Leonie Haimson is a fearless advocate for students, parents, and public schools. She runs a small but mighty organization called Class Size Matters (I am one of its six board members), she led the fight for student privacy that killed inBloom (the Gates’ data mining agency), and she is a board member of the Network for Public Education. None of these are paid positions. Passion beats profits.
In this post on the New York City parent blog, she takes a close look at a new report that lauds the Bloomberg policy of closing public schools as a “reform” strategy. The report was prepared by the Research Alliance at New York University, which was launched with the full cooperation of the by the New York City Department of Education during the Bloomberg years (Joel Klein was a member of its board when it started).
Haimson takes strong exception to the report’s central finding–that closing schools is good for students–and she cites a study conducted by the New School for Social Research that reached a different conclusion. (All links are in the post.)
Furthermore, she follows the money–who paid for the study: Gates and Ford, then Carnegie. Gates, of course, put many millions into the small schools strategy, and Carnegie employs the leader of the small schools strategy.
Haimson writes:
“The Research Alliance was founded with $3 million in Gates Foundation funds and is maintained with Carnegie Corporation funding, which help pay for this report. These two foundations promoted and helped subsidize the closing of large schools and their replacement with small schools; although the Gates Foundation has now renounced the efficacy of this policy. Michele Cahill, for many years the Vice President of the Carnegie Corporation, led this effort when she worked at DOE.
“The Research Alliance has also been staffed with an abundance of former DOE employees from the Bloomberg era. In the acknowledgements, the author of this new study, Jim Kemple, effusively thanks one such individual, Saskia Levy Thompson:
[He wrote:] ‘The author is especially grateful for the innumerable discussions with Saskia Levy Thompson about the broader context of high school reform in New York City over the past decade. Saskia’s extraordinary insights were drawn from her more than 15 years of work with the City’s schools as a practitioner at the Urban Assembly, a Research Fellow at MDRC, a Deputy Chancellor at the Department of Education and Deputy Director for the Research Alliance.’
Levy Thompson was Executive Director of the Urban Assembly, which supplied many of the small schools that replaced the large schools, leading to better outcomes according to this report — though one of these schools, the Urban Assembly for Civic Engagement, is now on the Renewal list.
After she left Urban Assembly, Levy Thompson joined MDRC as a “Research Fellow,” despite the fact that her LinkedIn profile indicates no relevant academic background or research skills. At MRDC, she “helped lead a study on the effectiveness of NYC’s small high schools,” confirming the efficacy of some of the very schools that she helped start. Here is the first of the controversial MRDC studies she co-authored in 2010, funded by the Gates Foundation, that unsurprisingly found improved outcomes at the small schools. Here is my critique of the follow-up MRDC report.
“In 2010, Levy Thompson left MRDC to head the DOE Portfolio Planning office, tasked with creating more small schools and finding space for them within existing buildings, which required that the large schools contract or better yet, close.
“And where is she now? Starting Oct. 5, Saskia Levy Thompson now runs the Carnegie Corporation’s Program for “New Designs for Schools and Systems,” under LaVerne Evans Srinivasan, another former DOE Deputy Chancellor from the Bloomberg era Here is the press release from Carnegie’s President, Vartan Gregorian:
“‘We are delighted that Saskia, who has played an important role in reforming America’s largest school system, is now joining the outstanding leader of Carnegie Corporation’s Education Program, LaVerne Evans Srinivasan, in overseeing our many investments in U.S. urban education.'”
Concludes Haimson:
“How cozy! In this way, a revolving door ensures that the very same DOE officials who helped close these schools continue to control the narrative, enabling them to fund — and even staff — the organizations that produce the reports that retroactively justify and help them perpetuate their policies.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Was this not the beginning of the strange and rampant adoption of credit recovery schemes in the new smaller schools? This was also the beginning of very different SUMMER SCHOOL offerings by the small schools. Every school seemed to be able to host summer school or credit recovery with different rules. This might be why the graduation rates went up so quickly.
Credit recovery needs to be investigated and analyzed by some entity that isn’t invested in showing the successes of ed reform.
I hear story after story from parents about how it is being used to game graduation numbers. If so many ordinary people smell a rat with this, if it’s reached that kind of penetration where people who don’t work in schools are questioning it, something big is going on there.
Is there not a case that the small schools movement has resulted in safer high schools in many cases? I don’t know if it’s possible to show the causation, but I recall that was one of the bullet points on the list of justifications for small schools.
FLERP,
Safety may be an upside of small high schools. Every student is known.
The downside of small high schools is no advanced courses in math and science, only one foreign language, few electives, no programs for ELLs, students with disabilities, other specials, including the arts.
It is a trade off.
There should be small high schools and comprehensive ones. In this era of school choice, why remove that choice?
Your question is wrongly phrased: those who closed large, comprehensive high schools, and sent students into smaller schools rife with turf battles, fewer resources – minimal or no clubs, athletic teams, electives, etc. – have the burden of proof that they did the right thing, concerning safety or anything else.
Incidentally, just as a matter of so-called reform practice, if things were appreciably safer at these smaller schools, rest assured it would be trumpeted everywhere. That you even need to ask the question suggests that statistics are not on their side.
That’s fine, I’m just asking if there’s a case to be made. You don’t have to make it. I would assume that rates of school violence are lower in the small schools than they were in the comprehensives, because that would follow the general trend of drops in violent crime. Maybe that assumption is incorrect. If it is correct, the question is about causation.
You may be thinking of this study, which showed a big edge for the smaller schools in responses to the 19 out of 20 questions on student and teacher surveys that deal with “safety and respect.” These are the same surveys that Class Size Matters so frequently refers to (historically, a small plurality of NYC DOE parents, usually 20-25%, identified reducing class size as the thing they’d most like to see at their child’s school).
http://economics.mit.edu/files/9158
It is a pretty amazing difference when you consider that the new smaller schools were located in the exact same buildings, neighborhoods, and circumstances as the large high schools they replaced.
Tim –
Not such an amazing difference when you know that they were not the same students.
“… our many investments in urban education.”
Indeed, and these people make sure they get a return on their investment, no matter who has to pay for it.
Closing schools would be a GREAT idea
IF
those closed were the charters.