UPPER WEST SIDE — The Urban Assembly High School for Green Careers was the fourth lowest performing school in the city when Kerry Decker took over as principal.
Most incoming ninth graders at the 350-student school entered reading on a first-grade level. Many had been left back and had serious behavior problems. Many students felt they were dumped at the West 84th Street school.
“Kids were really angry when I got here,” Decker said.
Students knew they were barely literate, and it bothered them. They often blamed teachers for it — and Decker agreed with them.
“Teachers got in their way,” she said.
She’s now trying to give students more autonomy, independence and responsibility when it comes to meeting their educational goals.
In just three years, Decker helped steer a dramatic turnaround of the school, working with NYU professor Cynthia McCallister.
McCallister developed a curriculum model called Learning Cultures, which promotes self-directed learning and focuses on social-emotional development, where students are responsible for helping their peers improve behavior.
The results have been profound.
The graduation rate at Green Careers jumped in two years from 38 percent to 60 percent, and it’s on track next year to hit 86 percent, Decker said.
The school received a score of “well developed” in all categories on its Quality Review — a feat achieved only by 7 percent of city schools, McCallister said.
It’s also been a relatively budget-friendly intervention, costing about $175 per student the first year and since falling to about $50 per student, McCallister said. Most of the money goes to professional development since the model requires teachers to rethink their approach — which is not always an easy lift, the school's leaders acknowledged.
Despite successes at Green Careers, Learning Cultures has been unable to gain a toehold within the Department of Education, so McCallister plans to submit a charter proposal to the state this month to open a school serving the South Bronx and one serving students from Harlem and Washington Heights.
On a recent afternoon at Green Careers, a small group working in an English class discussed articles about why women got paid less than men while another group discussed how to define crime. (DNAinfo/Amy Zimmer)
The demographics at Green Careers — roughly 90 percent of students are low-income and 95 percent are black and Latino — are similar to many of the city’s 130 Community Schools, which are getting a huge influx of cash, working with nonprofits to become one-stop centers with on-site health, mental health and social services along with expanded hours for learning time.
Decker and McCallister don’t believe the answer lies in adding more counselors and wraparound services to bolster student performance, but it does embed a “behavior component” at all levels of the school.
When students have serious behavioral issues, for instance, they meet with the “Keepers of the Culture” — other students identified as exhibiting the school’s values of responsibility and collaboration.
These meetings are in some ways like group therapy, McCallister said, where the students seem to be much more open with their peers and offer each other support, feedback and strategies.
“The students live in poverty and are subjected to all the trauma that goes along with that: patterns having to do with attachment, mental illness, violence, substance abuse,” McCallister said.
But she added, “It’s not like you need to pathologize kids and give them social workers. They know how the world works. Usually it’s the injustices of schools they’re objecting to. So we make rules very transparent. We help them understand how their behavior is getting in the way, and then make a plan to uphold their responsibility.”
The level of learning in the program is rigorous even though it doesn’t follow a linear curriculum like most traditional schools, school leaders said.
To help give students clear expectations about managing their own education, the school gives each of them a copy of the New York State Education Department standards they are expected to meet — a simple but somewhat radical move considering the standards are usually only given to teachers, acting as gatekeepers, to structure their lessons.
The students themselves then must figure what questions to ask in figuring out how to meet those standards. They also must find whatever resources are available to answer those questions, whether they’re textbooks, YouTube videos or online lessons from Khan Academy.
Students at Green Careers find their own sources to use in class, with many using online videos or materials. (DNAinfo/Amy Zimmer)
Under the Learning Cultures model, students in small groups read aloud in sync, and students are supposed to stop the group if they have a question or can’t hear someone before moving on.
It can take about five months before students get comfortable with this and “stop ridiculing each other or rolling their eyes or cursing each other,” McCallister noted.
“The emotions connected with reading for a lot of kids are so negative,” said McCallister, who believes that building positive associations help break patterns of behavior.
“One guy said to me, ‘School reading kills my vibe.’ How do you create formats that harness their vibe so they rise to their potential?”
The program, in some ways, mirrors what’s considered the gold standard in progressive preschools when it comes to giving kids structure but also the freedom to move around “activity centers” in the classroom. Its emphasis on social emotional development — with constant reminders for the need for cooperation and consideration — is also something that tends to be strong in early childhood education but gets lost as kids get older.
“It’s nice to see kids be kids again,” said Decker. “I’m not saying it’s perfect. But they’re happy.”
