Bruce Karhoff

Education Improvement Plan

EDL 710   The Leadership Experience I

May 5, 2014

Section I:  Problem/Issue Identification

            Bronx Lab School is a small public high school located in the Evander Childs Educational Campus in the north Bronx.  The school serves a diverse population of 480 students; it has a faculty of 37 pedagogues, 2 administrators, and a total staff of 55.  The school was founded in 2004, graduating its first class in 2008.

            The school’s student racial/ethnic demographics have remained fairly constant over the years.  Since the school’s founding, each cohort has been composed of between 54 and 62%  Hispanic (Non-White) students and between 34 and 42% Black students.  Asian and White students together have made up 5% or less of each cohort.  In recent years, the student body has tilted male; the past three entering 9^th-grade classes have had approximately 60-40 male-female splits.  Currently, 59% of Bronx Lab students are male.  Enough students qualify for free lunch, based on family income according to federal standards, that the school is considered a Title I school.

            Like many of the small schools created in the early years of the Bloomberg administration, Bronx Lab at first attained impressive results, but later saw diminishing student achievement as the school “matured.”  The school had a four-year graduation rate of 92% for its first graduating class in 2008.  As its founding principal and teachers moved on—only one of the staff members who opened the school was still teaching there in 2014—the school saw its graduation rate steadily decline.  By 2012, the school’s four-year graduation rate, for example, had fallen to less than 60%.   In the fall of 2013, the tenth year of the school’s operation, the third principal, Sarah Marcy, took the helm of the school.  Table 1, below, gives the graduation rate at Bronx Lab School for its first six graduating cohorts.

Table 1:  Official Graduation Rates, 2008-2013, Bronx Lab School

*For this cohort, only students with IEP’s (Individual Education Plan) were eligible for NYS Local Diplomas.

            As the graduation data shows, the number of Regents diplomas earned at Bronx Lab School has reached new highs in each of the last two years, even though the graduation rates have dipped to school lows.  One could thus attribute the lower graduation rates in recent years to higher NYS graduation standards: after 2011, Local Diplomas were available to students with Individualized Education Plans (IEP’s) only.   

Over the past three or four years, the school’s leadership has analyzed other school data to determine the underlying causes of the decline in the graduation rate.  Of the non-graduates, the majority had not attained a diploma due to a lack of credits, rather than not meeting Regents exam requirements.  In effect, the higher diploma standards were having a smaller effect than a simple analysis of the graduations rates might suggest.  In none of the last three cohorts were there more than five students who had accumulated all the necessary credits for graduation but had not passed the five Regents exams required for graduation, while in every cohort there were at least ten students who had passed all required exams but still needed credits.

            A second, related, cause was the number of students who had not progressed to the 12^th grade by their fourth year in high school.  Some of these students had formally dropped out.  Others were still on the school’s active roster for four years, but had earned fewer than the 30 credits—some far fewer—needed to attain 12^th-grade status.   

            In short, school leaders determined that a lack of credit accumulation was the primary (but not only) cause in the decline in the graduation rate.  Previous administrations have implemented various initiatives to increase opportunities for credit accumulation, such as structured credit recovery programs and evening programs (Extended Learning Time programs) for juniors and seniors, that produced positive, but small, results.  The 4-year graduation rate for the 2013 cohort, 65.8%, was the first in the school’s history that was higher than the previous cohort. 

The graduation rate, however, was below the target graduation rate of 80%, set by the NYC Department of Education, although it met an intermediate goal set by the Bronx Lab School’s administration in the school’s Comprehensive Education Plan (Bronx Lab School, 2012).  In 2012, the school set a goal of an 80% four-year graduation rate by 2016, with intermediate goals of 65% for 2013, 70% for 2014, and 75% for 2015.  The new administration has committed the school to these same goals.  To continue the school’s progress in meeting these goals, the new administration has determined that the school must reinvigorate its instruction, which it sees as a key to greater student engagement, higher course pass rates, greater credit accumulation, and in the end, higher graduation rates (Dean, Hubbell, Pitler & Stone, 2012).             

To read the full EIP, please see the attached document.
 

I found the Leadership Experience assignments to be the most helpful of the tasks we performed at my school for the Lehman EDL program.   These assignments had me spend time with my principal or other school leaders to consider situations that are some of the most challenging that a school leader must face.   In most of these situations, the school leader must weigh options that counter competing interests and come up with decisions that are sufficing—one in which there is no one “best” decision, only those that are better or worse at meeting the conditions of the particular situation. 

One particular discussion that I remember was with my principal concerning teacher and staff supervision.  Principals are charged with both supporting and developing their teachers, while at the same time performing evaluative supervision.  My principal shared the challenges that individual teacher personalities played in his support and supervision of the teachers.  Some teachers are much more willing to talk about their weaknesses and consider strategies to improve themselves as educators; others are much more defensive about their practice and unwilling to consider areas of growth.  The take away for me was that a leader needs an arrange of approaches and specific strategies to work with a staff with diverse personalities and needs.  While I knew this in some general sense before this assignment, this Leadership Experience really drove home with me the importance of building relationships with all members of the school staff.

A Leadership Experience that forced me to grapple with the conflicting interests within a school was the special education assignment.  I discussed these issues with both the leader of our “Learning Support” department—a veteran teacher—as well as my principal, which offered some interesting points of comparison.   Some of the interests that need balancing include, for example, student flexible scheduling and limited course availability; teacher assignments that meet the specific conditions of all IEP’s and the learning needs of all students; and being a welcoming school to all students and matching services to recognized school strengths.  I tend to look at these issues from a practical standpoint; this assignment forced me to consider the ethical and legal dimensions more deeply as well.