Editor’s note: As someone from P.S. 1 has correctly pointed out, my original headline on this article was inappropriate. Apologies.
Last week, I wrote enthusiastically about a proposed partnership between Cole Arts and Science Academy and the Denver School of Science and Technology. The joint venture between Denver Public Schools and a high-performing charter school could, if consummated, provide an excellent option from preschool through high school for children living in the Cole and Whittier neighborhoods.
The idea also won the praise of dignitaries, who showed up in force at a recent Friday afternoon news conference to laud the idea. Mayor John Hickenlooper was there. So was Speaker of the House Terrance Carroll. Oh, and let’s not forget DPS Superintendent Tom Boasberg.
I still think this partnership is a great idea. I hope and trust it will proceed. Meanwhile, though, another school in the neighborhood has had a different experience with a similar proposal.
Almost a year ago, Manual High School Principal Rob Stein wrote to Boasberg and the school board “to request that a KIPP Charter School be located on the Manual High School campus in 2010. KIPP would be a vital addition to the educational choices for Northeast Denver’s children, and it would be an ideal partner for facility sharing at Manual.”
KIPP, the Knowledge Is Power Program, has built a strong national reputation by opening and operating high-performing charter schools serving low-income children in grades 5-8 in cities across the country. Manual, closed during the 2006-07 school year because of chronic low performance and declining enrollment, was in its second year of rebirth when Stein penned the letter.
Though the school has made major strides under his leadership, Stein has come to realize that, as KIPP co-founder Mike Feinberg once told him, trying to get 9th-graders who are several years behind in basic skills to graduate on time and ready for college is akin to “throwing a Hail Mary pass into the end zone with no time left on the clock.” A strong middle-school partner would be a huge boon to Manual, and the neighborhood.
According to Manual’s Leadership Team and School Advisory Council, DPS responded to Stein’s request with silence. Stein heard the occasional vague promise about having the discussion at the appropriate time, but nothing ever happened. The district seemed uninterested in or unwilling to engage in dialogue about the idea.
Boasberg views the situation differently. He told me during a phone call last night that shortly after receiving Stein’s letter last April, he heard from KIPP that the organization did not want to open a new middle school, for which it had won approval, until 2011, because it wanted to focus on the launch of its first Denver high school, which opened last fall.
DPS won’t begin until November the process of deciding where to place new schools opening in 2011, Boasberg said. So there was no reason to ponder the Manual-KIPP proposal before now. It was too far off in the future.
Just as the Cole-DSST proposal will come under review in the coming months, so will any proposal Manual and KIPP might put forward, Boasberg said. “I look forward in that process to talking to both Manual and KIPP about the proposal,” he said. The Cole-DSST and Manual-KIPP proposals – should the latter submit one — will be treated equally, Boasberg said.
But the Manual community is now nervous about a more recent development. On Monday, the Manual School Leadership Team and School Advisory Council sent a letter, penned by a parent, to Boasberg and school board President Nate Easley, stating that the school has learned “of the District’s intent to locate the P.S. 1 Charter High School in the Manual facility.” You can read the letter here. It asks again that the district consider KIPP as a partner for Manual, and that the P.S. 1 decision be rescinded.
That chronically struggling school, one of Denver’s first charters, is being closed by the district at the end of next school year.
This is exactly what Manual does not need – a failed school, full of low-performing students, undergoing hospice care inside Manual’s walls. Even if it is only for a year.
Boasberg said Manual’s concern about P.S. 1 is premature. He said Manual is one of several locations “potentially under consideration,” because it has plenty of space to accommodate P.S. 1. But he stressed no decision has been made. “There hasn’t even been a recommendation,” he said.
Well, that’s not exactly true. An internal memo from Kristin Waters and Kelly Leid of the Office of School Reform and Innovation to senior central administrators Happy Haynes and Antwan Wilson, dated Feb. 19, says:
“..after the exploration of several facility options, we are recommending the relocation of to excess space currently available at Manual High School.” The memo also says that “Other viable options explored would require displacement of current users along with related financial support…”
The memo recommends bringing the issue to the school board for a vote this week. But the item is not on this week’s board agenda, so the decision apparently has been pushed back.
In other words, this may be only an internal DPS recommendation, from one layer of the bureaucracy to another. But Manual parents and staff do, in fact, have cause for concern. And the talk of using Manual for P.S 1 seems to have gone farther than Boasberg told me it had.
Boasberg said he has talked to Stein about the possibility, “and I think it’s fair to say there is not a lot of enthusiasm.”
“Manual supports the mission of P.S. 1,” says the letter from the leadership team and advisory council. “However, as a school that caters to struggling students with low achievement and high dropout rates, P.S. 1 represents where Manual has been -not where it is headed.”
If Manual’s nightmare scenario became reality – an arranged marriage with P.S. 1 rather than a consensual marriage to KIPP – it would demonstrate boneheaded decision-making on DPS’ part.
When the school board made the abrupt but correct decision to close Manual, then-Superintendent Michael Bennet promised the community to reopen it as “a premier high school.” A partnership with KIPP could help make that promise a reality.
A one-year shotgun marriage with P.S. 1 might not deal a fatal blow to that vision. But it sure wouldn’t help. Even without that unwanted distraction, it will take time and careful planning to determine how — and whether — both a Cole-DSST and a Manual-KIPP might fit in the same neighborhood.
Feelings are still raw in Cole and Whittier over the closing of Manual three years ago. It wouldn’t take much for people to start complaining, with some justification, that Manual has gotten the shaft. Again.
Don’t let it happen, Mr. Boasberg.
Popularity: 4% [?]
This makes no sense why there would not be enthusiastic support from DPS for getting a KIPP middle school into the half empty Manual building. With this change, DSST collaborating with Cole and Venture down the street, this neighborhood could become the place to be if you wanted to go to college prepared with a choice of what best school meets you and your family’s needs.
re: “No P.S.1-ing on Manual”
The notion that one group of students could contaminate another group of students sickens me.
I want to be clear: I agree with much of what Mr. Gottlieb wrote yesterday about co-locating schools. Indeed, if I were the leader of Manual, I would have written the same letter that Mr. Gottlieb linked to in his post yesterday especially if DPS has not addressed Manual’s request and they were blindsided by the notion of co-locating with P.S.1. I also understand the Superintendent’s point of view on this matter – the co-location request was for the future, which can be eons in a school district, and the Superintendent is focused on the present. Furthermore, I want to highlight the fact that DPS is looking for ways to assist P.S.1 in operationalizing their decision to close P.S.1 in 2010-11 – a decision that is as near as I have ever been to water torture.
I am writing to address the issue of contamination that was alluded to in the subject line of your inbox on Tuesday.
Let’s finally talk about the students at P.S.1, who, allegedly, would contaminate another school. At P.S.1 we gather data on our students the minute they walk in the door – qualitative and quantitative data. To understand the significance of the level of growth that P.S.1 has been able to obtain, it is important to understand the student body of P.S.1. In 2008-09, over 70 percent of students were eligible for free or reduced lunch (whereas in 2004-05 this was 34 percent of students). For the visual among us, imagine a steep slope upwards.
Furthermore, in 2008-09 nearly 26 percent of students qualified for Special Education services (the highest percentage of any other charter school within Denver Public Schools). Additionally, the percentage of incoming students with indicators that place kids in an “at-risk” category according to the State of Colorado has increased in almost every area over the last three years. Consider four of these data points:
• One out of seven P.S.1 students dropped out of school before coming to P.S.1;
• One out of three P.S.1 students have a history of court involvement;
• One out of five P.S.1 students have a history of repeated school suspensions for personal drug or alcohol abuse; and
• One out of ten P.S.1 students were pushed out of or expelled from their previous school.
Finally, and most relevant to the discussion of the academic performance of P.S.1’s students, is to understand where these students are starting from, based upon their performance on Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) in their first semester at P.S.1:
1. On average 73.4 percent of new-to-P.S.1 students enter below grade level in Reading, Writing and Math.
2. Further, on average 29 percent of these new-to-P.S.1 students enter five grades below grade level in Reading, Writing and Math (based on NWEA placement guidelines).
Our students do not climb hills – they climb mountains. This is what they – and our staff – accomplish using data from our current accountability system:
1. According the Colorado Growth Model, over half of all P.S.1 students demonstrate either typical or high growth in reading, math and writing.
2. According to DPS data, in 2009 P.S.1’s high school students’ growth ranked in the 89th percentile for Catch-up growth in reading in DPS, and in the 77th percentile in both math and writing in DPS. As a reminder, Catch-up Growth, as defined by DPS, is whether or not students transition from a lower to higher performance level – including movement within levels, for instance, up from low-partially proficient to high partially proficient – from one year to the next.
3. In 2007, P.S.1 students’ average score on the ACT was 13.9; in 2009 it was 16.2. We have seen a 14 percent increase on the ACT.
4. P.S.1 students with IEPs earn diplomas at a similar or better rates compared to our enrollment of students with IEPs (23.9 percent of students enrolling in 2008, 26 percent of students graduating had IEPs).
5. The percentage of graduating seniors enrolled in post secondary course work has increased from 3 percent to 42 percent.
6. In 2009, 19 of 31 graduates (61 percent) applied to a post-secondary institution, 17 were accepted (89 percent of those who applied), and two were still waiting to hear.
I understand the characterization of “chronically underperforming” to some extent – especially as a policy analyst. However, I submit to all of you reading this that the students who land on the doorstep of P.S.1 are in the margins of those data that we analyze. These students do not contaminate the system: they are the canaries in the coal mine. They indicate where there are problems with our system. What is our collective answer to serving the students in the margins? To be more specific, how do we serve students with special needs? What are the appropriate and rigorous expectations that we should set within our accountability system? How do we ensure that those students, who are not successful at Manual, are served? What does this say about our city if we do not serve them?
And, by the way, we still have students arriving at our doorstep. Should we ask them what they think about this contamination issue?
Alan,
My dictionary defines the verb “to P.S.1″ this way:
“a school district practice of dumping so many high needs students in an under-resourced school that it can no longer do what it was designed to do; and then closing said school for ‘low performance’ instead of the schools the students came from, in order to appear ‘tough’ enough to get federal money to identify and punish more teachers for failing to get poor and high needs students ready to enter Princeton.”
see also “school reform as regulatory sadism”
If you are not using the expression “P.S.1-ing” in this sense, but rather as a way to disparage the students and teachers at P.S.1, I and a lot of other people find the term offensive.
Rex,
I made a stupid mistake with that headline, apologized and changed it on the blog almost immediately. But it had already gone out in the newsletter. My apology remains at the beginning of the post, and will stay there. Everyone makes mistakes; some are more visible than others.