In New York's Smaller Schools, 'Good Year and a Tough Year'

The memoirs, written by ninth graders, were as flawed as they were vivid: riddled with ungrammatical sentences, spelling errors and absurd punctuation. As they read their work to an audience of parents, several of the young authors stumbled over their own words.
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Ruby Washington/The New York Times
"When we push them, they know it's out of love," said Johane Ligondé, an English teacher at the F.D.N.Y. High School for Fire and Life Safety in Brooklyn.
Learning CurveSumming UpThis is the final article in a series exploring the process and effect of opening dozens of new small schools this year in New York City. Earlier articles are online at nytimes.com/education.

The Little School That Could, With a Patron's Help (June 25, 2005)
Getting Smaller to Improve the Big Picture (May 3, 2005)
In Push for Small Schools, Other Schools Suffer (January 14, 2005)
Early Gains and Losses at City's Themed Schools (January 4, 2005)
Small School's Script Tries to Transform Studies (October 4, 2004)

Forum: Contemporary Education
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Michael Dwyer for The New York Times
Marc S. Sternberg, principal of Bronx Lab, in sunglasses at rear, with, from left, Crystle Barfield, Maureen Rosario, Francisco Gonzalez Jr., Rebecca Pena, Kimberly Cruz, D'Larys Rivera and Richard Cabrera touring Boston University in June. "I feel like we are doing a whole lot of things right," Mr. Sternberg said.
But for Kelly Connerton, the sole English teacher at Peace and Diversity Academy, the end-of-year essays - including stories about a dying uncle's last days, a family's flight from war-torn Macedonia, a boy's remorse over joining a gang - were a triumph. "I have kids who were not writing a thing," she said. "They are now writing two-page essays."
Peace and Diversity, in the Bronx, is one of 53 small high schools that opened last September as part of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's effort to remake public education in New York. And in a way, the students' essays are a metaphor for the inaugural year of the small schools: far from perfect, but with notable achievement and a lot of hard work still ahead.
New York City's experience is being watched by districts nationwide that are following its lead in creating small schools as an antidote to alarming high school dropout rates.
The hope is that schools with fewer than 500 students will create a more intimate learning environment, improving attendance and achievement by making it easier to identify students' needs. Themes like peace and diversity are used to make school more engaging, even as the curriculums focus on basic requirements, not vocational training or electives.
More than a month after the school year ended, there are few hard statistics on the new small schools. Attendance figures have yet to be audited, promotion rates yet to be finalized, results of Regents exams yet to be published by the state.
But anecdotal evidence suggests better numbers than at the large, failing schools that small schools are replacing - admittedly not a high bar to clear, since the four-year graduation rate at those schools was 35 percent.
In dozens of interviews, principals, parents, students, teachers and city education officials were unanimous on a crucial point: The 5,000 or so ninth graders in the small schools were better off than they would have been in big schools.
"In the beginning I wasn't too happy because they were so unorganized," said Marlene McLeod, whose son, Justin, attends Peace and Diversity. But she said she had quickly learned that the principal, Andrew M. L. Turay, was running a different type of public school, and she decided to become active in the PTA for the first time in years.
"I feel so good because he knows me by name; he knows my child," she said. "You just get the feeling everybody cares. It got me involved." At Justin's old school, Middle School 142, she said: "I didn't even bother. You couldn't even get through to the school; the phone just rang."
Yet across the city, the small schools labored against innumerable obstacles. Chief among them were location and facilities problems, staff turnover, and students' extremely low academic skills, which hit some schools particularly hard. Nearly 70 percent of the students started the year performing below grade level, often far below, in math and reading.
The small schools - with themes like the law, performing arts, technology, and architecture - also strained to carve out identities in the face of large numbers of ambivalent students. More than half of pupils in the small schools had applied elsewhere and were rejected, or had applied nowhere and were simply assigned to a small school.
In interviews and in visits to small schools, it was clear that the schools had built closer relationships between teachers and students than traditional large schools. But it was also clear that teachers in these schools were being called on to perform roles for which they were not trained: counselor, social worker, foster parent. Many spoke of feeling professionally and emotionally exhausted.
"It was a good year and a tough year," said Johane Ligondé, an English teacher at the F.D.N.Y. High School for Fire and Life Safety, a new small school in Brooklyn. "It was a very tough year for both teachers and students. But because we love them, I think that makes a big difference. When we push them, they know it's out of love."