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Policy Framework
The New York City public school system is the largest in the United States, with over 1,200 schools and more than 1.1 million students enrolled each year. In the last decade, it has also been the site of an unprecedented investment in high school reform. Beginning in 2002 and with the support of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and other philanthropies, the New York City Department of Education (DOE) closed many large, comprehensive high schools with a history of low performance and created hundreds of new small secondary schools. At the same time, the DOE instituted a centralized high school admissions process for matching incoming ninth-grade students to the over 400 high school options available to them.
The small school movement has been a national one. And while nearly every major American urban district has undertaken efforts to create new small schools or to transform large schools into campuses of small learning communities, there has been little rigorous evidence about the effectiveness of small schools.
MDRC has been able to take advantage of a lottery-like system that New York City uses to assign students when the high schools they choose are oversubscribed to develop an unusually large and rigorous study of the impact of these small high schools on academic achievement and graduation. The first findings from the study, released in 2010, provide rigorous evidence that new small public high schools are narrowing the educational attainment gap and markedly improve graduation prospects, particularly for disadvantaged students.
Agenda, Scope, and Goals
New York City’s new small high schools — called Small Schools of Choice (SSCs) in this project — are more than just small. They were authorized through a demanding, competitive proposal process designed to stimulate innovative ideas for new schools by a range of stakeholders and institutions, from educators to school reform intermediary organizations. The resulting schools emphasize strong, sustained relationships between students and faculty. Each SSC also received start-up funding as well as assistance and policy support from the district and other key players to facilitate leadership development, hiring, and implementation.
While the new small schools in New York City have a wide variety of themes and educational philosophies, they are intended to share three common design characteristics:
- Academic rigor: Schools are expected to be college-preparatory in that they move all students toward acquisition of a New York Regents Diploma.
- Personalization: Schools were to be small not only in size but also in function to ensure strong student-teacher relationships and to hold adults accountable for individual student outcomes.
- Community partnerships: Through partnerships with business and community partners, schools were intended to offer learning opportunities outside of the classroom and to infuse relevant real-world examples into classroom instruction. Partners were expected to bolster school capacity in areas ranging from curriculum and instruction to youth development and community outreach.
The ongoing evaluation of New York City high school reform addresses the following questions:
- What effects do the new small schools have on students’ engagement, academic performance, and preparation for college beyond what they would have achieved if they did not have the opportunity to enroll in these schools?
- How are the small high schools similar to and different from other high schools in the system?
- What role have intermediary organizations played in effecting change in New York City high schools?
- What issues and challenges do the schools confront as they undertake new reform initiatives, and how do they respond? What are the instructional practices at a sample of the schools?
Design, Sites, and Data Sources
The impact analysis focuses on the "small schools of choice," new, small, unscreened high schools. The path-breaking analytic approach used in the impact study capitalizes on random elements of the DOE’s centralized high school admissions process. Each lottery for a small school of choice is a naturally-occurring experiment, which, after some adjustments, makes it possible to produce valid estimates of the effects of enrollment in small schools of choice on student academic outcomes. The impact study will be the most rigorous evaluation to date on the effectiveness of small schools.
The impact study follows four cohorts of students — those entering high school in the fall of 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2008. The primary sources of data for the analyses are High School Application Processing System (HSAPS) data and school records, which were obtained from the New York City DOE.
The MDRC school characteristics study uses extant data from the U.S. Department of Education, New York State Report Card, and New York City DOE along with aggregate HSAPS and student records data in a school-level database to analyze changes in the high school options and student enrollment over time. The analyses identify patterns and trends for schools on a number of instruction-related, demographic, and performance-based characteristics by school type as defined by size and selectivity.
A companion qualitative study by Policy Studies Associates examined the roles that intermediaries played in designing and implementing new small schools. Case studies of six new small schools, assessing the degree to which schools implemented best school and classroom practices, was published by The Academy for Education Development.
Over the next four years, MDRC is conducting an expanded set of research activities that will:
- Address the how and why questions raised by the current report thereby amplifying its usefulness to the field, and
- Provide additional evidence about the overall effects of small schools of choice in New York City.
To address these objectives, we will conduct three types of research that will help to:
- Identify the locus of SSC impacts. We will conduct an integrated series of exploratory quantitative and qualitative analyses of what it is about SSCs in New York City (their leadership, organization, teaching staff, students, and/or available resources) that make them so effective for disadvantaged students.
- Understand long-term SSC effects on student achievement. We will conduct statistical analyses of (1) SSC effects on graduation rates for later student cohorts and at five and six years after students enter high school, and (2) the extent to which high school graduation attainment and college-readiness effects translate into gains in future educational outcomes (postsecondary education enrollment, persistence, and completion) and future economic outcomes (employment and earnings).
- Understand whether SSC effects persist as the recent school reforms in New York City move toward steady state. We will conduct quantitative analyses of the extent to which SSC effects persist as the larger school system of which they are a part evolves.
What's Next
A series of publications will be released each year with updated findings. The first, in January 2012, will examines four-year graduation effects for a second cohort of students, five-year graduation effects for the first cohort, and effects across student population subgroups.
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