrollment of these students, their remediation needs when they get there, and their graduation rate after 4 years in college?

  • Rebecca Unterman

    Contrary to Mr. Bloomfield’s assertions, my coauthors and I, who also wrote the executive summary and overview of the report, stand fully behind the statistically significant positive finding of a 6.8 percentage point increase in graduation rates — which comes from an analysis of data for one cohort of more than 5,000 student observations and is entirely consistent with findings on progress toward graduation in earlier grades for all four of the cohorts examined by the study (comprising a sample of more than 29,000 student observations). We encourage everyone to read and judge the report in its entirety; it is available on MDRC’s website: http://www.mdrc.org.

  • http://Gotham Queenie

    The truth is that more students may be graduating from these small schools because of credit recovery. I know that in my school ( a large high school) this credit recovery consists of 17 and a half hours of class time to complete some work supplied by the teacher they had during the semester who failed them. There will be a teacher monitoring their work and they will decide if they pass or not. I suspect that if they show up, they will pass. So the truth is, the administration allows us to graduate functional illiterates. But why should they care, the graduation rate will be fabulous! As for the smaller schools, they only take the creme de la creme and maybe a few lower functioning students, maybe some ESL students, so naturally their rates are high. It’s a joke!

  • Pogue

    Large high schools that were closed were not allowed to give credit recovery to the minimal extent it’s given now.  When you allow students to make up a whole semester, and even a year of school, to make up credits in several measly hours of seat time…Congratulations!  You get, “How New York City’s Small Schools are Boosting Student Achievement and Graduation rates.” Yippee!

  • I noticed that…

    At the small high school where I teach, there were 7 seniors that couldn’t graduate because they’re missing a P.E. credit. So how did we help these seniors get that credit and raise the graduation rate, bt giving them a last-minute independent study packet and having an untenured teacher be intimadated into signing off on the packet. It’s education the American way!

    Next thing you know, they’re graduates, the school’s graduation rate is solid, and the mayor’s leadership is praised by his good, dear friend, Murdock!

    Hail to the Mayor while graduates fail down the road!

  • Invictus

    I noticed that….I say, “Hail the great reformers as they have prepared the road to LIFELONG LEARNING SCHOLARS, aka:  low wage and bare minimum wage workers for an ever ambitious and unscrupulous business elite.”  In this matter, the dynamic duo has done an outstanding job.

  • http://ccsr.uchicago.edu/content/index.php Emily Krone

    Readers might also be interested in similar research by my colleagues at the Consortium on Chicago School Research at the University of Chicago. Our recent report on the Gates-funded Chicago High School Redesign Initiative (CHSRI) found that small high schools in Chicago also posted higher-than-expected graduation rates, particularly among students with the lowest probability of graduating. However, CHSRI’s success at graduating the most vulnerable students can be considered only a partial success. Graduation rates at CHSRI schools remained at less than 60 percent, and the initiative did not succeed at raising test scores. These findings were consistent with our previous CHSRI reports, which found that while students felt more supported in these new, more intimate schools, teaching did not substantially change—providing further evidence of the critical importance and steep challenge of improving instruction at the high school level (and, by extension, the challenge of raising test scores and improving college readiness). You can access the Consortium report at http://ccsr.uchicago.edu/content/publications.php?pub_id=141.

  • Mitch

    I don’t believe we have to wait for the DOE to publish SAT scores. Over the past few years, the DOE has mandated that the PSAT be given to all Sophmores and Juniors in public high schools. Public high schools are required to give the PSAT on a regular school day, Wednesdays usually, thereby ensuring the most possible student participation. This is a rich data base to tap. Lots of participation over a long period of time. As taxpayers, if we paid for the exams, why don’t we have a right to the results of those exams? It’s interesting that the DOE has not published those results, nor do they tout the “progress” students have made on this exam.

  • gloria erdman

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