Getting back on track
Charter schools focusing on ‘re-engagement’ target students at risk of dropping out
SALBUQUERQUE ara Tafoya never pictured herself as one of New Mexico’s at-risk students. She came from a supportive, college-educated family in Albuquerque, had once earned good grades and dreamed of going to college and becoming a physical therapist.
But in her sophomore year of high school, Tafoya “attracted bad situations,” skipping classes — sometimes for weeks at a time. By the time she found out she was pregnant at age 15, she faced a hurdle that typically derails a girl’s education. Pregnancy is the leading cause for dropping out of school among adolescent girls in New Mexico. Pregnancy, along with widespread poverty and childhood trauma, helps explain the state’s skyhigh dropout rate of 29 percent.
Tafoya might have become part of that statistic if not for ACE Leadership High School Academy. The Albuquerque charter school bills itself as a “re-engagement school,” part of a national trend of schools committed to addressing the problems of unemployment and low education achievement among at-risk students.
ACE is part of the Leadership Schools Network, a group of charter schools that caters to students who have dropped out — or, like Tafoya had been, are at risk of dropping out — of traditional public schools. All four Leadership schools (ACE, Siembra, Technology and Health) in Albuquerque offer career-specific
curricula in partnership with local employers.
Academics in the traditional sense take low priority and standardized testing is deliberately de-emphasized.
“Why would we bring kids who have been failing at taking tests for 11 years, or who are behind in credits or dropped out — and bring them back to a test factory?” asks Tony Monfiletto, the education advocate who in 2013 founded the controversial program. “That makes no sense. That doesn’t make the city any better off, it doesn’t make the community any better off.”
Before starting Leadership Schools Network, Monfiletto cofounded and directed Amy Biehl High School, a respected high-performance college prep charter in downtown Albuquerque. But within a few years of his tenure, he concluded a strong focus on academic achievement and college readiness did not match the reality of many of its students.
“A lot of the students just weren’t able to do what we were asking of them, even with all the support we were giving them,” he says. “Many of [them] have super complicated lives. They work late at night, they often live on their own or with absent parents, they don’t have structures in their lives that allow them to be able to get through school.”
Monfiletto saw a connection between the state’s low graduation rate and its high unemployment among young people. That connection was confirmed by a 2016 Brookings Institution analysis: The unemployment rate for 20- to 24-year-olds in New Mexico who didn’t complete high school is nearly 50 percent. That same analysis placed Albuquerque among the 10 cities with the lowest employment rates nationally among residents aged 25-54.
“That’s just a real tragedy for the community,” Monfiletto says. “All those kids with nowhere to go and nothing to do.”
The Leadership Schools and other reengagement schools around the nation have brought thousands of young people back into the public school system, furnished them with high school diplomas and, in many cases, placed them on a trajectory towards a career or higher education.
The approach has shown positive results: 97 percent of graduates from ACE and Health Leadership High Schools were employed after graduation or went on to college, according to the program’s data tracking. (Siembra and Technology Leadership Schools haven’t yet graduated their first class.)
Tafoya, now mother to a 2-year-old boy, is one of those graduates. After taking an extra year of classes, she graduated from ACE Leadership High School in May. A talkative and energetic 19-year-old, she works as a visitor educator at Explora, the children’s museum in Albuquerque.
“Having to prove that you know how to work in the real world, getting hands-on training to help you be in the workforce was really encouraging,” Tafoya says, adding that the focus on accommodating the needs of students with children, including an option to take classes at night, proved especially attractive for someone in her position.
This year, she starts studying for a degree in physical therapy at Central New Mexico Community College — the goal she set for herself as a 15-year-old.
Program criticism
The program is not without its critics. Measured by standardized test scores, the Leadership Schools’ performance is abysmal. Only about 5 percent of students test at grade level for reading or math, among the lowest scores in the state.
“The re-engagement school model is awesome,” says Amanda Aragon, who worked as director of strategic outreach for the New Mexico Public Education Department before taking the helm of NewMexicoKidsCan, an education advocacy group. “But they have to be able to read and they have to be able to do math. And we need some evidence that they can struggle through the learning process.
“When I see schools with math or reading proficiency of less than 5 percent, I think that’s concerning, and I think employers would find that concerning.”
Public Education Department Secretarydesignate Christopher Ruszkowski has also expressed his disdain. Last year, he called for the closure of three Leadership Schools. The schools narrowly escaped that closure by leaving the state system and re-chartering under Albuquerque Public Schools.
The charter debate
The idea of relying on charter schools to make education work for at-risk students is controversial. Their proliferation has long drawn the ire of teachers’ unions and supporters of traditional public schools.
Because New Mexico’s school funding formula is based on a per-student calculation, each student who transfers to a charter school means a financial loss to the district school they left behind. It’s an especially pronounced problem in rural districts, where the loss of funding can lead to the closure of advanced classes, arts programs and extracurricular activities.
And charter schools can be unstable. In the past five years, 14 charter schools have closed across New Mexico, their licenses often revoked due to poor performance. Three have closed so far in 2018.
Advocates point to these closures as a sign of increased accountability. Underperforming public schools can’t be as easily shut down due to bad academic performance, they say.
Critics argue the closure of a school has been shown to have continuing, negative impacts on students, often including decreased academic performance and emotional stress.
Further chafing critics is the fact that charter schools, which operate without school boards or other structural constraints shared by traditional public schools, can restructure their finances to pay teachers more, often luring talent — along with more engaged students and parents — away from neighborhood public schools.
“It has been a bit of a brain drain,” says Santa Fe Public Schools Superintendent Veronica García.
Despite her qualms, Garcia is examining ways to adopt some of the Leadership Schools’ strategies for serving at-risk students.
And despite the criticism, the growth of charter schools in New Mexico is a trend that’s likely to continue. The Public Education Department is set to expand the presence of charter schools — which currently account for slightly over 10 percent of public schools in the state — with help from a $22.5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education. This year, PED began offering its own grants to help charters replicate.
“Charters have their place,” García says. “They meet a need, and I do think they spur competition. But I don’t think the intent [in creating a charter system] was to decimate the traditional schools.”
Searchlight New Mexico is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization.