The Death and Life of the Great American School System

by Diane Ravitch

  The scholars attributed District 2’s improvements over the course of Alvarado’s tenure to his decision to focus “professional development and accountability almost entirely on reading and literacy improvements.” The gains, they said, “place District 2 second among all the community districts in New York City, although it has a substantially poorer and more diverse student population than many districts with lower scores.”16

  The studies produced by this unusual partnership between scholars and practitioners were almost uniformly celebratory. One paper admiringly described the district’s philosophy of “continuous improvement,” which allowed it to maintain its “central focus on high quality instruction.”17 Others praised the district’s practice of teaching principals to be instructional leaders. A paper on “closing the gap” between advantaged and disadvantaged students concluded that District 2’s strategic focus on instruction was “having powerful effects on student achievement—especially literacy. Furthermore, professional development, District 2’s espoused route to improving teacher quality, appears to be having the desired effect on teaching and therefore on achievement, beyond the strong impact of SES [socioeconomic status].”18

  One study, however, reached different conclusions. The authors of this paper (“Professional Development and the Achievement Gap in Community School District #2”) found that in literacy, where the district recorded its biggest gains, classrooms with high proportions of relatively affluent students were likely to have higher test scores. After surveying teachers about the time they spent in professional development and comparing this to the achievement gains of their students, the authors concluded that “engagement in professional development . . . does not appear to have significant influence on student achievement in either literacy or mathematics.” This finding contradicted the conclusions of other studies in the project.19

  Nonetheless, the multiple studies of District 2 gave it national stature. Here was a district that did the right things and got the right results: It engaged in sustained, large-scale instructional improvement, promoted collaboration among teachers, trained its leaders, kept the focus on learning for students and professionals, and made remarkable gains.

  According to Elmore and his colleague Deanna Burney, what made District 2 successful was its relentless focus on instruction and professional development; its cultivation of teacher and principal support; its experimentation with new approaches; and the conscious encouragement of “collegiality, caring, and respect” among all staff members. Improvement relied on professionals who were willing “to take the initiative, to take risks, and to take responsibility for themselves, for students, and for each other.”20

  Elmore and Burney anticipated that skeptics might attribute District 2’s success to demography, rather than pedagogical strategy. They contended that the district’s strategy of investing in teacher training had “clearly paid off in terms of overall improvement.” After all, the district had risen to second place in the city, an impressive accomplishment, even though it was “among neither the most affluent or homogeneous districts in the city nor among the poorest.” (In fact, District 2 was one of the most affluent districts in the city and became even more so during Alvarado’s tenure.) They detailed the demographics and achievement data for every school in the district in 1995. Of its forty-three schools, including elementary schools, intermediate schools, and a few small high schools, thirteen were majority white; six, majority Asian; six, a combined majority of whites and Asians; and eighteen, majority African American and Hispanic. That is, more than half the schools in District 2 had an enrollment that was majority white and/or Asian. This was quite unusual in New York City, where nearly three-quarters of the city’s students were African American and Hispanic. The highest-performing schools in District 2 were those with a majority of white and/or Asian students. The lowest-performing schools were highly segregated; even though a majority of the district’s students were white and Asian, nine schools were more than 75 percent African American and Hispanic.21

  Elmore and Burney described these disparities as “school-level variability” and explained District 2’s method for dealing with it. The five or six top-performing schools were considered “Free-Agents” and left alone; the next group of schools—some twenty of them—were considered “With-the-Drill,” meaning that they were making progress but needed some support to master the Balanced Literacy strategies; then came the “Watch-List,” some thirteen schools that needed lots of extra attention to push them toward the correct path. Last were five schools that were so problematic that they were categorized as “Off-the-Screen.” These five schools were not identified, but they probably included some of the schools that were more than 75 percent African American and Hispanic, particularly those where fewer than 10 percent of students reached the top quartile of achievement on reading tests during this period.22

  The final report of the Resnick-Elmore-Alvarado collaboration was presented to the U.S. Department of Education in 2001. With only minor caveats, the final report lauded District 2’s “content-driven reform,” “standards-based education,” professional development, continuous improvement, commitment to adult learning, and significant academic gains in literacy and mathematics. The report acknowledged that District 2 “enjoys a lower proportion of impoverished students than many urban districts, which may account for some portion of their success” and that it was “in the wealthiest quartile” of urban districts in the nation. But, the authors insisted, the district’s favorable demographic composition “is clearly not the only factor. Achievement levels have risen over the last 13 years, despite the fact that the socio-economic composition of the district has remained relatively static.”23 It was true that achievement levels had risen, but the socioeconomic composition of the district and its schools had also undergone significant change.

  Critics soon emerged to challenge the scholars’ narrative. In February 2001, Education Week, the most widely read weekly newspaper in the education field, published two side-by-side critical commentaries about District 2 on the same day. Louisa C. Spencer, a retired environmental lawyer who had spent the previous four years as a volunteer tutor in a District 2 elementary school, complained that large numbers of the students in her school—which was 80 percent African American and Hispanic—were not learning to read. She attributed their failure to the Balanced Literacy program. Spencer charged that the district’s methods produced “the most fearful waste of precious time in the school day,” while failing to teach phonics and to offer a “substantive, sequenced” curriculum. The victims of this failure, she wrote, were the poorest children.24

  The other article was by Lois Weiner, a professor who prepared urban teachers at New Jersey City University. Weiner was a parent activist at P.S. 3 in District 2, which she described as a highly progressive alternative school with an unusual degree of parent involvement. She claimed that district administrators were stifling teachers and parents at P.S. 3 by mandating “constructivist” materials and specific instructional strategies. (Constructivism is a theory that students construct their own knowledge; in its extreme forms, constructivism eschews direct instruction, focusing instead on activities, processes, and social interaction among students.) Weiner said that “P.S. 3 parents by and large favor ideas associated with ‘constructivist’ learning,” but “they are suspicious of packages that presume any single method or approach could be best for every child and teacher in our school.” When Alvarado “fired our new principal (the third in four years) in the sixth week of school, despite the expressed collective wishes of parents and teachers, we realized that we no longer have a choice about whether to accept the package District 2 delivers. We watch, powerless, as staff developers trained and paid by the district office report back to supervisors if teachers don’t follow mandates about instruction.” She continued, “The degree of micromanagement is astounding.” Those who challenged the district office’s mandates, she said, risked getting an unsatisfactory rating or being fir
ed. Weiner contended that “opposition from parents is building against the new math curriculum,” which was supposed to be field-tested with control groups, but instead was mandated for every classroom. Teachers were expressly prohibited from using other math textbooks or materials, and some were clandestinely “photocopying pages of now-banned workbooks.”25

  The response to the articles was swift in coming. Two of the district’s former superintendents (Alvarado and Elaine Fink) and the acting superintendent (Shelley Harwayne) wrote letters to the editor of Education Week. By 2001, when the articles were published, Alvarado was chancellor of instruction in San Diego (he left District 2 in 1998), and Fink too was there, training principals for the San Diego schools. The three vigorously defended District 2’s record and described the critical authors as biased representatives of “the left and the right” who had ignored “facts and the hard reality of educational outcomes.”26

  The district’s mathematics curriculum provoked controversy in 2001. A group of angry District 2 parents and professors from New York University’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences met to protest the district’s constructivist method of teaching mathematics. What did a constructivist math lesson look like? The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) offers lesson plans in which students are supposed to think deeply, work collaboratively, and discover their own ways of solving problems. For example, a constructivist mathematics teacher might use the card game Krypto to “develop number sense, computational skill, and an understanding of the order of operations.” In this game, students must perform operations on five numbers (say, 3, 2, 6, 1, 9) in order to arrive at a target number, such as 10. The lesson plan says, “Ask students to work on this individually for 45 seconds, which is usually enough time for most students to find at least one solution. Then, ask them to work with a partner for another 90 seconds. They should compare solutions, noting any differences. If neither of them found a solution, they should work together to find one. If they both found solutions, they should work together to find a third solution.”27 Constructivist programs such as TERC (used in District 2) and Everyday Mathematics (used in many cities) emphasize multiple solutions to problems. However, students who do not have a firm grasp of basic arithmetic are seldom able to find their own solutions.28

  At a forum convened to air their grievances, District 2 parents complained that they had to hire tutors because their children were not learning basic skills. The mathematicians warned that students who lacked computational skills were not prepared to succeed in mathematics courses in high school or college. One parent said that “the district leaders have a mentality of a sect.” After the first meeting, parents and mathematicians formed a new organization, NYC HOLD, which lobbied vigorously against the math curriculum by writing articles, convening meetings, and managing a Web site to disseminate critical studies.29

  Weiner was not assuaged by the district’s frosty dismissal of her article in Education Week. At the 2002 annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, she accused researchers and district leaders of fabricating the District 2 mystique through a public relations campaign. The following year, she published a long article titled “Research or ‘Cheerleading’? Scholarship on Community School District 2, New York City.” She charged that the research team had ignored District 2’s racial and social segregation and taken a cheerleading role, “promoting reforms they have aided in implementing and assessing.” District 2, she pointed out, was atypical of New York City; in the year 2000, its combined white-Asian enrollment was 65 percent, while in the city as a whole it was only 27 percent. District 2’s alleged success, she maintained, was a function of demography, not pedagogy.30

  Resnick defended her team’s conclusions, saying that its relationship with district officials was never a secret, and they never pretended to conduct “an arm’s length investigation,” but rather fostered collaboration between scholars and practitioners in a “new form of research and development.”31

  In 2005, the Public Broadcasting Service, in a program called Making Schools Work, narrated by Hedrick Smith, singled out District 2 as “a pioneering effort at district-wide reform and a watershed in the two-decade effort to improve America’s schools.” The program omitted the meetings of angry parents, the controversy over the constructivist mathematics program, the debate about demographics, and questions about the imposition of Balanced Literacy. The teachers who complained about micromanagement got short shrift. Viewers learned only that some teachers complained “about the extra work forced on them, lack of respect for their professional opinion and the pressure to comply with Alvarado or risk being pushed out.”32

  In 1998, Alvarado was hired as chancellor of instruction in San Diego. There he oversaw the implementation of the programs that had brought him national acclaim in District 2: Balanced Literacy and constructivist mathematics. When Chancellor Joel Klein of New York City selected reading and math programs in late 2002, he copied those in use in San Diego, believing that they would produce rapid test score gains. So the programs inaugurated in District 2 came home to New York City, to be mandated across the city’s public schools, only four years after Alvarado left for the West Coast.

  Certainly reading scores improved in District 2 under Alvarado’s leadership. However, the cause of these gains is not easily ascertained. Resnick and Elmore thought it was because of the pedagogical approach that was mandated across the district. A study by another group of scholars concluded that school choice in District 2 was responsible for higher scores in reading.33 Still others attributed the improved results to Alvarado’s charisma and the strong staff he assembled. But relatively little attention has been paid to the remarkable economic boom and demographic changes in the district during the 1990s. These shifts surely influenced the district’s educational gains.

  Alvarado’s tenure in District 2 stretched from 1987 to 1998. This was a period of population growth and rapid gentrification in District 2, when many neighborhoods were changing and slum buildings were replaced by high-rise luxury apartment buildings. Once-impoverished sections in Chelsea, Soho, Tribeca, the far West Side, and the Lower East Side became fashionable, expensive neighborhoods. Even the Bowery, long known for its flophouses for indigents, was transformed into a stretch of luxury apartment buildings.

  District 2 was not a typical urban district nor was it a typical New York City district. In a city where more than half the population was African American or Hispanic, the population of District 2 was overwhelmingly white (in 1990, 5 percent was African American, 10 percent Hispanic, 13 percent Asian, and 72 percent white; in 2000, 4 percent was African American, 9 percent Hispanic, 15 percent Asian, and 70 percent white).34

  District 2 was also very wealthy: The average family income in District 2 rose from $150,767 in 1990 to $169,533 in 2000 (in inflation-adjusted dollars). Over the same decade, the average family income in New York City increased slightly from $62,818 to $63,424. While 23 percent of families in New York City had an income over $75,000 in both 1990 and 2000, the proportion of District 2 families in the same category rose from 39 percent in 1990 to 43 percent in 2000.35

  The researchers who studied the district believed that District 2’s socioeconomic composition was “relatively static” during the period of its test score gains, but this was incorrect. From the late 1980s to the late 1990s, as the district gentrified, District 2 enrollment grew from 18,000 to 22,000 students. Nearly 90 percent of the new enrollment in District 2 consisted of white and Asian students; the largest growth was among white students. The district saw increases in groups that tend to score higher, and declines in the proportion of groups that tend to have lower scores, that is, African Americans and Hispanics. District 2 was becoming even more affluent and whiter than other urban districts in the city and the nation.

  From 1988 to 1998, the ethnic composition of District 2’s schools significantly diverged from that of the city as a whole. The proportion of white students increased, while the pr
oportion of African American and Hispanic students declined (Asian students remained the same, at about one-third). By the late 1990s, District 2 had approximately twice the proportion of white students, three times the proportion of Asian students, half the proportion of African American students, and a smaller share of Hispanic students, as compared to the city’s schools as a whole. The students in District 2 were approximately 65 percent white and Asian, and 35 percent African American and Hispanic. At the same time, enrollment in the New York City public schools was almost the reverse, at 63 percent African American and Hispanic, and 27 percent white and Asian.36

  The schools of District 2 had a large achievement gap among students of different racial and ethnic backgrounds. In 1999, when the state introduced new tests, the following proportions of fourth-grade students met state standards (levels 3 and 4) in reading: 82 percent of whites, 61 percent of Asians, 45.7 percent of African Americans, and 37.8 percent of Hispanics. On the state mathematics test, 79.6 percent of whites, 87 percent of Asians, 50.3 percent of African Americans, and 51.9 percent of Hispanics met the standards.37

  In eighth grade, the gaps were just as large or larger. Eighty percent of white students met state standards in reading, as compared to 61 percent of Asian students, 53 percent of African American students, and 40 percent of Hispanic students. In mathematics, 68.8 percent of white students, 70.6 percent of Asian students, 25.2 percent of African American students, and 24.4 percent of Hispanic students met the standards. Although its minority students scored higher than those in most other districts, District 2 did not close the achievement gaps. The gaps among racial and ethnic groups ranged from 30 percentage points to more than 40.38