Rod Serling couldn’t have imagined this …
Unfortunately high schools are filled with kids who don’t attend classes regularly, don’t do their homework and end up failing most of their classes. In many schools you have to come to school a half hour early just to get through scanning and get to class on time. During the first few weeks scores of oversize classes result in the equalization, the shuttling of kids from class to class. No wonder that fragile kids simply give up and seek out the streets.
We could have created smaller classes, advisory classes and a range of student friendly interventions: the “answer,” however, is a Twilight School.
Transfer low achieving kids into a Twilight School (formerly known as PM School) that starts in the late afternoon. The student/parent signs a “last chance” contract and is assigned to classes taught by teachers, usually as per session. Instead of teaching five classes a day, how about six or seven. Hey … you gotta pay the mortgage!
Is it any surprise that Twilight Schools have low attendance and low passing rates? A supervisor was chastised when he reported low achievement,” You should have selected smarter kids.”
How do you communicate with a non-English speaker: it’s easy, you speak louder and slower.
* * *
Manhattan Comprehensive Day and Night High School was created by Howard Friedman, a former teacher and chapter leader at City As School High School. The school operates from morning to evening, seven days a week. Teachers teach a flex time schedule. The eight hundred students fit school into their schedule. Some are parents, other work full time jobs, sometimes at night, sometimes during the day. The school provides a wide range of social services: medical, dental and legal. Needless to say the school has wonderful achievement data.
It would be nice if there was a magic bullet. For decades superintendents and chancellors have imposed programs on schools and it is no surprise that the halls of schools are littered with failed programs.
Schools and programs that emanate from practitioners at schools have created a range of wonderful programs, many of which operate under the radar. When will our schools move from the twilight to sunlight?
7 Comments:
1 institutional memory
· Jan 25, 2006 at 5:22 pm
NO CHILD’S BEHIND LEFT
Even more Twilight Zonesque is that Manhattan Comprehensive is on a new State Education Department hit list of “Schools With Graduation Rates Below 70 Percent That Are In Improvement Status.”
Their NCLB “Improvement Status,” listed as SINI-One (School In Need of Improvement, Year One), is due to missing their Annual Yearly Progress (AYP) goal for 2003-04. They made AYP in ‘04-’05, but a SINI school stays “in status” for two years no matter how well they perform their first year in SINI status.
To add insult to injury, they’ve been named to the SED “HS Hit List” due to their 65% graduation rate. The Graduation Rate AYP goal for 2004-05 was 55%, but the NYS Board of Regents changed the rules in mid-year, so every school between 55% and 69% has now been cited by the state for “low graduation rate.” NCLB citation for low graduation rate will follow next year, so their status will ratchet up a notch to the more serious “Corrective Action” designation.
Of course, none of this will matter come 2014, when every single school and district in the city will be cited as “In Need of Improvement” by NCLB.
That’s neither misprint nor exaggeration. Under NCLB, the required Annual Yearly Progress numbers are raised every year. So, in 2014, any school or district with so much as ONE STUDENT who falls into the “bottom half” on any one of the state tests will be cited as a SINI school. As early as 2017, schools and districts with even a single “below average” student are subject to state-mandated restructuring. And, by 2020, schools and districts that fail to get every kid into the “top half” can be closed by the state. That’s right: closed!
Hopefully, before it comes to that, the American public will wake up and recognize that NCLB is a stalking horse for the elimination of public education in the US.
Otherwise, it’ll evolve from NCLB to NCBL: No Child’s Behind Left in American public schools.
Did someone say “vouchers?”
2 Chaz
· Jan 25, 2006 at 6:13 pm
Peter; Institutional memory;
Very nice. My overcrowded, large high school have had to take in students from other schools that closed down and made into smaller schools in the last few years. Therefore, our progress under NCLB criteria has stopped.
Is it Bush, Pataki, Bloomberg?? Maybe, but the real villian is DOE who on one hand requires us to meet the standards, while with the other hand dumps the rejects from the closed down schools into my school making it impossible to meet these standards.
The UFT is not blamless in this fiasco. A strong union would not allow a once good school to fall apart without a fight. Further, a strong union would be filing lawsuits to ensure an equal education for all. Finally, a strong union would be organizing a publicity campaign to embarass DOE in their selective approach in distributing students to the city schools that can result in some schools being thrown to the garbage heap.
There is plenty of blame to go around here but I expect my union to try to do the right thing for the students of my school and they haven’t.
3 NaniRolls
· Jan 25, 2006 at 7:23 pm
We have Twilight in my school and it’s been doing awesome. Don’t be quick to make generalizations. Obviously, it’s working at some schools and not working at others. (And no, I’m not teaching Twilight…I don’t need money that badly.)
4 redhog
· Jan 25, 2006 at 7:49 pm
Brilliant, Institutional Memory! You use impeccable analysis to illustrate the dark designs of the extremists who have muscled into the mainstream and made sick educational visions seem plausible and even wholesome.
5 Persam1197
· Jan 25, 2006 at 8:44 pm
I’m with you Chaz. We shouldn’t wait until years pass after a contract expires to make our voices heard. We should be showing the world what horrible public policies are being put forth as educational “reform.”
6 Peter Goodman
· Jan 25, 2006 at 11:03 pm
Nanirolls
As kids fall behind their age cohort the chances of graduating drops precipitously … if Klein said Nanirolls, I’ll give you the $$$ that we are currently spending on the Twilight Schools … would you design the same program? I’m sure you could design a far more effective program …as a classroom teacher you know what your kids need and what can you make you a more effective teacher … all you need is the $$$
7 jd2718
· Jan 26, 2006 at 7:07 am
Nice post and discussion. And IM is right to hammer NCLB – this real life Lake Woebegone stuff is ridiculous.
Maybe I am making the same point as Peter, but I get nervous when I hear that we are going to “replicate” program X or activity Y or prep course Z.
For example, let’s say one middle school raised its math scores dramatically? We are all going to copy them. Of course there can be many local, individual factors leading to that local success, and there is no way of knowing in advance how much is going to be transferable. (We notice that a chameleon protects itself very effectively from predators by changing colors. Quick, everyone else, change colors…)
We should study what has worked (and what hasn’t worked elsewhere). Especially where we are not performing up to our standards, we really should do so. But then we should plan what works for our city, for district, and our particular school.
First of all, the idea that there is one “solution” within the constraints of NYC’s intentional overcrowding and unconscienably large class sizes is ridiculous.
Second, locally developed plans, with real input from teachers, students, and the rest of the ’school community’ are more likely to have a serious local buy-in, the attudinal piece that no one ever bothers to ‘replicate.’
In Bronx high schools we’ve replicated a single model on a global basis. We now have one hundred nine high schools in this borough. 109! To what end??? Certainly the Bronx has not been ‘cured.’ (and proposals to create mini-schools under at least one major grant were rejected unless they replicated a single, narrow model.) My last point is cautionary. The UFT had a role in promoting these mini-schools (well into the process we did sound the alarm, but the ball was already rolling…). We need to be careful, as a union, not to fall into that one-size-fits-all trap, into that global replication model, again.
Jonathan