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Two years into New Haven’s school reform effort, there are signs of improvement. But as WNPR’s Neena Satija reports, it’s not yet clear if the effort is really working.
New Haven began its school reform campaign by placing its schools into three different tiers. Last year, it then designated some of the lowest-performing, or Tier Three schools, as “turnaround” schools, implementing significant staff and other changes. Since then, none of the schools have managed to move up a tier – in fact, one high school has actually gone from tier two to tier three. But school reform czar Garth Harries says New Haven’s turnaround schools still saw promising improvements.
HARRIES: “By no means can we declare victory at any of our turnaround schools yet. We do however see good positive signs of change in really all of them.”
According to data presented at a recent Board of Education meeting, many turnaround schools showed at least a small increase in the percentage of students on track to graduate. Some showed significant improvements in attitudes about school climate and culture, which are measured by surveys. But New Haven Federation of Teachers President Dave Cicarella isn’t convinced any of that is due to the turnaround effort.
CICARELLA: “Ideally you’d have five years of data, that you can look at and tell, here’s our trend. But we really don’t have any solid data which says the schools have performed well or not well.”
Cicarella hopes the district will wait before giving more schools the turnaround label. It’s too soon, he says, to apply the turnaround model to other low-performing schools. Harries said the district hasn’t made a decision on that yet, but will do so in the next few weeks.
For WNPR, I’m Neena Satija.