One school at a time
The Jacob Hiatt Center for Urban Education leads the universal call to "Leave No Child Behind"
By Anne Gibson Ph.D. '95
Photos by Joel Haskell
In the United States, education reform is a dominant social issue. Educators, policymakers and other advocates have struggled to solve the inequities that have led to a persistent and distinct achievement gap separating western European from African American and Latino students. According to Tom Del Prete, Education Department chair and director of the Jacob Hiatt Center for Urban Education, the challenges facing education today are acute and pressing; and the stakes are high.
Despite vigorous intervention over the past decade by individual states, the federal government and its No Child Left Behind Act, and the high school-reform initiatives of large private foundations, such as Gates and Carnegie, this achievement gap and a corresponding high-school graduation gap vividly remains.
"The question of what and how to change weighs heavily on the effort to improve high schools, so as to ensure equitable opportunity and achievement, " explains Del Prete. In addressing reform, educators and policymakers draw time-honored attention to issues of equitable funding and quality teaching, he says. Over time, emphasis has shifted toward universal high expectations and immersion in a rigorous academic curriculum with greater personalization and support, and away from entrenched systems of tracking which earmark only a relatively small proportion of students for postsecondary education.
Guiding Reform
Del Prete says there's a vast and growing stream of research and commentary on what strategies influence and lead to effective high schools that educate all students well. These studies address factors such as school size, personalization, the location and focus of curricular and pedagogical decision-making, instructional practice and professional community. The challenge lies in determining and implementing the combination of factors that will close the gaps.
Despite the universal call to close these gaps, he is quick to point out how difficult it is to build consensus on a philosophy of reform that coherently unifies ends and means, purpose and practice. Policy has tended to emphasize standards and accountability, for example, while giving much less attention to what instructional and institutional practices might lead all students to significant learning and college readiness. However, a guiding light shines brightly on the horizon —that beacon is Clark's Hiatt Center and the University Park Campus School (UPCS).
The Hiatt Center's work focuses on urban-teacher preparation; professional learning and leadership development; curriculum, teaching and assessment practices that support learning for diverse children; and University-school collaborative research. UPCS, the result of an innovative collaboration between Clark and the Worcester Public Schools, is a testament to the center 's mission. With the help of the Hiatt Center, the small, grade 7-12 public school set out to instill in its students, most of whom face disadvantages, the knowledge and ambition to earn a college degree. Together they beat the odds.
Since opening in 1997, 95 percent of UPCS graduates have attended college. Nearly all are first-generation college students. And all but one have passed Massachusetts ' rigorous graduation exam—one of the measures used to fulfill the requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act —surpassing all but a handful of elite schools in the state of Massachusetts. The strong academic program and demanding-yet-nurturing culture have enabled the school to achieve these outstanding results without significant attrition.
According to Del Prete, the educational path of students matching the demographic profile at UPCS, where 75 percent of students are low income, 65 percent from families in which English is not the first language spoken and most from families with no previous college experience, is all too familiar —many of these students leave school prematurely, and only a precious few succeed in postsecondary education.
"Yet the students at University Park Campus School stand astoundingly tall in the face of this trend, " says Del Prete.
In the wake of its success, UPCS and its innovative partnership with Clark University have been recognized as a national school-reform model. The Education Trust, a national organization which keeps a critical eye on progress in educational reform, highlights UPCS as one of a small number of schools in which all students achieve at a high level —demonstrating that students from diverse and low-income backgrounds can achieve. Considered the only high-performing urban high school in Massachusetts by a 2003 report by the Center for Education, Research and Policy, UPCS has also been cited as an exemplar by the National Association of Secondary School Principals, as well as the U.S. Department of Education Office of Innovation and Improvement. Clark's Hiatt Center has become synonymous with innovative and quality public education, and these and other education-reform agents are looking to Clark to lead the way.
Testing lessons learned
Now Clark's Hiatt Center is addressing a bigger question: can other urban schools throughout the United States draw upon the UPCS model to help at-risk students achieve similar success? In other words, can they adapt instructional practices that simultaneously foster students ' understanding of content and academic capability, build a professional learning community that develops, shares and renews its knowledge about students, teaching and learning, and cultivate a learning culture in which students believe in themselves and aspire to go to college?
This question has prompted several initiatives. One is the formation of the Hiatt-Main South Secondary School Collaborative. In addition to UPCS, the collaborative includes two other Main South neighborhood schools serving middle and high-school students —Accelerated Learning Laboratory ( ALL School) and South High. These schools share similar demographics and the same geographical landscape. But while students from all three schools may live next door to each other, their school experiences and outcomes are likely to be very different. Both schools are challenged essentially to redefine their mission, their cultures and their practices in terms of preparing all students for college, to implement more personalized approaches, and to unify in the effort.
According to Del Prete, the collaborative comes close to being a microcosm of national high-school reform efforts, since it includes a small school built from the bottom up (UPCS), a small school reconfigured from a larger one (the ALL School once served K-12 and now serves 7-12 ), and a large-school conversion effort (South High into smaller learning communities). The immediate goal of the collaborative, Del Prete explains, is to develop a learning community among the three schools —a strong academic curriculum and learning culture, an equally strong professional learning culture, and a system of parental and community support.
UPCS principal June Eressy, who is now also the principal at the ALL School, fully acknowledges the challenges of implementing reform in an existing institution with an entrenched culture. "Change takes time," says Eressy, whose initial efforts have centered on building a sense of community at the ALL School.
South High's principal Maureen Ciccone plans on adapting some of the practices that have proven successful at UPCS at South High. Although not formally adopting a UPCS model, Ciccone hopes South High teachers can learn from UPCS, particularly in the areas of literacy, mathematics and developing college-ready students.
Preparing teacher-leaders
Clark is dedicated to preparing outstanding urban teachers as part of a broad effort to enhance educational possibilities for urban youth, reform education and renew urban community life. Clark 's teacher-education programs are an exciting and dynamic blend of university and school —liberal arts, education and school faculty work together as specialists in subject matter, curriculum and classroom teaching to support student learning. The learning culture is collaborative, interdisciplinary and reflective because it embodies and draws together these vital educational perspectives.
Clark's programs combine high expectations and standards with strong support for students, attracting those with an enthusiasm for learning, a capacity for reflection and inquiry, a spirit of collaboration, and a desire to make a difference in the lives of diverse urban youth and the communities in which they live.
Clark's education students are an important part of the center's reform efforts: all complete student-teaching requirements at one of the three Hiatt-Main South Collaborative schools, under the guidance of mentor teachers and supported by education professors and Hiatt Center staff. A number of Clark graduates have taken on permanent teaching positions at one of these schools, not to mention the many alumni educators teaching at schools throughout the nation who are instituting what they learned at Clark in their commitment to make a difference.
Upon graduation, Chad Malone M.A.T. '06 was encouraged by Eressy to take a position at the ALL School, where he now teaches 10 th-grade English. According to Malone, the most important lesson from his student-teaching experience at UPCS is the importance of personalized attention and a belief that all students can learn.
"Each institution has its own set of strengths and weaknesses, problems and challenges. But the same teaching practices that I learned at Clark and UPCS can be transferred one kid at a time," says Malone. "Ultimately, good teaching comes down to a one-on-one connection with each student. "
Malone understands that schools like UPCS can have a powerful impact, not just on its students, but also on the community of which they are a part.
"Here, there's the sense that we're working toward something tangible: to improve our community by reaching the kids. That 's truly alluring for a teacher who wants to make a difference," he explains.
"I wasn't always aware of the gaping divide between suburban and urban schools," says Chris Rea ' 06, M.A.T. '07, who attended a suburban high school and is presently doing his student-teaching at South High. "I now feel passionately about working to equalize things between them. When underprivileged students do not get a good education, the results manifest throughout society. "
Beyond Main South
When Jobs for the Future (JFF), an educational intermediary in Boston, needed a model school to serve as a guide for its school-development efforts, UPCS came to the fore. Donna Rodrigues, founding principal at UPCS and now working on an early-college high-school initiative at JFF, often talked with JFF colleagues about her experience at UPCS; those colleagues were eager to see it for themselves.
Early-college high schools are small high schools partnered with a college, where students can earn two years ' worth of college credit concurrently with their high-school studies. While UPCS is not an early college, the two models have much in common: a close partnership with a university, a mission of preparing all students for college and a small school size.
Another initiative, the University Park Campus School/Clark University Institute for Student Success —a partnership of UPCS, Clark University and JFF —was created to share the success of UPCS with the broader small-schools movement. Supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the institute enables practitioners to visit UPCS and observe its successful model first hand. The institute hosts leadership and instructional training programs that make the school 's methods transparent and replicable. Its mission is to train small-school developers, leaders and teachers to implement the leadership strategies and instructional techniques that have led to universal college readiness at UPCS.
According to UPCS Institute training director Dan Restuccia, nearly 500 participants from across the nation have attended the institute's weeklong summer program and/or the two-day academic-year residency since 2004. Attendees observe classes, participate in leadership workshops with Rodrigues and Eressy and instructional workshops with veteran teachers from UPCS, and meet students, faculty and partners. Restuccia says participants leave newly inspired.
The institute also offers a yearlong, cohort-based, leadership-training program. A short training at UPCS is followed by quarterly follow-up visits to the participants' schools and monthly conference calls on current research and leadership approaches.
Some schools look to build an instructional program with the same signature elements featured at UPCS and emphasized in the Hiatt Center's M.A.T. program, including an emphasis on literacy in all classes, a focus on group work and differentiated instruction (meeting each student at his or her own level), and an untracked program where all students take honors-level courses.
According to Restuccia, the City University of New York (CUNY) is using the UPCS model to start six early-college high schools in New York City. Like UPCS, CUNY 's program combines middle and high school to give students time to catch up on their basic skills before facing the rigors of a high-school curriculum. Nearly all of the teachers and school leaders at these schools have participated in training at the institute as part of their orientation or initial training.
Another initiative is the North Carolina New Schools Project, a public/private partnership to implement high-school reform statewide. They have an ambitious agenda and are opening new schools as well as redesigning existing ones, says Restuccia. The New Schools Project uses UPCS as a model and training site for a variety of its initiatives. This year, educators from between 30 and 40 schools in North Carolina will visit UPCS.
"One of the central questions in educational reform is whether a single example like UPCS can not only inspire and guide others, but lead to more widespread success," explains Del Prete. The local work of the Hiatt Center and its initiatives to enable others to follow in the path of UPCS confronts this question head on and offers hope for widespread reform.
"To the extent that the Hiatt Center and partner schools with histories, challenges and circumstances different from UPCS can approach the UPCS record, then another step will be taken toward the transformation of urban education on a national scale, " he says.
That's one more step toward closing the gap.
Ripple effect of "a promise kept"
In 2003, Clarknews featured a story called "A Promise Kept," about the first class of students to graduate from the University Park Campus School. One of those students, Damian Ramsey, expects to graduate this spring from Brown University. This fall, Ramsey sent a thank-you note to Hiatt Center Director Thomas Del Prete, and the first principal of the University Park Campus School (UPCS), Donna Rodrigues.
Ramsey writes: "Though I take much credit for my own progress, I know that I didn't get here on my own. I have grown tremendously during my four years at Brown University, and I thank you for providing me with the tools and skills to not only get into this great institution, but also to do well here. "
Many of the students in the UPCS class of 2003 entered the school with prior educational attainment that suggested they would struggle to complete high school, let alone achieve a college degree. In addition to Brown University, this year, UPCS alumni from the class of 2003 will be graduating from institutions such as Georgetown, Tufts, Savannah College of Art and Design, College of the Holy Cross and Worcester State.
Perhaps the most powerful ripples will be made by students like Ramsey, who have directly benefited from education reform efforts of the Hiatt Center and UPCS. After graduating from Brown, Ramsey plans on applying to Teach for America, the Peace Corps, and graduate programs in social work. Whichever option he chooses will provide him with the opportunity to make a difference.
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Clarknews Spring 2007
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