Gail Robinson won a journalism award for this piece.
http://www.bkbureau.org/who-killed-john-dewey-high#.UT9y-xnFzoh
Pearl Gabel/City Limits
Documentary >> View Slideshow >> Photos by Pearl Gabel
Who Killed John Dewey High?
In the '60s it was an ambitious experiment in progressive education.
Today John Dewey High graduates its final class after being closed as a
failing high school. What led the Gravesend facility from success to
shut-down?
On April 26, 1963, a dozen New York City principals went into
seclusion in Hershey, Pennsylvania. They emerged 10 days later with a
plan for what was to be one of the boldest experiments undertaken by the
city's public schools, a blueprint for a high school that would foster
independent study, replace the letter grade system, extend the school
day and encourage students to take charge of their own educations.
On June 26, that experiment—tattered and eroded over more than 40
years—will come to an end as John Dewey High School in Gravesend
graduates its final class. Earlier this month, all Dewey teachers
received letters telling them their jobs no longer exist. Barring action
by an arbitrator, when school reopens in September, the building on
Avenue X will house a new school dubbed Shorefront High School of Arts
and Sciences at John Dewey Campus.
Few in Dewey's early days would have expected this denouement.
For years, Dewey's program attracted press coverage and visitors from
across the country. "It is looked upon by school officials as a model
for the future and by others as an island of hope in a sea of trouble,"
Paul Montgomery wrote in
The Times in 1971. As recently as 2000, the U.S. Department of Education selected Dewey as a showcase high school, and in 2008
US News and World Report awarded Dewey a silver medal in its ranking of American high schools.
"Dewey should go down as the greatest experiment on the secondary level in the 20th century," says Bob DeSena, founder of the
Council for Unity, a group started at Dewey that works to reduce violence in schools and communities.
So what happened? Who killed John Dewey High School?
Shut and open
John Dewey High School, of course, is not alone. Since 2002, the
Bloomberg administration has shut or begun phasing out about 140
schools, many of them, like Dewey, large high schools. The
administration says that as of September, it will have opened 589 new
schools. About 200 are high schools, most of them small.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg and officials at the Department of
Education (DOE) staunchly defend the policy. The mayor crowed about the
openings of new schools at a
press conference
in April, calling the results "really amazing," and adding, "It is an
achievement that nobody, nobody, would have thought possible.”
There's little doubt that many of the shuttered schools deserved
to close, and that some of the new schools have excelled. But the school
closings have proved wrenching for many New Yorkers, sparking
passionate protests from students, parents and teachers. Critics have
charged that the DOE is so eager to close schools that it has ignored
other, less-draconian solutions. "They are using schools closings
totally inappropriately. School closings should be a last resort," says
Pedro Noguera, a professor of education at NYU.
In some cases, critics say, the DOE has--under the banner of
improving a facility—actually abetted a school's decline. "DOE has a
list of schools they think are not going to make it … and they insure
that their predictions come true," says Norm Fruchter, senior scholar at
the Annenberg Institute for School Reform. The department may place
more troubled students, students with special needs and English language
learners at the shaky school—moves that can further bring down its
graduation rate and test results.
The closings have become an annual ritual. This February, the
city approved closing all or part of 23 schools. In addition, when the
administration and the United Federation of Teachers failed to reach
agreement on a plan to evaluate teachers, Bloomberg announced he would
designate 33 struggling schools as "turnaround" schools. Under a federal
program, this meant DOE would shut the schools and replace up to half
their staffs.
Initially, many saw Bloomberg's move as a bluff designed to win
concessions from the teachers union and sharply criticized it. "There's a
fight going on here that has nothing to do with what's going on at the
school," state Board of Regents chancellor Merryl Tisch, usually a
Bloomberg ally, said last winter of the mayor's closure plans. “It’s a
labor dispute between labor and management.”
Bloomberg eventually spared several "turnaround" schools. But on
April 26, the Panel for Education Policy, a body controlled by the
mayor, voted to close 24 schools on the original list of 33 and reopen
them in new guises and with many new teachers in September. One of those
schools was Dewey.
Education reform, '60s style
In the 1960s city officials saw Dewey not as a problem but as a
solution. "There has been an increasing dissatisfaction with the goals,
methods and results of high school education,'" the group of principals
wrote after the Hershey meeting. "How can our high schools do an even
better job? What changes must be made in philosophy, organization,
curriculum and teaching methods if they are to meet the imperatives of
our times."
The school that opened with 1,000 students in September 1969
tried to answer those questions. Named for the American philosopher
whose theories form the basis for much of progressive education, it
featured a longer day, with students spending 25 percent of their time
in independent study or other activities. Resource centers, equipped
with books and other materials, were set up as places where students
could work on their own or get extra help. The school also had science
labs, music practice rooms and art studios as well as a large outside
campus that students could use freely. Dewey became home to theatrical
productions, various publications and a marine biology program whose
students took samples from Jamaica Bay and then pressed the federal
government for stricter regulation of discharges into the wetland's
waters.
The school offered a plethora of novel courses--on such subjects
as the crime and punishment, the emerging city, the Holocaust and the
American Dream --and independent study allowed students an even broader
selection. Underscoring it all was a belief, as a 1982 documentary on
Dewey put it, that youngsters should "be responsible for their education
and approach it with zest and concern."
Dewey upended the standard building blocks of high school.
Instead of semesters it offered courses in seven-week cycles. Students
could graduate after two to six years. Letter grades did not exist.
Dewey, an early teacher recalled in the documentary, "freed me to let go
of every shibboleth … I had about public education"
Because the school's approach might not suit all teenagers,
students had to apply. The school selected students through a process
aimed at guaranteeing those accepted would have a range of abilities and
reflect the diversity of Brooklyn.
Today many look back fondly on those early days. Naomi Berger graduated in 1975 and some 30 years later helped form the
John Dewey Alumni Association
to keep the Dewey model alive. "The opportunities were endless," she
recalled. "By virtue of getting a rich experience you were prepared for
college or the workforce or beyond when you went to Dewey."
Decline and fall
Dewey's descent was slow.
"There wasn't any one thing that brought Dewey down. There was a multiplicity of things," DeSena says.
Even in the early days, he added, there was "a dark side … There
were a lot of kids bringing conflict from the neighborhood into the
school." And of course there were budget cuts as the fiscal crisis hit
in the 1970s.
By most accounts, though, the major changes came during the
1990s, a decade not kind to the city's schools as Mayor Rudolph Giuliani
clashed with chancellors, lashed out at teachers and cut spending.
Marianne Stephan, who is active in the Dewey alumni association,
attended Dewey at that time. "When I went to Dewey, I met people who
brought me out into the type of person I became," says Stephan, who went
on to get a master's degree in public administration. "I would not have
done that without people at Dewey who care."
When she started high school, many key elements of the Dewey
program remained. But she says, "The late '90s were when things started
to change for the worse and they continued to go downhill." According to
Stephan, "new teachers came in, new administrators came in that didn’t
necessarily understand the ideas of the old administration, the old
teachers, even the students … Things just weren't the same and it was
very depressing being there."
Indeed, the leadership of the school changed several times, with
at least eight principals (one acting) in 35 years. Michael Drillinger,
who graduated in 1974, now heads the Dewey alumni association. If an
innovative school like Dewey is to succeed, he believes, it must have
"the energy of a single person or small group of people." For the first
couple of decades, he says, Dewey had that "very strong leadership from
the top."
Meanwhile, one strong leader, former assistant principal Saul
Bruckner, had replicated much of Dewey at Edward R. Murrow High School
in Midwood, an arguably safer and, for many prospective students more
convenient neighborhood. Many students who once would have gone to Dewey
opted for Murrow instead, says Clara Hemphill, founder and senior
editor of
Inside Schools
The final decade
Bloomberg came to office promising to be the education mayor. But
the renewed interest in city schools did nothing to help Dewey and many
other large high schools. The dismantling of the Dewey experiment
continued.
As Bloomberg instituted his choice system for high
schools—requiring most students in the city to apply to high school
rather than being able to attend a neighborhood school— 100 or 200
students a year who were not matched with any of their chosen schools"
were dumped into Dewey." according to a former teacher, now retired.
Multiply that by four grades, and that left Dewey with "800 kids who
could not handle the concept," she says.
The culinary and dance
programs ceased to exist, reportedly victims of budget cuts.
Publications stopped publishing. "It became like a Jenga game," says
Berger. "Their answer to every problem is to remove another piece until
the tower falls down."
Some thought the principal at the time, Barry Fried, was not up
to the challenge. "He did not have a strong, solid commitment to the
Dewey model," Drillinger says, and was "not the person to wage battles
with the Board of Ed or the Department of Ed."
By most accounts, problems increased at Dewey as the city started
closing large high schools in Brooklyn in 2003. The demise of nearby
Lafayette High School, sent more students with little interest in Dewey
to Dewey. Overcrowding and discipline problems followed, Samuel Freedman
reported in
The Times. "Since Lafayette began to close down,
we've had an influx of students who are unprepared. It's destroying our
entire school," Chung Chan, a social studies teacher, told Freedman.
The longtime teacher agrees. There were problems in the
cafeteria, she says, and it became difficult to determine who was
cutting class and who was on independent study. "It was very hard. It
was very sad," she says.
In 2007-2008, the first year of the Lafayette phase out, Dewey
had 78 more ninth graders—more than two classes worth --than it had the
previous September. Also in 2007, the number of suspensions at Dewey
rose sharply—from 153 to 250 Attendance dipped from 87 percent to 84
percent. Both numbers, though, improved the following year.
The graduation rate declined from 71 percent in 2003 to 63 percent in 2007-08, according to a
2009 report by the Center for New York City Affairs.
It found that after Lafayette closed, Dewey attracted fewer
high-achieving students and more "poorly prepared for high school,"
including recent immigrants with little formal education.
In 2008, a student brought a gun to Dewey, sparking a lockdown at
the school. Later the school installed scanners. Students had to spend
the school day inside the building, leaving the surrounding campus
largely unused.
Eventually fewer students opted to attend Dewey. Between 2003-04 and 2010, enrollment dropped by 19 percent.
Dewey's woes mirrored those that have afflicted many other large
schools during the Bloomberg era—in the Bronx where a succession of
closings led to the shutting of Lehman High School this year and along
the Brooklyn/Queens shore, where Rockaway, South Shore, Beach Channel
High School and now Sheepshead Bay and John Adams have all tumbled.
"The prevailing philosophy under 10 years of Bloomberg is small
schools are the answer to high school problems," says Hemphill, an
author of the center's report. "What DOE hasn't come up with is a
strategy for big schools, which still serve many thousands of New York
City teens.”
As big schools close and small ones open, many of the remaining
large schools find themselves unable to attract the top applicants a
school needs to succeed. And so, Hemphill says, "the stronger schools
get stronger, the weaker schools get weaker."
Meanwhile, Dewey, like all schools, grappled with cuts in
funding. "When you cut somebody's budget and then dump a lot of kids
there that no one wants to deal with, they're setting you up to fail,"
DeSena says. (Spending for school rose sharply during the first years of
the Bloomberg administration. Since the recession, spending continued
to increase to cover pension costs and debt service, but classroom
programs were cut across the city. At Dewey, per pupil spending has
inched up slightly, but an analyst with the Independent Budget Office,
said that rise has been more than offset by an increase in teacher
salaries.)
By all accounts, Dewey began to show signs of stress. The state targeted it as a persistently low achieving school.
In 2010, the United Federation of Teacher found that 135 classes
at Dewey had more students than the number allowed by the teacher
contract—the third highest of any school on the city.
Students lagged behind their counterparts in similar schools in
accumulating credits. In 2008-09, 32 percent of students responding to a
DOE survey said they did not feel safe in Dewey's halls and bathrooms.
(This number declined to 23 percent in 2010-11.)
Visitors to the campus saw little evidence of the original Dewey
program. "For an ostensibly progressive institution, Dewey has many
classrooms that are traditional,"
Inside Schools reported in
2007. "Most rooms were near-barren of student-made work or art, and
hallways, lined by disused lockers, had bulletin boards filled largely
by generic or pre-fab graphics."
"There was a lot of room for improvement," says Noguera, who met
with faculty and alumni. "The data showed it, and the teachers were
aware of it."
Alumni, faculty and others tried to turn things around. City
Councilmember Domenic Recchia, who graduated from Dewey in 1977, tried
repeatedly—and without success—to get DOE to replace the principal. In
November 2010, Friends of Dewey, including Berger and DeSena, issued a
plan calling for curriculum changes, revitalization of the Resource
Centers, restoration of the dance program and the development of new
programs in a number of areas.
There was, though, only so much the group could do, says Noguera. "No one was providing leadership," he says.
The state education department identified Dewey as a
persistently-low achieving school and, in 2011, put it on a list of
schools the state believed should be replaced. In May 2011, the city
announced it would seek a management change for Dewey and 21 other
schools and a federal grant to help fund the process. In September, that
money was approved. But then, in January 2012, Bloomberg announced his
plan to shut the 33 struggling schools. Two months later, DOE did what
many Dewey advocates had sought for years. It removed Fried, replacing
him with Kathleen Elvin.
Elvin's work at Dewey has garnered considerable praise, but many
wonder why it took the department so long to act. For years, the
department "fiddled as Rome burned," says Tom Bennett, a Brooklyn
representative for the UFT, "Why wouldn't you have taken the obvious
first step to replace the principal?" Bennett continued. "I resist
conspiracy theories, [but] it does appear that they did not want the
school to improve."
(The department in its written response to
questions about Dewey did not answer questions regarding Fried. It also
did not respond to similar questions from Recchia and others at an April
hearing. An attempt to reach Fried was not successful.)
With Dewey's days apparently numbered, student, staff and other
in the community took the steps that have become hallmarks of school
closing season in New York. They staged protests and spoke out at
hearings, arguing that whatever shortcomings Dewey had, DOE should fix
the school rather than shut it.
The school still has fans. Deion Harrington, who is graduating
from Dewey this year, says, "It's breathtaking being at Dewey." Dewey
let him explore his interests. Teachers provided extra help and if that
wasn't enough, he says, they called in another faculty member: "No
matter where you were sent, it was like family."
Christopher Reyes, then a 10th grader, told of similar
experiences when he spoke at the April hearing on Dewey's future. "I
walked into this school and became interested in a subject which I
actually hated before, and that was history, and now I love history, I
can't get enough of it. I walked into my math class and I actually liked
it, because in ninth grade I had a teacher who would spend his entire
lunch break with me just talking about math, history and math … because
he just cared that much."
Dewey's supporters say the efforts to fix the school had already
begun to bear fruit. The four-year graduation increased from 51.2
percent for the class of 2009 to 66.0 percent for the class of 2011. The
percentage of Dewey graduates deemed "college" ready—23.3 in
2011—exceeded the city average of 20.7 percent, although that number
represented a decline from 2010.
Responding to arguments from Dewey supporters at the hearing,
deputy chancellor Marc Sternberg said Dewey's graduation rate still
lagged when the school was compared to schools with similar student
populations. Sternberg also noted the sharp declines in enrollment at
Dewey "suggest a decline in parent and student satisfaction with the
services rendered here."
The new Dewey
Shorefront High School will open as a single large high school
with eight so-called small learning communities—clusters of 400 or so
students with 25 teachers. Five will be based on current programs at
Dewey. The school will have three new communities: visual and media
arts, theater arts and dance and robotic and space science.
Counselors will be assigned to each learning community. The new
school, DOE has said, will build upon "elements of the existing school
that support rigorous learning and help students attain higher levels of
confidence and achievement."
The resource centers seem all but certain to fade into history, although Vincent Brevetti of the
Institute for Student Achievement,
Dewey's educational partnership organization, says the small learning
communities may provide the kind of support for students that the
resource centers once did.
The scanners, though, will remain in place for the time being.
And, unlike in the past when people had to apply to Dewey, the new
school will take “over-the-counter” students, the often challenging
teenagers who show up midyear, many having had trouble in their previous
schools.
The biggest question-marks concern who will attend Shorefront and
who will teach there. While the department did not provide figures on
applications to Dewey, many ninth graders do not apply to schools with
uncertain futures. Brevetti says he hopes any shortfall in students will
be temporary. "If we do well by the school, it will be a very
attractive option," he says.
The school, he says, should be able to meet the needs of even
low-performing students. "If you engage a student you can bring out the
best in them," he says. "It's the responsibility of the school to spark
that kind of engagement if the student doesn't come in with it."
All teachers at Dewey have lost their jobs. Those wishing to
remain must apply and face interviews. By all accounts, this has been
stressful and upsetting for almost all faculty. Senior teachers in
particular worry the process will hurt them. "Principals have a vested
interest in hiring the least experienced teachers because they're the
least expensive," Bennett says. (The UFT filed suit to stop the
personnel changes, and an arbitrator is expected to rule soon.)
Teachers not finding work at Shorefront would enter the Absent
Teacher Reserve pool. Many would probably eventually find jobs at other
schools.
Despite the upheaval, DeSena, for one, sees some hope in the
plan. "There are very positive things in it that will be attractive to
kids," he says. "They've tried to diversify it, and I think it might
work."
Drillnger also expressed optimism. "What they're planning to
offer in the fall is, in fact, better than the program as it exists
today and as it has existed for the last five years," he says.
There are, of course, no guarantees. In the past few years, DOE
has shut down some small schools that once opened to much fanfare. Some
buildings, such as John Jay in Park Slope and Erasmus in Flatbush, have
gone through many permutations.
The department, though, remains strongly committed to its program of closings and openings. Officials cite a
report by MDRC,
which concluded, "It is possible, in a relatively short span of time,
to replace a large number of underperforming public high schools in a
poor urban community and, in the process, achieve significant gains in
students’ academic achievement and attainment."
A
policy brief
released by MRDC this year seems to back this up. It found that all
groups of students—black, Hispanic, low performing, male, female, low
income—in one of the small schools was more likely to graduate from high
school than similar students not attending one of the small schools.
Critics, though, charge that while many small schools have had
good results, their student bodies do not reflect the complexity of the
city's student population. A
study
by the Annenberg Institute concluded that, when compared to the schools
they replaced, the new small schools were likely to have more students
who were proficient in reading and math and less likely to have over-age
or special education students and English language learners.
And earlier this year, the Coalition for Education Justice found
that the new small schools at many campuses had fewer special education
students in self-contained classes than the big schools that formerly
occupied the same buildings. (Students in these self-contained classes
are far less likely to graduate than other students.) While 10 percent
of those attending South Shore High School were in self-contained
classes, for example, only 1 percent of the schools now on the site are.
DOE denies the small schools have cherry-picked their students.
"Our new small schools on the whole are serving more black, Hispanic,
and students with disabilities than the schools they replaced, and than
the citywide average. We feel very strongly about this because people
often claim otherwise, and it’s absolutely not true," a spokesman wrote
in an email.
As each side cites numbers to bolster its case, the puzzle
remains whether a high school with many very challenging high school
students—people who enter over-age, those not speaking English, those
emerging from the criminal justice system—can meet DOE's standards for
success and survival.
If more than 40 percent of students entering a high school have
low test scores, Fruchter says, "you substantially reduce the graduation
rates of the total school. … You have to control your school
composition so you don't concentrate kids with low skills"
Whatever happens at Dewey, parts of this story seem certain to be
repeated next school year. Bloomberg has dismissed a rumor that he
would close 75 schools during his last year in office, but he
told reporters
he certainly would shut some. How many? ”Pick a number," he says. "It's
less than the total number of schools that are in this city and greater
than zero."
