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A Community Sets Standards Around the Table

Type: Example from Schools Author(s): Kathleen Cushman Source: Performance. #7. June 1994

June, 1994 - No. 7

UNIVERSITY HEIGHTS HIGH SCHOOL
at Bronx Community College
University Ave. & West 181st St.
Bronx, NY 10453
(718) 220-6397

Nancy Mohr, Principal
400 students, 28 staff
Student population: 60% Latino, 40% African-American
New York City alternative school

Who says whether student work is good enough to graduate? At this school, every student must pass a review board that meets in seven areas

ALEXANDRA LOZANO SPOKE not a word of English in 1983, when her family came to New York from the Dominican Republic. As she worked her way through city schools, her classmates were mostly African-American or Latino; by her own account, she has had few experiences outside that community. But as she prepared to graduate from University Heights High School this year, Sandy arranged a conversation about her education among four leading social critics of our day. Drawing from their recent writings on racial segregation in schools, Derrick Bell, Kenneth Clark, Marian Wright Edelman, and Jonathan Kozol argued out Sandy's case from social, psychological, economic, and political perspectives.

Well, almost. In fact, Sandy herself wrote out the "debate," as part of a weeks-long group project on whether her high school needed greater racial diversity to best serve its students. And besides reading theorists like Edelman and Clark, she and her classmates dug through census records to graph population trends, analyzed the school's enrollment by zip code and race, and wrote five legal briefs that summarized school integration cases from 1935 to 1955.

But Sandy still had more to prove, if she wanted to meet University Heights' graduation standards this year. Assembling her work on this and four other project-based units in a special portfolio, she reflected on how it could demonstrate "social interaction and effective citizenship," one of seven "domains" in which the school requires students to show mastery. In a 3,000-word cover letter she made her case, calling on evidence from all five projects; and then for three hours she defended her conclusions before a "Roundtable" of teachers, relatives, peers, and community members. Their evaluations made up her final "grade": Sandy passed with distinction.

An alternative public high school on the campus of Bronx Community College, University Heights set out from its start, in 1986, to put muscle behind the principle of demonstrated mastery that underlies the Coalition of Essential Schools philosophy. Its students arrived with serious truancy habits, poor academic records, high pregnancy rates; at best, the city hoped to retrieve them from the streets. But principal Nancy Mohr wanted more: to change their educational value system, making college acceptance the norm for these once devalued young people.

"Our mission was to hook them in through academic rigor," she says. "Vocational courses and a pleasant high school experience doesn't do it for us. We prepare kids for college."

To that end, school staff spent years devising a program that would hold students accountable not just for "seat time" in class but for demonstrating their proficiency in a general course of study that comprises 37 specific outcomes in seven broad educational domains (such as "effective expression and communication," "critical thinking and problem- solving," or "cultural and historical involvement").

The work of all academic disciplines, Mohr contends, is embedded in those outcomes and in the projects that display them. "Any specialist?an artist, an accountant, an engineer, an architect, a nurse, a police officer, an athlete?should be able to find his or her professional areas of interest and inquiry within each of these seven domains," she says. "We think of them as Áhabits of mind' that a student needs to develop in any class."

Who Owns the Standards?

Instead of counting up credits, University Heights students begin early to exhibit their work before peers and parents and to collect it in portfolios, building their case for becoming seniors. From that point, they face Roundtable reviews roughly every two months, as soon as they consider themselves prepared to show mastery in each of the seven domains. Approval rests on the consensus of the review panel members, who are asked to give both "warm," appreciative feedback and "cool," constructively critical assessments.

"They don't always agree," notes Mohr. "We're not looking to norm these voices; we want to look at student work through many eyes." Teacher Paul Allison points out the case of his student Tyson Jones, whose grandfather criticized a Roundtable presentation on Malcolm X for lacking depth and detail. "Tyson went back and did more work," says Allison. "The next time around it came out much better, which he recognized with pride."

More critical feedback comes via a visiting review committee made up of university and business people, teachers from other schools, and other outside critics. "It helps us look at student work from an even more objective standpoint," says Mohr.

University Heights governs itself as a "just community," making its decisions by consensus of all involved. Students remain with the same academic team all day (eight teachers and 133 students), and they resolve guidance issues in "family groups" of around fifteen. A student Fairness Committee addresses disciplinary problems before they grow into bigger trouble; the school last year reported not a single "serious incident" to its superintendent. The teaching staff clearly likes its work as well; no union grievances have been filed in all eight years of this school.

By other conventional measures, University Heights students succeed far beyond what their histories might predict. Only 2.8 percent leave high school before graduation. Parents participate in enviable numbers; one teaching team recently saw almost half its students' parents in some constructive fashion before the term reached its midpoint. College acceptance reached a record high in 1993, with 92 percent of the school's graduates planning to go on, mostly to four-year institutions. And fully 50 percent of University Heights students?13 percent more than the citywide average?pass the City University of New York's entrance exams.

As one of the fourteen "partnership schools" chosen to pilot New York's New Compact for Learning, University Heights plays a key role in demonstrating how a new kind of accountability can emerge when each locality defines the standards by which it measures student work. Though all students here pass the state Regents Competency Tests before graduation, their real progress continues to show in other ways?Alexandra Lozano's legal briefs, for instance, or Tyson Jones's second try, or the new language in which students describe their work (See sidebar at left.) A credit-counting system once bankrupted these young people; University Heights gives them a new currency in which to prove their worth and make investments in their futures.

This resource last updated: June 05, 2002

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