The scene was set for Julius Caesar: white lanterns hung off the balcony; two blood-splattered columns stood sentinel before a scarlet platform and a row of crimson chairs. The audience stared expectantly at the stage. The man who strode to the microphone at center stage, however, spoke not of the might of the Roman Empire, but of the power of arts education and free learning.
“If you want a place that will challenge the way you think and the way you produce, this is the place for you,” said Frank Costanzo, Principal of New Haven’s Cooperative Arts and Humanities High School. “If you’re ready for academic rigor at a place that will nurture and cherish you, this is the place for you.”
That night — February 11 — some fifty families sat in the main theater at at the College Street high school, clutching applications and glossy brochures featuring student dancers, writers, actors, singers, musicians, and visual artists. The Open House night was for families, most from outside of New Haven, who were about to enter their children into the New Haven inter-district magnet school lottery.
New Haven’s magnet school program is one major component of its larger public education reform efforts, which have been praised across the nation. For instance, after the city overhauled its teacher evaluation system to unite teachers’ unions and school administrators, Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, said, “New Haven is the gold standard in terms of how you do things right.”
New Haven’s reform platform, as well as the nationwide school choice movement, advocates programs that offer alternatives to so-called neighborhood schools, or the public schools to which students are assigned according to their residence. In the United States, there are a variety of methods of choice. Wisconsin, Ohio, Florida, and Georgia, among other states, subsidize private education through vouchers; other states offer tax credits to individuals for donating to education. These donations can then be converted to scholarships for students. In New York City, students can take entrance exams to be selected for one of nine specialized high schools, including Brooklyn Tech, Bronx Science, and Stuyvesant.
Several states, including Connecticut, offer charter and magnet schools as alternatives to neighborhood schools. A charter school is publicly funded yet independently run, and is founded generally by parents, community groups, or teachers. While other cities have focused on charters, New Haven has directed a great deal of funding and attention into developing its magnet schools; these are public schools that offer specialized instruction and programs otherwise unavailable. In New Haven, the magnets have become increasingly selective, and often attract students from outside the city’s school district.
Elizabeth Carroll, the director of Yale’s Education Studies program, lauded innovation in magnet schools. “The fact that suburban students are traveling here to New Haven, as opposed to staying in their more affluent areas, I think, speaks well to the opportunities they’re being offered here,” she told The Politic. “In other cities, you’ll see magnet schools that are just for students within that district. The curricula and facilities that these magnet schools offer are incredible, and I can totally understand why someone would choose to get on a bus to come and go to school there with people not from their town.”
Yet while the magnets have undeniably strong records in terms of academics and diversity, they tend to draw a disproportionate amount of the district’s attention and resources. Thus, they have provoked a barrage of questions for local officials and a heated debate across the city. And as the role magnet schools play in New Haven’s reform agenda becomes more and more central, this debate will only continue to grow.
***
Magnet schools, developed to attract a more diverse student body, arose in response to protests over racial segregation in public schools. In 1968, Tacoma, Washington opened the McCarver Elementary School, the nation’s first magnet school. Connecticut developed its magnet program more recently, after the Connecticut Supreme Court ruled in Sheff v. O’Neill (1996) that the state government was not providing all Connecticut public school students with an equal opportunity for education; the court gave the state department of education five years to equalize its schools. It was in the wake of this decision that Connecticut developed its magnet school program.
In the seventeen years since the Sheff decision, New Haven has developed the largest magnet program in Connecticut, and one of the most prominent in the country. Today, twenty of New Haven’s 46 public schools are magnet schools. (Of the ten non-charter high schools in New Haven, only two schools are comprehensive traditional, non-magnet neighborhood schools). What’s more, the magnet schools do not serve New Haven students exclusively. New Haven, along with Bridgeport and Hartford, runs an Open District school choice program. In each school, seventy percent of the spots in the school are reserved for residents of the city; the other thirty percent are open to any Connecticut resident. Of the 7,325 current students enrolled in New Haven’s inter-district magnet schools, 3,000 — 41 percent — are from other districts.
Each magnet school has its own focus or structure. Superintendent Garth Harries explained to The Politic that the district develops a school’s theme by working directly with the founders of the school and evaluating the portfolio of schools already established: “Our hope is to have a wide array of schools that are attractive to different families, including different magnet schools of different kinds. The most important thing about a magnet theme isn’t the theme itself, but that the theme is a unifying scaffold for instruction so that you have teachers working together to build professional learning communities around the theme.”
In New Haven at least, magnet schools are known for being hotspots of innovation. Costanzo, the Principal of Co-op High School, argued that Co-op, with its extensive arts program, fills an important niche in the community. “Many kids come with previous talent in some art form, but some don’t, so we work hard to cultivating our culture right from the get-go, from the freshman year, to get students to understand that this is a different, special place, and to be a part of this culture, you really have to embrace and celebrate the arts.” Co-op has worked to center its curricula on mastery-based learning, in which students are coached to learn at their own pace. In addition to spending an hour and a half per day on their respective art — music, dance, creative writing, theatre, or visual arts — students, said Costanzo, also complete a rigorous academic program. Co-op was praised by the College Board for its recently-developed AP program and high SAT scores. In 2012, it graduated 90.4 percent of its senior class, up from 82.1 percent in 2011.
And Co-op is not alone in emphasizing the arts in public education. Sophie Dillon ’17, who graduated from Wilbur Cross Comprehensive High School, lauded New Haven’s work on the arts. Dillon attended Worthington Hooker Middle School, then split her time in high school between Wilbur Cross and the Educational for the Arts, a selective afternoon magnet program for creative writing, dance, music, theatre, and visual arts in downtown New Haven. “I can’t rave about the program enough,” Dillon said. “All of the teachers are practicing artists and the classes are really small. Kids come from all over Connecticut to the program, and it’s simply amazing.”
In a city with many de facto segregated neighborhoods, New Haven magnet high schools are also remarkably diverse. For instance, Co-op is currently about 50 percent black, 25 percent white, and 25 percent Hispanic. “We [offer] between 70 and 75 percent free and reduced lunch. You factor in all of that, and our demographics, and it’s an extraordinary place,” Costanzo said. “Students are interacting with kids that they might not otherwise have met, whether they’re from Guilford or Madison, or from Fair Haven Heights. And those are the kinds of things that really benefit kids who come here.”
James Doss-Gollin ’15, an alumnus of Wilbur Cross and the founder of New Haven Reach, a student-run organization that coordinates college access efforts for New Haven students, praised the diversity of the magnet schools. However, he also noted the tension associated with attracting suburban kids. “Even though we charge other school districts to send their kids to schools here, it’s still frustrating for parents from New Haven when they want to get their kids into magnet schools, and are told there’s no space.”
Indeed, the lottery for admission is a grueling process: last year, Co-op alone received 528 applications from New Haven residents for 103 freshman spots (19.5 percent acceptance rate), and 338 suburban applications for 70 seats (20.7 percent acceptance rate). Many parents appealed for more transparency in the lottery process so as to select their top three schools based on their chances of getting in.
“I think that’s been a reasonable criticism of the Board of Education — that it’s hard to navigate and to find out about our resources,” Harries, the Superintendent, acknowledged. In early 2013, however, the district published the magnet lottery data for the first time. Doss-Gollin added, “They’ve also done a lot of work with eighth graders to try and get them to think about where they want to go, so I think they’re definitely moving in the right direction to try and make the magnets more accessible.” This improvement is pivotal in neighborhood schools, which suffer from a lack of parental involvement because, as Doss-Gollin explained, many parents “either can’t speak English, lack an education themselves, don’t have time, or don’t care.”
New Haven’s choice to opt for magnet schools rather than neighborhood schools likewise affects the involvement of schools in their communities. “I think you gain a lot and you lose a lot from the choice not to have a high school in every neighborhood,” Doss-Gollin said. “Although magnet schools are often less segregated than neighborhood schools, you lose some of the sense of community in magnets. You don’t have teachers who can look at a kid in class and say, ‘You better stop acting up, because I know your mother.’” On the other hand, Costanzo emphasized that Co-op is taking advantage of its downtown location and its “opportunities for partnerships that other schools don’t have access to.”
Similarly, Harries and Costanzo both raised the issue of student mobility in New Haven — when students move from one school to another for disciplinary or other reasons — and its differing effects on magnet and comprehensive schools. Costanzo admitted that magnet schools seldom deal with students who change schools during the year, noting that “student mobility and transience have some real consequences for classroom learning,” and “neighborhood schools have borne the brunt of that burden.”
Carroll, of Yale’s Education Studies program, added, “I think there are legitimate questions to ask about who ends up going to comprehensive schools. Is it the kids whose parents who couldn’t, weren’t aware of, and just didn’t take added initiative of getting kids in lotteries? Those could be potential reasons for the overall lower performance of comprehensive schools. That would be something potentially concerning, that the school choice program could exacerbate gaps in achievement and opportunity within New Haven schools.”
Indeed, magnet schools not only receive state per-pupil funding for each student they draw from other districts, but, in recent years, several New Haven magnet and charter schools have been the recipients of federal grants. For instance, the New Haven Independent reported that on September 26, 2013, the U.S. Department of Education awarded New Haven $11 million over three years to develop four schools into STEM-themed magnet schools, including the Strong School, a K-4 21st Century Communications Magnet and Lab School, and the K-8 Celentano Biotech, Health, and Medicine Magnet School.
Meanwhile, Doss-Gollin remembered that at Wilbur Cross, the paper supply would run out by early May, and when teachers went to request more supplies, they were met with bureaucratic obstacles. He explained that Wilbur Cross and James Hillhouse Comprehensive High School have become “dumping schools,” but continued, “there’s nothing wrong with that, as long as you give them the resources to cope. It’s objectively fine to send all the kids who are learning English as a second language to Wilbur Cross, but if you don’t give them the resources to deal with those students, then you have a problem.”
The bottom-line for New Haven high school education reform, said Doss-Gollin, is that the district should focus on Wilbur Cross and Hillhouse in order to “improve the educational outcomes of kids in New Haven. The magnet schools have a really important role, but Cross [at 1,284 students] is bigger than several of the magnet schools put together, and a lot of the magnet school students aren’t from New Haven.”
On the topic of funding allocation, he remarked, “The same grants going to magnet schools could be doing a lot more for a school [with] a 58 percent graduation rate, like Wilbur Cross, than one with a 85 percent graduation rate. At Wilbur Cross, giving the soccer team a beautiful field could have ensured that twenty more kids stayed in school every year. When we’d do our end-of-the-season ceremony for soccer, there were always kids who said, ‘I would not have graduated if this hadn’t kept me coming back every day,’ and they meant it.” He continued, “Our goalie was working forty hours a week on top of going to high school and everything else, and soccer was what motivated him to keep working really hard and showing up to school instead of dropping out so he could put in more shifts.”
After acknowledging the tensions inherent to New Haven’s school reform programs, Harries stressed that the district was working to guarantee an equitable distribution of resources among both magnet and comprehensive schools. “We need to be mindful that it is a portfolio of schools,” he said, “and one set of schools’ success can’t come on the backs of what happens in other schools.”
***
At the end of the day, many of the issues in New Haven public schools fall outside the typical school choice debate. Doss-Gollin recalled — although he could not blame them — that many teachers at Wilbur Cross “are so worn down from trying on students who have been in and out of jail, or from losing their students to violence. It’s incredibly hard to teach like that. In my sophomore year, this kid, who was everyone’s friend and was loved by all the teachers, was murdered. When there’s stuff like that going on in your community regularly, it’s hard to learn.”
Dillon and Doss-Gollin both pointed out that Wilbur Cross often seems like multiple schools under the same roof. Dillon recalled, “There was a real dichotomy between kids who were enrolled in AP and Honors classes, and those who were not. Sometimes, if you weren’t in AP classes, you’d get left behind.”
Harries said that he is prioritizing closing this gap between high- and low-achieving students. “I really want to emphasize disengaged youth in particular,” he said. “I tend to think that those students that are becoming over-aged and under-credited show the problems in our system most acutely, and so it’s always been the case that the district has tried to help those students, but I want to ensure that the district helps them systematically by identifying students before they become disengaged and take aggressive action to make sure they have the opportunity to see their future through school, instead of through activities outside of school.”
With their innovative curricula and programs, magnet schools are often heralded by proponents as effective tools in the fight to lessen the divide Harries noted. Indeed, opponents of magnet schools are often opponents of school choice in general. And they are just as passionate in their defense of traditional public schools as school choice advocates are for charters and magnets.
Carroll pointed out the realistic consequences of school choice: “Competition fosters incentives for people or schools to do what they need to do to improve and be chosen as a school where people want to go; if they don’t succeed, they’ll be shut down.” Yet she contended, “I don’t think that people are right in saying that school choice is the silver bullet for public education. Offering school choice, even on the inter-district level, as New Haven does with magnets, can be a really helpful piece of the bigger strategy to improve schools across the board. And it can be a way to [increase] family engagement with schools — when families feel they have some say in what school their child goes to, they’ll be more likely to be involved with school, which leads to host of benefits.”
She paused, before elaborating. “By and large, the argument to expand school choice has merit… And, through efforts to improve neighborhood schools, one would hope that they would, on their own, become attractive options. I think that if people felt that they had a good option in their neighborhood school, they’d prefer to send their kid to the local school rather than busing them across town… The more quality options that New Haven can provide, the better. We want our city to be able to serve the wide priorities that people have for their kids’ education. And that seems to be what they’re doing.”
Although magnet schools clearly impact neighborhood schools, Harries explained that research on the “impact of magnets on other schools, particularly in terms of enrollment,” has yet to be done.
“I do want us to maintain our emphasis on magnets in the district,” he added. “I think that the idea of choice and choice system is really important and valuable, but we need to make sure that we’re prevented unintended consequences on other schools.”