DON’T LOSE MODEL OF SUCCESS AT EAST HIGH
The question around East High School appears to be whether the model developed jointly by the University of Rochester, New York state and East families, faculty, staff and scholars is sustainable.
I was privileged to be part of the original design team for the East Educational Partnership Organization in 2014. We were approached by then-Board of Education President Van White because East, as it stood in 2014, was not sustainable and stood on the verge of school closure.
It had the lowest graduation rate, highest suspension rate and one of the highest dropout rates in the city. It was described to us as the lowest performing school in the lowest performing school district in the state.
By 2021, however, the cohort of students who started with East in 2015 had a graduation rate of 85%. That compares with the cohort who graduated in 2015, the year before the EPO, at a rate of 33%.
What was not sustainable is a school that produced dropouts at an unprecedented rate, a school where gangs and violence thrived, where students did not feel safe and where young people entered the world of work with few skills and even fewer prospects.
When we started at East, we had our lower school students tested by a national company only to find they were among the lowest-performing students in reading in the nation, not in New York state, in the United States. Their prospects were dim. That is the same group that achieved an 85% graduation rate in 2021.
Our goal was to introduce a model of success, where teachers and administrators were “all in, all the time” using best practice within a longer, more-focused school day. We collaborated with families, scholars, East faculty and staff and the community to create a model that could serve as an example of what could happen when the right people, with the right resources using the right practices worked together to create a culture of success, dignity and empowerment for the students we served.
What happens when high schools routinely graduate most of their students, when dropouts are the exception rather than the rule, when students leave school ready for college or the workplace? What does that do to the local economy, neighborhoods, incarceration rates or social service costs? If the current practices at East were the norm, what would be the impact be?
I submit that what is unsustainable is not East, but the alternative.
Stephen Uebbing is a retired college professor and former school superintendent who has served as project director for East’s Educational Partnership Organization.