Small Schools in the Big City
Promising Results Validate Reform Efforts in NYC High Schools
by
Karen Theroux
"The people are warm and the kids are respected," says South Brooklyn Community Teacher Patrick McGillicuddy. "It helps students get past having once been labeled as a failure or a dropout."
September 1, 2007
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New York, NY
In Brooklyn…
On the waterfront, directly facing the Statue of Liberty, the area known as Red Hook has been considered one of the city’s toughest corners for ages. But nonprofit organization Good Shepherd Services has long been a bright spot in the neighborhood, providing counseling and youth development, and running community-based education programs. All of which make it an ideal partner for South Brooklyn Community High School—the smallest of small schools, just for truants and dropouts. Here, 150 students ages 16 to 20 benefit from an accelerated program offering the opportunity to earn 15 credits a year, plus an extraordinary support network that extends from school to home and throughout the community.
“Good Shepherd is the engine behind this school,” says history and government teacher Patrick McGillicuddy. “In the past, the city had approached them to run a small program in the basement of John Jay High School, which they did for many years.” Building upon this success, Good Shepherd, New Visions and the Department of Education, designed an innovative school that meets the more rigorous demands for Regents diplomas3 that former dropouts must now meet. The five-year-old school now occupies several levels of Good Shepherd’s modern headquarters, where students enjoy light-filled classrooms, state-of-the-art science and computer labs and a spotless gym on the top floor.
Students who are admitted to the transfer school must be two years offtrack for graduation (from course failure or truancy) or have dropped out. They follow a program tailored to their individual needs. Guiding them through the process are advocate/counselors who greet the students at the door every morning, know the details of their lives and help them manage problems. If students don’t show up, their counselor will call to find out why. “The whole school revolves around the fact that it’s the student’s choice to be here,” McGillicuddy explains.
There are a number of signs that this school is different than what students have experienced before; one is that they’re free to call teachers by their first names. Another is the standardized biweekly progress report used to track their performance, which, according to McGillicuddy, makes it quite clear to students what their strengths and weaknesses are, and “transforms ‘Why’d you fail me?’ into ‘Why didn’t you live up to your own expectations?’’’ The school also offers teachers unusually generous latitude to vary the curriculum so that harder-to-reach students find it relevant.
McGillicuddy, who brought a strong background in nontraditional approaches to the school from his prior teaching stint in Hong Kong, was overwhelmed his first year in Brooklyn, when his history and government class “just was not working,” he recalls. Then he decided to try reenacting Supreme Court cases as a way of livening up the lessons, and it took off. “Students finally got past being too cool to care,” he says, “and once that breakthrough happened, I thought, let me turn my whole class into this.” He participated in the Washington, D.C.-based Summer Institute for Teachers run by the nonprofit organization Streetlaw, which brings educators together with justices to talk about their work. He even ended up winning the organization’s Educator Award—and met Sandra Day O’Connor at the presentation ceremony.
Most rewarding of all, McGillicuddy says is that “every year you get to see kids’ lives turn around.” South Brooklyn operates on a three-cycle schedule from September to June, so at the end of each cycle, a group of students becomes eligible to graduate, a good number of them heading off with scholarships to two and four-year colleges. “These are kids who stand up at graduation and say, ‘My whole life people said I couldn’t do this, but I can and I did.’’’ He adds, “This is a really good job.”
http://www.carnegie.org/reporter/15/reform/index.html
Source:
The Carnegie Reporter (Carnegie Corporation of New York) Vol. 4 No. 3, Fall 2007
(Reproduced with permission)
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Topic: Civic & Law-Related Education
Topic: US Supreme Court