Friday, June 8, 2007
Written by: Vista
In the world of school reform we keep hearing stories of schools where success proves that all children can learn; that poverty, race, family status are not insuperable barriers to learning and achievement.
Today’s Denver Post contains one such story, about Arrupe Jesuit High School in Northwest Denver. It’s an inspiring read. Denver now has two break-the-mold high schools, Arrupe and the Denver School of Science and Technology — neither of them run by Denver Public Schools.
Nationally, the latest example of this encouraging, albeit still miniscule movement, is described by Neil Pierce in the Denver Post.
Writing of the University Preparatory Academy in Detroit, he asks when will all schools meet the challenge they set themselves to graduate 90% of their students and send 90% on to post-secondary education?
University Preparatory Academy was founded by a former director of Michigan’s Department of Commerce and a former US undersecretary of housing and urban development. These two powerful and well connected civic leaders mobilized resources to create a school that is showing success at preparing its graduates for more education. The leaders attribute their success to “a deep knowledge about each child
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June 8th, 2007 at 10:08 am
Vista wrote:
“These two powerful and well connected civic leaders mobilized resources…”
“…the school is organized so that a single faculty member engages personally with each student in classes comprised of 16 students.
“Supporting students through personal and family crises, the teachers go well beyond the boundaries traditionally associated with public schools.”
“Money is a necessary condition for this kind of school, but it is not sufficient.”
Of course it’s not sufficient. But how many public schools have the capacity to have a faculty member engage personally with each student, and to have classes of only 16 students?
You also didn’t mention that the Pittsburgh school got the help of a retired businessman who donated some of the proceeds from the sale of his business, enabling them to build a $15 million high school campus.
I don’t really understand your point. Are you suggesting that a school founded by well-connected people who are able to raise lots of money should serve as a model for cash-strapped public schools? And that teachers should not only teach, but serve as counselors for the families of each of their students (while simultaneously raising test scores)? And that the way to do this is to go out and find more well-connected civic leaders to run our schools and raise private funds? What a brilliant strategy!
June 8th, 2007 at 2:26 pm
It is truly inspiring to see how effective these schools have become. By the way, I think Arrupe may be the first school in Colorado (private or public) to graduate most of their low-income Latino kids and send them to college (80% going to 4 yr schools!). Your average Colorado high school is lucky to get more than 50% of their low-income kids to graduate let alone go to a 4 yr college.
Mr. Miller should check out ALL the data on these and other schools in terms of the money. There are a variety of reasons why these schools are successful but the main reasons have to do with the school leadership and educational program design. Both schools have very high expectations, deliver a rich core academic program while having strong supports for all kids (oh and they are small which helps). Arrupe and DSST have staff that are relentless in their support for kids succeeding. Every staff person has a small group of kids that they track and support until they have graduated and gotten into college, much like my mother. Money matters in terms where it is spent but is hardly the overriding factor in terms of total amounts as some might suggest based on teacher/student ratios.
While DSST may have a great new building (at less cost than other new public high schools), Arrupe is in a facility far inferior to any DPS high school paying teachers less than public schools and having fewer adults/kid than your average DPS school. Both schools do have lower student to teacher ratios as most charters and privates. They don’t have librarians and all of the other people that are in larger high schools. They choose to put their money into instruction and use all of the staff to support kids (not your typical high school!). I suspect that each school spends in the ballpark of $6-7K per kid on the academic program. Each of these schools is receiving somewhere around $8-10K per student for the total school cost (everything including building). DPS is spending only about $3-4 K/student in the high schools with operating income of about 8 K and overall income of about $15k/student. Most school districts are very constrained by law, rules and the general district culture in how they spend their funds. I’m sure it would help enormously if DPS could free up more staff (not just traditional teachers) and funds to focus where it matters on kids. The folks under the gold dome would have let them do it.
June 11th, 2007 at 11:48 am
Regarding the high college-attendance rate at Arrupe versus other schools, I think you have to consider that students and families self-select into these schools. The same goes for charter schools. DPS gets lots of motivated kids in their regular schools, but they also get all the kids who wouldn’t be there if they weren’t legally required to be. Arrupe and DSST get kids who really want to be there, and are thus more motivated to succeed.
I don’t think we can resolve anything unless we are able to compare per-pupil costs. Edmove “suspects” that Arrupe and DSST spend $6,000 - $7,000 per student. I’d like to know where that figure comes from.
The more important issue, however, is what costs are included in the figure. Charters are public, so in theory they have to be open to all kids. But it’s pretty unlikely that students with severe disabilities attend these schools. Those kids attend regular public schools and specialized programs operated by the district. The high cost of educating them is factored into the per-pupil costs of the regular schools, which makes it higher than charters’ P-P costs.
The point about Arrupe choosing to use its funds for instruction rather than other services like librarians confuses the issue. OK, so they don’t have librarians. Do they have a library? Who helps the students do research? Probably their teachers, or other adults who do not have the “librarian” title. Or do they just go to the public library and get help there? Taxpayers are supporting that library and the librarians in it, so maybe that cost should be included in the per-pupil cost of the school. (By the way, Arrupe lists 17 people as faculty, and 21 in other categories, including two development people whose jobs are to raise money.)
Arrupe also doesn’t have a speech therapist, social workers or a police officer. West High School, for example, has all of these. Should a school district have to pay for all of these services? As a community, we have decided that it should. Until we have an honest, well-informed public conversation about what services public schools should and should not provide, who they serve and what the costs are, we’re really comparing apples, oranges and strawberries.
Don’t get me wrong; I support charters. I just don’t think it’s fair to make a sweeping generalization that they and private schools are more cost effective than regular public schools. It’s much more complicated than that.
June 11th, 2007 at 11:54 pm
Well I couldn’t agree more about relevant comparisons on money, inputs and outcomes. While there are not currently good enough public data to get apples to apples on all school comparisons, we do now have data that allows us to get close, say tangerine to orange (which is fairly close considering all of the plants). The data gets better every year and we can now make fairly good judgments about most public schools. I’ll stick to the ballpark numbers I shared earlier. There isn’t enough time or space now to get into a detailed comparison but you can do it using their school budgets. Privates as a group are more diverse and very hard to compare to publics (they are private for a reason) nevertheless schools like Arrupe that open their books do allow for some reasonable comparisons. By the way, I did not want to suggest that privates as a group are more cost effective or better (most national data suggest they are not better).
I only wanted to suggest that much of what Arrupe does could be done by West HS or any other public high school within the confines of what many districts spend on their high schools (with some policy support from the state/district and I’m not referring to the crosses in the halls of Arrupe). DSST is an example of a public high school that has a very similar focused program with great attention to each student. There have been a variety of these public high schools (reg district and charter) that have done it over the years just none in CO until now.
By the way school choice does not lead to high student achievement, there are plenty of mediocre charters and privates. It is only one of many ingredients that can help. I’ve always wondered why so many regular city public high schools complain about the local charter or privates stealing their students and then compound the excuse by using their special education populations or poorly educated parents as reasons for poor performance when it is now possible to determine if this is true. There are a few districts, Mapleton, just north of Denver that are now purposely creating different kinds of schools and forcing everyone to choose a school…what a concept! Those of us with money and/or information do it anyway. The good news is that we can now look at the dissagregated data and determine if a public school is adding value through multiple measures. DPS and a number of other districts are now working on doing this as a regular part of their work.