- With the hue and cry surrounding big policy issues like testing, school choice, accountability, and labor, too little bandwidth remains for district- and building-level ideas that can spark energy in new directions. In the pages of Education Next, Fordham Senior Visiting Fellow Peter Meyer tells the tangled story of one such innovation: New York City’s small high schools. An early fixation of philanthreformers like Walter Annenberg and Bill Gates, the broader movement away from colossal public schools and toward more manageable, specialized academies was for years widely viewed as a failed effort; students could be sorted into the redesigned schools, but curriculum and instruction always seemed to lag. New York’s effort, the brainchild of Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Chancellor Joel Klein, changed all that by providing institutional backing behind the initiative. Rather than scattering isolated seeds throughout an otherwise unaltered system, the city’s leaders directly engaged educators to develop a broad and resilient base of some two hundred schools. Maybe it shouldn’t be surprising that breaking up crowded behemoths into fun-sized institutions of learning increases graduation rates for low-income kids, but this tactic is an avenue to academic success that hasn’t been given the recognition it’s due. Thankfully, that’ll change later this year, when an expanded version of Meyer’s essay appears in Fordham’s new volume on upward mobility.
- The recent education triumphs of the commonwealth of Kentucky also deserve more attention. Yes, everyone knows that it’s the home of bourbon, bluegrass, raffish basketball coaches, and the Derby, but they might be surprised to hear that it’s also blossoming on the learning front. A recent Wall Street Journal story chronicled the state’s early and successful implementation of the Common Core. While legislatures across the country hemmed and hawed about whether even to adopt the standards, the Bluegrass State went to work. 2015 marks the fourth year of testing under the new regime, and the results to date are more than promising. The statewide graduation rate now beats the national average, up twelve points from the pre-Common Core era; the percentage of graduates deemed college- and career-ready has also seen a spike; and the list of schools in need of improvement has shrunk. Not bad at all.
- Not all early Common Core adopters have equally good news to report, however. Dedicated readers may remember Long Island high school principal Carol Burris, who authored a book in support of the standards only to abruptly flip-flop on them the very next year. Now she’s taking her unshakeable convictions and bounteous pension into retirement. We have no doubt that she’ll make good use of the extra hours in the day—the long, twilight struggle against high standards is an all-consuming one, and she’ll no doubt be busy penning editorials for the Answer Sheet blog and getting her clock cleaned in public debates. The Gadfly hereby wishes her many sunset years during which to remind her children, and her children’s children, what it was like in America when they were free to be failed by their schools.
