CLEVELAND, Ohio – Eight of the 13 struggling schools the Cleveland school district targeted for extra turnaround help four years ago have failed to make significant gains and need more “intensive” work, the district has decided.
All eight will have their academic programs redesigned and their principals and staff possibly replaced.
How far those changes will go is still to be determined and can vary by school. But none will be closed and they will instead just be overhauled and re-cast.
All eight received Fs on their state report cards for student achievement and either an F or D for how much improvement students make over a year.
“We have used a form of closure – ‘Phase Out’- with success, because we have simultaneously ‘Phased In’ another option,” said district spokesperson Roseanne Canfora. “Traditional closure remains one of the options we will consider in the coming year, as we review our data and assess the needs of the school and the community.”
Three of the eight schools are high schools – Collinwood, John Adams and Lincoln-West – where the redesign process is already underway.
– Lincoln-West on the near West Side was already split into two separate schools this past fall, becoming a “Global Studies Academy” and the “School of Science and Health” based partly at MetroHealth Medical Center.
– John Adams on the southeast side will be split apart next year, with a new early college high school program in partnership with New York’s Bard College taking over part of the school and a still-to-be determined program taking over the rest.
The early college program will be the city’s second with Bard and allows students to earn an associates degree along with their diploma.
– And Collinwood High School in the northeast part of the city has already made one big shift. It no longer has a traditional program, but uses the national “New Tech” program – in which students learn by doing projects and do a lot of their work on laptop computers.
The district and community leaders are now discussing how new programs at the school should look.
One possibility: Creating a vocational program on the East Side of the city, a constant request of Collinwood’s City Councilman Mike Polensek.The city’s main vocational school, Max Hayes, is on the West Side.
“Is there a need for an East Side career center?” asked Christine Fowler-Mack, who heads creation of new school models for the district. “We’re calling some of the bigger questions.”
The other five schools are elementary schools – Anton Grdina, Mound, Jamison, Marin and Case.
Two more schools that were never named as “Investment Schools” but also have struggles will also be redesigned – Booker and Sunbeam elementary schools.
District CEO Eric Gordon said that while there are many distinct high school styles nationally that can serve as a guide, there are not as many elementary school models to study. And while the district has aggressively split several large, traditional high schools into smaller, more specialized schools in recent years, it has not tried much at the elementary level.
“We haven’t done a lot of redesign in the K-8 space,” Gordon said. “Unlike high school, there’s a lot fewer offerings.”
We’ll have more on how these redesigns could look as planning progresses.
The district’s improvement plan, the Cleveland Plan for Transforming Schools, promised “immediate and dramatic action” in 2012 for failing schools that could not be improved.
That action includes, “closure and reassignment of students to better schools, closure and start-up of a new school, phase in of a new program and phase out of the old, or turning the school over to a capable charter operator.”
The district has avoided just shuttering schools altogether. Closing a school leaves hundreds of students without a home and many just enroll in charters instead of other district schools.
In addition, the district spent millions on new buildings for schools on the turnaround list like Grdina and Mound or to renovate others. Closing the school would abandon significant taxpayer investments.
Click here for more on how the district has “eliminated” failing schools.
Here’s what will happen to the other five schools, all elementary schools, that were among the first 13 “Investment Schools” the district named in 2013:
– Robinson G. Jones improved enough for the district to remove it from the list for district intervention.
– The Franklin D. Roosevelt and Benesch elementary schools will still have “targeted” intervention by the district with partial redesigns.
– The district will hold off another year before making any decisions on the Walton and Kenneth Clement schools. It will also wait until next year to make any decisions about the 10 schools in the second group of Investment Schools named in 2014.
The district also plans to name a third group of Investment Schools for turnaround starting with the 2017-18 school year.
For now, though, it will not spend any extra money on any of the schools. The first year of the Investment School program, the district gave them a combined $3.5 million extra for consultants, training and other efforts, then bumped that up to $7 million when the second group of 10 was added.
The district will now set the budget for all 23 just like it does for any other school, Gordon said, without that extra money.
The schools, however, will continue receiving the so-called “wraparound” social service help the district provides to students and families in partnership with the United Way of Greater Cleveland and other local non-profits.
The district is waiting on a report from University of Virginia consultants who will visit schools and study what is working and what isn’t. Gordon said he sees some signs of improvement in absenteeism, parent engagement and some test scores but wants to know more about which efforts are bringing which gains.
“We’ll have maybe a more sophisticated version of investment schools with our third cohort,” Gordon said.”My intention is to pause and have it studied as to what worked and what didn’t work. We can learn from this and use it more smartly based on what we learned.”
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