The third way on school reform
As Richard Carranza takes the helm as the city’s new schools chancellor, he must avoid getting caught up in the false debate that, sadly, continues to dominate American public education. It’s a debate that pits district and charter school supporters against one another in a zero-sum struggle for primacy.
There are no winners in this debate, but there are millions of losers — our country’s public school students.
The debate terms are as follows: Charter school champions declare that their district school counterparts are dysfunctional, hidebound institutions strangled by bureaucratic regulations and union rules, and believe they alone can bring needed innovations into our educational system.
District proponents claim that charters have failed on their innovation promise, and that they are exclusionary entities sucking up scarce public resources better directed elsewhere.
The result is a debate that is long on recrimination and short on the creation of scalable solutions that meet the needs of America’s children. Its fatal flaw is its failure to recognize that both district and charter schools have important roles to play in a healthy educational ecosystem. There are, of course, many great examples of both.
What is needed is a third-way approach that rejects this false choice in favor of a concerted strategy to tap into the vast yet still largely unrealized capacity of district schools to serve as incubators of innovation. This strategy partners district schools with nonprofit organizations that have a track record of improving students’ educational outcomes, and uses their combined resources and expertise to foster innovative, replicable practices that work to lift up student achievement.
The good news, which Carranza will quickly discover, is that this strategy is already being successfully implemented in New York City. Thanks to the support of two successive mayoral administrations, there are now a multitude of district schools partnering with nonprofits to yield promising new practices that are translating into positive results for students.
This third way is proving that innovation can be achieved in district schools — and demonstrating that the union contract need not be a barrier to the development and adoption of successful new practices that benefit students.
I’ve seen firsthand evidence of this strategy in my role as the chair of NYC Outward Bound Schools, a nonprofit that partners with the city in operating a network comprised of district schools as well as one public charter school.
Our schools are incubators of innovation, and successful best practices are surfaced from every school and implemented throughout our network. The result: graduation rates that outpace the city’s average by 15 percentage points and a college acceptance rate of 99% while serving a predominately high-needs population.
In our schools, we take fresh approaches to longstanding problems. A prime example of this is the work we are doing around engaging parents and families in their children’s education, a proven method of improving student achievement. We replace parent-teacher conferences with student-led conferences: Students, supported by a teacher/adviser, present their work to a parent or other family member.
This has resulted in high levels of family engagement within our network, with more than 90% of families participating in conferences, a sharp contrast to the participation rate at other comparable city schools, which is typically well below 30%. We are now actively working with other schools in the city, helping them to achieve similar levels of family engagement.
None of this would be possible without the important role that the Department of Education has played in supporting innovation in its district schools. Each of our district schools, along with those partnered with other nonprofit leaders in education, are part of a broader network within the DOE, called Affinity, which the de Blasio administration established several years ago to spur innovation and bring proven practices to more schools and more students. All of these Affinity partners are achieving exciting results while engaging in groundbreaking work. For example, the graduation rate for English language learners in the Internationals Network for Public Schools is three times higher than the city’s average for such students. And work done by CUNY around early college, by New Visions in developing new data systems, by the Performance Consortium in performance-based assessments, and by Urban Assembly in career readiness are all examples of innovations that initially took root in district schools and have been spread to other schools.
We don’t have to choose between commitment to district schools and innovation. We can have both.