March 2006
BY STATE EDUCATION COMMISSIONER
RICHARD P. MILLS
he Meeting in Brief: The EMSC-VESID committee will continue
its discussion of proposed strategies
for high schools, students with disabilities and English
language learners. The committee will also discuss an evaluation of the
existing policy on Career and Technical Education. This report is intended to
support that effort. The Committee
on Policy Integration and Innovation will discuss performance targets that are
part of the previously adopted Commissioner’s performance agreement. The full Board will discuss a draft
implementation plan for the early education policy the Board adopted in
February.
Is There Hope for High School?
Yes, there is hope. New York has many excellent high
schools. Right actions might turn hope to certainty for the low performers. But
deciding which are the right actions is hard. As we saw in January, and in
greater detail in February, high school graduation rates are unacceptably low:
only 64 percent of students who entered the 9th grade in 2001 had
graduated four years later. Details are even more disturbing: 30 percent of ELL, 37 percent of students with
disabilities, 40 percent of
Hispanic, and 43 percent of black students graduated after four years. But there are reasons to think this can
improve and with knowledge of both the data and the experiences of other
players, Regents can accelerate improvement. Reasons for hope come from several
quarters. Here they are in brief, followed by details intended to support
discussions in the EMSC-VESID Committee and later, the full Board.
Reasons for
Hope
Some high schools
with the lowest graduation rates are taking effective action. We can pay more
attention to what they are doing and find ways to back their efforts. The
Regents have the policy framework in place: standards, assessments,
accountability, P–16 governance, and other elements. Additional policy actions
that only the Board could take could accelerate improvement. Nationally, many
research-based efforts seek to improve high schools, and they are backed by
strong foundation support. We could listen more to what they have to say. The Summit and its aftermath reveal a
willingness among USNY institutions to join forces to improve high school, and
the Board can make fuller use of the advantage of P-16 governance. And finally, the global economic
challenges will soon compel changes in education, whether we are ready or
not. The Regents can continue to guide this transformation by encouraging wider
awareness among educators.
Lincoln High
School
Lincoln High
School in Yonkers is one of the 127 schools with the lowest graduation rates,
and one to watch. People like to
point to one factor – principal, teachers, curriculum, or students – as the
power source for improvement, but Lincoln is firing on all cylinders, with
support from the superintendent and board. Let’s start with the students.
Students in a finance class and in
the kitchen of a culinary arts class, a future teachers group, and just kids I
talked to in the hall described where they are going next and what it will
take. They described what the
employers expect in terms of academic skills and what the business world calls
the soft skills. Where does that
come from? Seemingly from most teachers, with a strong assist from the Yonkers
business community. Many students had completed work internships, and could
report what they learned and why that experience was important. Their schoolwork was demanding – student
reports in video format, student-led group preparation to actually teach a
lesson to the 4th grade, the culinary class presentation of desserts
to professional restaurant standards – but it was also inherently interesting. A
long bulletin board in the hall displays college acceptance letters. I asked a
classroom of seniors if they were headed to college and all roared back,
”Yes!” Whether they plan to attend
college or not, all students write a college admission essay when they take the
English Regents exam. After that,
college is one step closer.
Students can’t enter the
9th grade at Lincoln casually.
Within the first week, they are expected to make contact with five
adults. It’s an application of the adage that every student must be known by at
least one caring adult. Most 9th graders have the same lunch period
so they get to know one another and large groups of them share the same
teachers, so that the faculty can talk usefully about kids in difficulty. The 9th graders are also
under the care of a warm but no-nonsense administrator who knows them all by
name, and gets to the heart of the matter fast when one of them gets in trouble.
The principal carries a personal data assistant in his pocket with every
student’s schedule. I discovered that when I asked if it’s possible to have an
academically weak senior year. He demonstrated that it is
not.
The teachers were also
impressive. In private, they
expressed the same high expectations that I heard from students, the
superintendent, and the principal. Out of one another’s hearing, teachers
pointed to the principal as the source of the school’s strength, and he pointed
to them. To get a better idea about what entering students would know, several
teachers trained with their middle school colleagues in scoring the
8th grade tests, and two actually shared in the scoring. Teachers are asked to do administrative
duty only when it’s essential. One essential task is calling home when students
are absent. I talked to one teacher who did that gladly. Who could be better
than a teacher at delivering this message: to succeed, you must show up.
And the principal reinforces this message when he sees students who should be in
school but aren’t.
Principal Edwin Quezada is in his
second year. His intensity, vision,
and commitment to student success bind everything together. Superintendent Bernard Pierorazio
prepared and selected him and Mr. Quezada is fulfilling the obligation all
leaders bear by developing another future leader. The principal knows his students and
where they are. He knows the data
cold. Everything about Lincoln – the way Mr. Quezada spends his time during
weeks and weekends, the building’s appearance, the way the faculty uses student
time, and the way people talk with one another -- reinforces the values of
civility, achievement and excellence at Lincoln.
Kati Haycock of The Education Trust
offered me advice about visiting low performing schools. Principals in such
schools, she warned, give the visitor a vague mission statement but say nothing
about the master schedule, and often don’t really understand it. Look for that schedule, she said,
because it often reveals weak academics.
At Lincoln, however, the master schedule is on the wall behind the
principal’s desk – printed by hand.
Why not let the computer do it?
“Computer technicians don’t know schools,” said Mr. Quezada. He and the superintendent showed how
Lincoln’s schedule had English classes in parallel so that the adults can
quickly transfer a student in difficulty to an intensive, small-group English
class. Students sometimes claim
success when they score 55 on a Regents exam, but Mr. Quezada demands 65, and
until students achieve that, they are in intensive
classes.
There are many possible lessons
here. As in other schools I’ve visited among the 127, school leaders, teachers,
and students in Lincoln High School appear to be using effective practice. That doesn’t mean they are doing
everything right – they are far from graduating everyone who enters ninth grade
-- but we should be cautious about telling them where and how to change. Do our policy and practice offer all the
right incentives? Where should
we change? One irritant that
we offer to Lincoln is different definitions of graduation rates, depending on
whether it’s the “accountability cohort” or something else. What they want from
us is an aggressive, clear standard that they must
attain.
Another lesson is the complexity of
the tradecraft it takes to operate a high school. For example, where exactly
does one learn how to create and use the master schedule to ensure both academic
rigor for all and flexibility to move a kid in academic trouble into a place to
get help today? Do our
leadership education regulations guarantee that new leaders will learn that and
countless other skills that the best field leaders use every day? The Regents
could ensure that they do.
How do we ensure that the best
leaders move from safer berths (not that any principal's job is easy) to the
lowest performing high schools?
What if new superintendents were to qualify for a special designation on
their certificates after successful service as principal in such a school? Perhaps the Regents could change the
incentives. And how do we ensure that policy actions at state and district
levels align with high school operations to achieve results? We could start this
with the help of teams from the 127 low graduation rate high
schools.
Learning More about High
School
Improving high
schools is a national issue as it was in the late 1950’s and again in the early
1980’s, and this is good because so many people are thinking hard about the
problem. The National Governor’s
Association convened a National High School Summit early last year, where Bill
Gates declared the American high school obsolete, and where data about the new
economy and low high school and college completion rates were never out of view.
Achieve, Inc., which was a partner in the Summit, recently compared states on
the rigor of high school curriculum requirements in relation to work and college
expectations, and has convened state teams that are trying to improve state
policy. This is consistent with the ideas of The American Diploma Project. The
Education Trust has documented practice in effective high schools, including
some in New York, and also keeps the pressure on states by comparing their
results. The Gates Foundation and The Broad Foundation have invested many
millions in promising leaders and school practices. The Edison Project invested
heavily to reinvent the elements of high school. The US Department of Education
convened several high school meetings around the nation over the last two years
so that state teams could share information, and New York participated. New national data systems compare
similar schools and identify those that outperform their peers. High Schools That Work is a
long-standing effort, that the Regents drew upon in creating the Career and
Technical Education option. The National Center on Education and the Economy
continues to examine practice among our global competitors. And these are only a few of the
opportunities to learn more about high school. The Regents could make it a priority to
bring more knowledge about the work of these groups to their policy table and
also to practitioners.
Using the Summit to Improve High
School
The USNY Summit
presented the case for better high schools as one of three critical changes in
policy and practice to raise achievement and close the gap. The Regents have
already adopted policy in the other two – early education and higher education –
and have moved quickly to implementation. Alarming data presented at the Summit
focused USNY leaders and business partners on what we could do together. There
has been follow up. Linda Sanford in her leadership position at both IBM and The
Business Council has led many regional discussions with business and education
leaders about the need for innovation, and education has been the dominant topic
in all of them. The District
Superintendents convened more than a dozen post-Summit regional meetings to
promote Summit themes. Regent
Phillips and I attended the most recent one in Rockland County, which concluded
with commitments to action by Rockland education, cultural institution, business
and elected leaders. NYSUT’s New
York Teacher has repeatedly carried articles that reinforce the Summit’s
urgent message about the gap, and advisory groups representing NYSCOSS, the
School Boards, and other professional organizations continue to talk about these
ideas. Chancellor Ryan and Provost Salins of SUNY have engaged BOCES and New
York City education leaders to help eliminate teacher shortages. The Summit Call defined a communications
strategy, which we are pursuing now through speeches and editorial board
meetings that take off from the graduation rate data. The Regents can keep the
Summit Call to Action in the public eye at every Board
meeting.
It’s hard to know
if New York educators are sufficiently aware of the implications of
globalization to actually change practice.
The Chinese educators and students I met are. In New York, most
professional meetings touch on global challenges, and the daily press is full of
accounts of wrenching transformation in our economy. But aside from what I saw
this month in Lincoln High School, I don’t know yet whether we talk about it in
school. Continuous attention to globalism is essential to high school reform.
Why? The global perspective, coupled with economic necessity, may be the only
thing capable of sustaining the urgency needed to close the
gap.
The essential
points bear repeating at every opportunity. Young people, no matter where they
live in New York, will not be entering a local labor market but a global
one. It’s difficult to imagine an
enterprise that is immune from the global race to innovate, expand options, cut
costs, obliterate old industries, and create and satisfy new markets. The skill content of most jobs is
rising, or at least changing, continually.
Hundreds of millions of people around the globe have entered the same
economy that we live in within the last half-decade, and more are coming. All
societies that can afford it seek rapid educational gains as a matter of
national economic policy. Some of
them don’t have to reform existing systems because they had so little to start
with and can build anew and quickly by adapting the best of what the world has.
Some of them are so large that they can get it wrong most of the time and still
field a bigger team of educated people than we can. And some are so small and
vulnerable that they have no choice but to benchmark the best and innovate at
breakneck speed – or die economically. Many of these competitors could falter
because of other weaknesses, but we can’t count on that.
The global
implications for high school will affect what we teach, who teaches whom, how
schools are organized, and how long we can afford to preserve structures that
don’t produce results. The transformations in high schools could be as painful
and perplexing as in every other system, or we could manage the
transformation. The responsible
course is to try to direct our own path with our colleagues through these
changing conditions. One thing is certain. High schools won’t escape
change.
What Other Actions Can the Regents
Take to Improve High Schools?
The EMSC-VESID Committee will
discuss the potential strategies that were before them in January and
February. They are: set targets for
high school graduation and measure results, make local school boards accountable
for graduation rates, check teacher qualifications and order changes so that
teachers are certified in the subjects they teach, strengthen teaching through
professional development focused on proven curricula, update school safety plans
and order immediate change where needed, engage the public and students, and
support improvement among the highest performers. The forgoing pages have
outlined other actions the Regents could take. Here are some summary
suggestions.
Keep
expectations clear and the pressure on. Since a 64 percent graduation rate isn’t
nearly good enough, the Board can set a higher target, insist that schools meet
it, and prepare for a still higher target shortly.
Ensure
alignment. The problem
of misaligned strategies is common. Here’s an example. We have partnership
agreements with the Big Four school districts. They devised plans to improve
specific results, and then together local and State Education Department leaders
defined performance measures, local actions, and state actions. Everyone is
working hard. But the actions don’t align so that everyone’s effort contributes
to the goals. We found the problem and are fixing it.
Do the right
work at the right level. We’ve
heard that before. State leaders can’t direct high school operations, tune all
the factors that produce a productive school, or sustain the human relationships
at the ground level. Local leaders can’t define teacher or leader certification
requirements, guarantee quality college programs, design statewide testing and
accountability systems, or establish graduation requirements. The desire on both
sides of the partnership to do the other guy’s work is hard to resist. But we
must. Our work and their work is hard enough, it’s essential to the whole, and
no one else can do it right.
Listen to
experts. Some experts are
scholars while others are practitioners. We need both kinds, but there are
plenty of both, so we don’t have to make this up. Regents can invite a steady stream of
experts to advise us on high schools. Who would refuse?
Demand a
solution, but don’t impose one.
The most powerful thing the Regents do is to change the rules in favor of
the students: everyone must graduate with a real diploma, ready for work,
citizenship and further education. The Regents do this through the standards,
the assessments, accountability, the graduation requirements, and especially,
the data. For example, the Board
can draw attention to poor transition rates from middle school to high school
and low college completion rates.
The Board can reveal how many hours of instruction students really
have. Such facts presented
persuasively compel change.
Consider
where, specifically, the Regents might build on their policy framework. That framework is excellent. The
questions that follow were suggested in conversations with New York educators
and leaders at The Education Trust and Achieve, Inc. and they may suggest useful
Regents actions, but we can only pursue a few of them:
Assemble the best
minds. Regents have from time to time mentioned
creating an external panel on high school.
Up to now it has seemed useful to narrow the focus to the lowest
performers. After a year, we have learned a lot from those school teams. We know
that we don’t want to disrupt high schools that are already successful. But
problems are not confined to the 127 schools, and many high performers could
help in the work at hand. We should
also bring in the national and international resources and ideas on high school
reform.
A successful panel would begin with
a carefully drafted charge for the right changes to meet our current situation.
The expected results: recommendations for Regents action. The work would be in two parts. We would
first hear from a panel of national experts with diverse views. Then a
longer-term panel of expert practitioners and scholars from New York would build
upon what we have heard from the national and international scene. The combined
effort would be led with the same intensity, intelligence, and integrity that
guided the mathematics standards committee. It would be even more difficult and
risky than that venture. But now may be the time.
Commissioner’s
Performance Agreement and Measures
In February the
Regents, through the work of the Committee on Policy Integration and Innovation,
approved the Commissioner’s performance agreement. This month that committee
will discuss baseline data for the measures in the agreement, and also potential
targets. Rebecca Kennard has led the Deputies and me in assembling the data. If
those committee discussions reach a conclusion this month, the committee will
recommend that the Board adopt the targets, which will become part of
semi-annual performance reviews beginning in July 2006.
Early
Childhood Policy Implementation Plan
The Board will discuss a
plan to implement the new Regents policy on early childhood. The Board made the essential
implementation decisions early on.
For example, the Board decided to seek legislative action to lower the
minimum age of attendance to five. They decided to engage a broad community of
providers, parents, advocates, and scholars in creating options that led to the
policy. They are now partners in
this work. The Board decided to build the policy on the research. This provides
a discipline that will focus implementation on only the actions that are most
likely to produce results. The Board decided to embed pre-kindergarten and full
day kindergarten in the state aid proposal. The detailed implementation plan
follows from these sound, early moves, but there is a lot of hard work remaining
to draft legislation, support local startup, and prepare teachers.
Career
and Technical Education
This
report was postponed from February. Career and Technical Education (CTE)
is part of the high school reform and one of the specific strategies being
pursued in the Destination Diploma work. The Regents will discuss a second report
on the independent evaluation of CTE policy implementation from MAGI Educational
Services. Also included is a NYC
profile. Here are some
findings:
Recommendations are summarized in
the Regents item. The most significant recommendations
include:
Leadership
Regulations
At this month’s
Higher Education and Professional Practice Committee meeting, staff will report
on how they are addressing the issues that were raised by the Regents during the
February discussion on the draft regulations for school leaders including
reciprocity for experienced school leaders from other states who wish to work in
New York, and concerns about the certification examination
requirement.
CPA Regulations
The Regents
Higher Education and Professional Practice Committee will discuss proposed
amendments to the Regents Rules concerning the profession of public
accountancy. In June of 2005 the
Committee discussed draft amendments and directed staff to make revisions while
continuing discussions with the field.
This month the Committee members will review the revised draft, discuss
policy implications of the proposed amendments designed to improve public
protection aligned with the Federal Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 and decide next
steps in the regulatory process.
Dr. Kenneth
Jackson is the Jacques Barzun Professor of American History at Columbia
University, and a distinguished historian.
On the evening of the first day of the March Regents meeting, the Board
of Regents will host an evening with Kenneth Jackson and members of the
Executive and Legislature.
Professor Jackson will speak about the unrecognized but indispensable
role New York played in shaping American democracy and character. In his words,
“events in New York, more than any other place, have dominated and defined the
larger American experience.”
Nowhere can this
story be better told than at the New York State cultural institutions, and at
the State Museum in particular. This event will underscore the importance of
renewing the State Museum and conserving the treasures held by the Archives,
Library, and Museum. This renewal
and conserving work are priorities for the Regents. The Executive budget
includes $40 million to renew the Museum and build an urgently needed facility
for collections and related research. The Assembly budget bill includes $20
million to support Museum renewal and the Senate bill includes $20 million for
the collections and research facility.
A monthly publication of the State Education Department
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