October 17, 2007

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Critical mass (in education, not bicycling)

Filed under: Education NYC DOE by Maisie @ 12:38 pm

Critical mass is a useful phrase. Though many New Yorkers associate it with the bicycling advocates, it also perfectly describes just what’s missing in an obsessively-equitable equity approach to school improvement.

Rudy Crew, one of our more kick-a** former chancellors, uses critical mass in his new district, Miami, to get real improvement in the toughest schools he has. Read about it in this Ed Week story, and if it sounds familiar it’s because Crew duplicated in Miami the initiative he first pioneered in NYC: the Chancellor’s District.

The UFT has bemoaned the loss of the Chancellor’s District a lot (Klein abolished it when he took over) and UFT President Randi Weingarten has proposed a very similar program in the School Enterprise Zone idea, which Tweed has thoroughly ignored.

But what Crew has achieved in Miami (though it sounds like a daily two-steps-forward-one-step-back battle) shows that concentrating resources makes for real change.

Crew focuses a whole slew of reforms on the 39 schools he selected for his School Improvement Zone. A longer school day and year, extra teacher training and 20% extra pay, additional instructional coaches, and special curricula are all part of the approach.

Just as important, the schools, which are for the most part neighborhood “feeder” schools from the elementaries to the middle and the high schools, get their own distinct support structure. The Zone superintentent holds monthly group meetings with all 39 zone principals, as well as monthly “data chats” with them individually to review interim assessments and other indicators, Ed Week reports. “It’s an excellent thing. They are supportive. It’s not a ‘gotcha.’ It’s ‘What can we do to help?’” one principal tells Ed Week.

Crew’s approach contrasts with a two trends here in NYC. No doubt the two systems have the same aim–to support struggling schools–but NYC’s solutions are far more “arm’s length.”

Weighted student funding (or Fair Student Funding) is NYC’s effort to drive more funds to struggling schools. While it provides additional funding “weights” for high-needs students, it does so in per-student increments. Its real goal is equalizing funding rather than concentrating it. Thus, even with a big infusion of money from the Campaign for Fiscal Equity suit, struggling schools received relatively small increases this year–if at all.

The second trend is principal empowerment, which creates each school as an island, where principals choose programs and strategies on their own. While they have support networks in place, the networks are to there mainly to support what the principal wants to implement, not to drive a coordinated strategy of intensive interventions across schools .

Measurable performance results from the two NYC restructurings–Fair Student Funding and principal empowerment–won’t be available for some time. But in Miami, after less than three years, many of those 39 schools are posting big gains in several areas. Teachers praised it to Ed Week. Lack of funds may scale it back this year, but Crew tells the newspaper that it has made an essential point to the system:

“If you can get your arms around the situation [with one group of schools] so the rest of the system has to organize money differently, staff differently, talk to parents differently, be held to a different level of accountability, build a different monitoring system, you’re into the jugular veins of how the system functions,” he said. “You’re in the mother lode.”

That is, critical mass.

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