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Building Smart Education Systems |
Voices in Urban Education
Archives
High School Redesign
VUE Number 8, Summer 2005
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Portfolios of Schools: An Idea Whose Time Has Come
By Constancia Warren and Mindy Hernandez
Constancia Warren is a senior program officer and director of urban high school initiatives and Mindy Hernandez is a program associate in the education division at Carnegie Corporation of New York.
> Author’s Biographies
Audio Clips
Interview with Constancia Warren. Transcripts included.
LISTEN [2 minute, 2 seconds]
What do you mean by a portfolio of schools?
LISTEN [2 minute, 16 seconds]
What do districts have to do to create portfolios of schools?
LISTEN [2 minute, 24 seconds]
What are the challenges involved in creating and maintaining a portfolio?
To meet the goal of ensuring success for all students in their school systems, cities are developing portfolios of varied, high-quality schools based on values of excellence, equity, diversity, and choice.
In 2001, as part of the Schools for a New Society initiative, Carnegie Corporation helped launch a nationwide high school reform movement by supporting the efforts of seven cities1 to transform the way their districts and communities organized and supported high schools. At the same time, New York City, with support from Carnegie Corporation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Open Society Institute, launched the New Century High Schools initiative to transform the city's lowest-performing high schools into successful smaller schools. The core challenge in both initiatives is to create entire systems of excellent high schools.
Four years later, a powerful pattern is emerging in New York City, the seven Schools for a New Society cities, and other cities around the country that are experimenting with high school and district reform. In different ways, each city is creating an exciting variety of high schools, most of them small learning environments, and many involving external community partners. Cities are developing new small schools, dividingexisting large high schools into small learning communities and small high schools, granting charters for new schools, and writing contracts with community-based organizations that operate educational programs where youth can complete high school. In this article, we attempt to position the ambitious and promising work we see in each of these cities within a strong conceptual framework.
The term being used to describe this diversification of organizational format, educational approach, and governance is portfolio of schools. In one sense, this term evokes the financial market, with the portfolio seen as a way of organizing the investment of public funds in the education of our children. But it is also a concept drawn from the arts, where the portfolio is an array of work that demonstrates, in different ways, the capacity of the creator — in this case, the school district and the community. A portfolio of schools is much more than a mix of schools among which students choose. It is a strategy for creating an entire system of excellent high schools that uses managed universal choice as a central lever in a district change process.
Transforming high schools is urgently needed if we are to ensure that today's young people become capable and confident young adults who are able to participate effectively in postsecondary education and training, secure economically stable and personally rewarding employment, and engage actively as democratic citizens. Creating systems of high-quality high schools that ensure this kind of success for all students is complex and daunting. But it is also necessary and possible if we acknowledge and confront in a systemic way the structural inequalities that lie at the center of our failing high schools. Replacing the traditional residentially zoned high school with a managed portfolio of excellent schools is a promising way to challenge the not-so-soft bigotry of the "opportunity gap" that feeds and fuels the stubborn gaps in achievement.
History and Emerging Practice
Small high schools already have a long history. And we all know some individual high schools — large and small — that are successful in preparing most of their students for success. To be sure,most school districts have several types of highschools, including magnet schools and alternatives for students at risk of dropping out. But if we are serious in our desire for a just and equitable society, the real question is: How do we create, in each of our communities, entire systems of individually excellent high schools that prepare all students for postsecondary education and training, employment, and citizenship and where excellence is the product of everyday practice?
In Carnegie Corporation's vision, all high schools in a portfolio share two essential characteristics. First, all the schools have a clear focus that serves to galvanize teachers' and students' work. One school might have an applied concentration, like health sciences, while another might offer a specific approach to learning, such as experiential education. Second, all schools in the portfolio are driven by the same high expectations for students' learning and provide both a rigorous, standards-based collegepreparatory curriculum and the academic and social supports students need to meet these high expectations. The portfolio provides multiple pathways to success, organized around a common core set of standards and instructional practices.
While choice is a central mechanism, the portfolio approach is not an unregulated free market. Students can choose from among a range of high schools based on their own interests, needs, and ambitions. Individual schools may be operated by a variety of providers — the district itself will operate most of the schools — but careful accountability and some degree of managed choice are critical elements of the model. To be effective, the portfolio of schools must not be allowed to become a new form of tracking that narrows rather than expands the opportunities available for students. A continual review of student and teacher assignment and student performance data is an essential component of maintaining a balanced and effective portfolio.
Finally, while the school district will still play a leadership role, the portfolio approach depends on building a powerful partnership between the school system and the community in which it operates, both to bring to bear the variety of resources that is needed for the education of young people and to make sure that all segments of the community are treated equitably. Districts operating portfolios of schools must work to overcome the pressure to give preferential treatment to one segment over another.
Core Values and Operational Commitments
Four values are central to our vision of a portfolio of schools: excellence, equity, diversity, and choice.
How do we create entire systems of individually excellent high schools where excellence is the product of everyday practice?
For the portfolio approach to deliver the high schools we need, excellence must be a core value. Whatever their focus or format, every school within the portfolio must be designed to help students meet rigorous academic standards and to prepare students for postsecondary education and/or professional training.
But we also know that the portfolio of schools cannot provide excellent choices for all students without explicitly addressing equity. The difficulties we now face in urban school systems reflect deeply embedded systemic inequities in the distribution of resources, teachers, students, and attention across the district. These inequities mirror the differential distribution of power and resources in the larger society and undermine students' access to excellent education. Breaking up the system through the portfolio's use of universal choice will disrupt some patterns of inequality. But because these inequities have a way of reappearing in new forms, portfolios of schools must be designed to include not only strategies to reduce their impact, but also monitoring and feedback strategies that keep these inequities from emerging in different ways.
At its core, the portfolio of schools embraces the diversity of individual aspirations and opportunities, learning styles, and cultural identities. Based on the findings from cognitive psychology that individuals have varied learning styles (see, for example, Gardner 1993; Kolb 1984; Messick 1976), as well as different interests, needs, and aspirations, we know that different schools are needed to provide a range of learning settings for students. This also is true for teachers. The portfolio capitalizes on the diversity of teachers' interests and talents and thereby increases the probability that teachers will feel more engaged by and committed to their work than in the traditional comprehensive high school model.
Choice has both intrinsic and instrumental value within a portfolio of schools. Choosing schools that respond to their individual and community interests and aspirations increases the likelihood that students will feel engaged by their school work, see its relevance to their future, be more committed to participating in the school as a community, and strive to achieve academically. A choice-based system also responds to adolescents' developmental need to explore different aspects of their emerging identity by choosing different kinds of schools and experiencing the consequences of their choices. Young people should help adults determine the range of choices by working jointly to decide what kinds of schools should be included in the portfolio and the kind of supports students and their communities might need to make those decisions.
To be effective, the portfolio needs to tap the creativity of teachers, students, and community members in everything from designing courses to designing schools in order to reduce the number of schools where too few children succeed.
At the same time, as parents and students choose which schools to attend, schools that are not serving students well will feel the pressure to improve or will be closed. To be effective, the portfolio needs to tap the creativity of teachers, students, and community members in everything from designing courses to designing schools in order to reduce the number of schools where too few children succeed.
These core values shape the operational commitments for implementing the portfolio. These commitments by districts and communities anchor the portfolio in city policy and community expectations. A portfolio cannot succeed without an ongoing substantial partnership in these areas. The cities involved in the Schools for a New Society and New Century High Schools initiatives, along with others, are beginning to put the following commitments into place.
Designing the Car While Driving: Emerging Lessons
and Opportunities for Future Research
A portfolio of schools may well involve some difficult trade-offs, and there is much we are still learning about the best way to implement this approach. To learn as much as we can, it is important to be transparent about what we need to know so that we can be strategic about where we focus our research and attention. For example, abandoning one-size-fits-all policies and replacing them with ones that can respond effectively to a diverse and dynamic mix of school formats and governance arrangements will likely increase the complexity of delivering operational supports. It may also create new opportunities for the application of unequal political power to gain educational advantages.
We also know that equitable choice is dependent on an equal distribution of accurate information. But there is unequal distribution of information; the neediest families have difficulty using information to advocate for their children. Our challenge is to provide all students and families with reliable information about their options and with the help they need to use that information. More research is therefore needed to know how most students and families are getting and using school information; who the non-choosing families are; and what constraints, priorities, and sense of agency interact to limit or shape their choices.
We are also concerned about ensuring that smaller, more personalized schools have adequate resources to offer all students the support and extended learning activities they need in order to thrive. If only some schools in the portfolio have the capacity to respond to special needs, hidden tracking and segregation may well become the unintended consequences of smaller schools. It would be useful to know what kinds of supports smaller schools are currently able to provide, how small schools and small learning communities can work together to provide additional supports for students, and how smaller learning environments can leverage community resources to offer additional activities and classes.
Final Thoughts
Implementing a portfolio of schools requires careful and watchful management and requires the steady collection and use of data to ensure that inequities do not reemerge. It also requires districts — working closely with community partners — to take on some unfamiliar roles. In particular, districts and their partners will have to create a pipeline of new schools to ensure a steady supply as needs change, design and manage a transparent and equitable guidance and admissions process, build the capacity of schools to excel for all students, and provide operational supports to schools.
We believe the portfolio approaches now emerging in urban school districts offer benefits that outweigh their risks. Remaining loyal to the core values that underlie our concept of a portfolio of schools — excellence, equity, diversity, and choice — offers our best chance to reap the benefits and minimize the risks. We must continually measure our efforts against those values to ensure that the portfolios of schools being developed in our cities continue to serve our young people well.
----------------------------------------------
FOOTNOTE
1
REFERENCES
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Archives
High School Redesign
VUE Number 8, Summer 2005
| VUE Home | Archives | Order Print Copy |
Portfolios of Schools: An Idea Whose Time Has Come
By Constancia Warren and Mindy Hernandez
Constancia Warren is a senior program officer and director of urban high school initiatives and Mindy Hernandez is a program associate in the education division at Carnegie Corporation of New York.
> Author’s Biographies
Audio Clips
Interview with Constancia Warren. Transcripts included.
LISTEN [2 minute, 2 seconds]
What do you mean by a portfolio of schools?
LISTEN [2 minute, 16 seconds]
What do districts have to do to create portfolios of schools?
LISTEN [2 minute, 24 seconds]
What are the challenges involved in creating and maintaining a portfolio?
To meet the goal of ensuring success for all students in their school systems, cities are developing portfolios of varied, high-quality schools based on values of excellence, equity, diversity, and choice.
In 2001, as part of the Schools for a New Society initiative, Carnegie Corporation helped launch a nationwide high school reform movement by supporting the efforts of seven cities1 to transform the way their districts and communities organized and supported high schools. At the same time, New York City, with support from Carnegie Corporation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Open Society Institute, launched the New Century High Schools initiative to transform the city's lowest-performing high schools into successful smaller schools. The core challenge in both initiatives is to create entire systems of excellent high schools.
Four years later, a powerful pattern is emerging in New York City, the seven Schools for a New Society cities, and other cities around the country that are experimenting with high school and district reform. In different ways, each city is creating an exciting variety of high schools, most of them small learning environments, and many involving external community partners. Cities are developing new small schools, dividingexisting large high schools into small learning communities and small high schools, granting charters for new schools, and writing contracts with community-based organizations that operate educational programs where youth can complete high school. In this article, we attempt to position the ambitious and promising work we see in each of these cities within a strong conceptual framework.
The term being used to describe this diversification of organizational format, educational approach, and governance is portfolio of schools. In one sense, this term evokes the financial market, with the portfolio seen as a way of organizing the investment of public funds in the education of our children. But it is also a concept drawn from the arts, where the portfolio is an array of work that demonstrates, in different ways, the capacity of the creator — in this case, the school district and the community. A portfolio of schools is much more than a mix of schools among which students choose. It is a strategy for creating an entire system of excellent high schools that uses managed universal choice as a central lever in a district change process.
Transforming high schools is urgently needed if we are to ensure that today's young people become capable and confident young adults who are able to participate effectively in postsecondary education and training, secure economically stable and personally rewarding employment, and engage actively as democratic citizens. Creating systems of high-quality high schools that ensure this kind of success for all students is complex and daunting. But it is also necessary and possible if we acknowledge and confront in a systemic way the structural inequalities that lie at the center of our failing high schools. Replacing the traditional residentially zoned high school with a managed portfolio of excellent schools is a promising way to challenge the not-so-soft bigotry of the "opportunity gap" that feeds and fuels the stubborn gaps in achievement.
History and Emerging Practice
Small high schools already have a long history. And we all know some individual high schools — large and small — that are successful in preparing most of their students for success. To be sure,most school districts have several types of highschools, including magnet schools and alternatives for students at risk of dropping out. But if we are serious in our desire for a just and equitable society, the real question is: How do we create, in each of our communities, entire systems of individually excellent high schools that prepare all students for postsecondary education and training, employment, and citizenship and where excellence is the product of everyday practice?
In Carnegie Corporation's vision, all high schools in a portfolio share two essential characteristics. First, all the schools have a clear focus that serves to galvanize teachers' and students' work. One school might have an applied concentration, like health sciences, while another might offer a specific approach to learning, such as experiential education. Second, all schools in the portfolio are driven by the same high expectations for students' learning and provide both a rigorous, standards-based collegepreparatory curriculum and the academic and social supports students need to meet these high expectations. The portfolio provides multiple pathways to success, organized around a common core set of standards and instructional practices.
While choice is a central mechanism, the portfolio approach is not an unregulated free market. Students can choose from among a range of high schools based on their own interests, needs, and ambitions. Individual schools may be operated by a variety of providers — the district itself will operate most of the schools — but careful accountability and some degree of managed choice are critical elements of the model. To be effective, the portfolio of schools must not be allowed to become a new form of tracking that narrows rather than expands the opportunities available for students. A continual review of student and teacher assignment and student performance data is an essential component of maintaining a balanced and effective portfolio.
Finally, while the school district will still play a leadership role, the portfolio approach depends on building a powerful partnership between the school system and the community in which it operates, both to bring to bear the variety of resources that is needed for the education of young people and to make sure that all segments of the community are treated equitably. Districts operating portfolios of schools must work to overcome the pressure to give preferential treatment to one segment over another.
Core Values and Operational Commitments
Four values are central to our vision of a portfolio of schools: excellence, equity, diversity, and choice.
How do we create entire systems of individually excellent high schools where excellence is the product of everyday practice?
For the portfolio approach to deliver the high schools we need, excellence must be a core value. Whatever their focus or format, every school within the portfolio must be designed to help students meet rigorous academic standards and to prepare students for postsecondary education and/or professional training.
But we also know that the portfolio of schools cannot provide excellent choices for all students without explicitly addressing equity. The difficulties we now face in urban school systems reflect deeply embedded systemic inequities in the distribution of resources, teachers, students, and attention across the district. These inequities mirror the differential distribution of power and resources in the larger society and undermine students' access to excellent education. Breaking up the system through the portfolio's use of universal choice will disrupt some patterns of inequality. But because these inequities have a way of reappearing in new forms, portfolios of schools must be designed to include not only strategies to reduce their impact, but also monitoring and feedback strategies that keep these inequities from emerging in different ways.
At its core, the portfolio of schools embraces the diversity of individual aspirations and opportunities, learning styles, and cultural identities. Based on the findings from cognitive psychology that individuals have varied learning styles (see, for example, Gardner 1993; Kolb 1984; Messick 1976), as well as different interests, needs, and aspirations, we know that different schools are needed to provide a range of learning settings for students. This also is true for teachers. The portfolio capitalizes on the diversity of teachers' interests and talents and thereby increases the probability that teachers will feel more engaged by and committed to their work than in the traditional comprehensive high school model.
Choice has both intrinsic and instrumental value within a portfolio of schools. Choosing schools that respond to their individual and community interests and aspirations increases the likelihood that students will feel engaged by their school work, see its relevance to their future, be more committed to participating in the school as a community, and strive to achieve academically. A choice-based system also responds to adolescents' developmental need to explore different aspects of their emerging identity by choosing different kinds of schools and experiencing the consequences of their choices. Young people should help adults determine the range of choices by working jointly to decide what kinds of schools should be included in the portfolio and the kind of supports students and their communities might need to make those decisions.
To be effective, the portfolio needs to tap the creativity of teachers, students, and community members in everything from designing courses to designing schools in order to reduce the number of schools where too few children succeed.
At the same time, as parents and students choose which schools to attend, schools that are not serving students well will feel the pressure to improve or will be closed. To be effective, the portfolio needs to tap the creativity of teachers, students, and community members in everything from designing courses to designing schools in order to reduce the number of schools where too few children succeed.
These core values shape the operational commitments for implementing the portfolio. These commitments by districts and communities anchor the portfolio in city policy and community expectations. A portfolio cannot succeed without an ongoing substantial partnership in these areas. The cities involved in the Schools for a New Society and New Century High Schools initiatives, along with others, are beginning to put the following commitments into place.
- The school district commits to playing the central role in creating, managing, and sustaining a system of individually excellent public high schools and guaranteeing all students access to these schools. In Sacramento, the district leadership divided large high schools into small learning communities, started four new small schools as independent charters, and granted an independent charter to a community-based organization to divide a large high school into six small schools.
- The district, through its portfolio, commits to promoting diversity – of students and programs – both within and between schools. Each school includes a mix of students, providing all with both academically challenging work and the supports needed to succeed. At the same time, the different schools in the portfolio include multiple options that address the full range of students' learning styles, interests, needs, and aspirations. Providence has matched its school options to students' diverse interests and academic needs by creating small schools, including a newcomer academy, an ungraded school where students progress through demonstrated mastery, a school focused on international studies, and another focused on health sciences and technology. In addition, Providence is working to divide its large high schools into small learning communities organized around curricular themes.
- The district, through its portfolio, commits to serving a diverse constituency of students, from those who are able to accelerate learning to those who are disconnected from school. Boston is considering a flexible promotion policy that would allow students to progress through high school as they complete course requirements, rather than moving from grade to grade. It also has created a small school for older adolescents who have not yet completed a high school diploma.
- The district, through its portfolio, commits to applying universal standards of excellence across schools and to providing supports that enable teachers and students to reach those standards. Chattanooga is creating a "single path" to graduation; the school board adopted a policy eliminating a two-track diploma and supporting schools to implement the change by expanding the use of literacy coaches to increase reading skills for all students.
- The district, through its portfolio, commits to providing and operationalizing equitable choice. Districts manage student choices by developing a sufficient supply of excellent options so that all students can find a place in at least one of their top choices. Districts also need to take action to close schools that do not serve students well and work closely with community organizations and personalinstitutions to help guide students' and families' decisions. At the same time, the district must focus on eliminating the ways that advantaged families circumvent the studentallocation process. In New York City, the district tries to accomplish these goals through programming that assigns students to schools, taking into consideration their choices and the schools' different racial, ethnic, gender, and academic composition.
- The district, through its portfolio, commits to engaging community groups and youth in the portfolio development and management process.Worcester began its process of high school redesign by engaging cultural groups, community-based organizations, youth-serving organizations, and ethnic minority communities, along with businesses and higher-education institutions. The community has maintained its involvement through a citizens' coalition, and each of the small learning communities in Worcester high schools has formed a community advisory committee to produce a formal process for community engagement.
Designing the Car While Driving: Emerging Lessons
and Opportunities for Future Research
A portfolio of schools may well involve some difficult trade-offs, and there is much we are still learning about the best way to implement this approach. To learn as much as we can, it is important to be transparent about what we need to know so that we can be strategic about where we focus our research and attention. For example, abandoning one-size-fits-all policies and replacing them with ones that can respond effectively to a diverse and dynamic mix of school formats and governance arrangements will likely increase the complexity of delivering operational supports. It may also create new opportunities for the application of unequal political power to gain educational advantages.
We also know that equitable choice is dependent on an equal distribution of accurate information. But there is unequal distribution of information; the neediest families have difficulty using information to advocate for their children. Our challenge is to provide all students and families with reliable information about their options and with the help they need to use that information. More research is therefore needed to know how most students and families are getting and using school information; who the non-choosing families are; and what constraints, priorities, and sense of agency interact to limit or shape their choices.
We are also concerned about ensuring that smaller, more personalized schools have adequate resources to offer all students the support and extended learning activities they need in order to thrive. If only some schools in the portfolio have the capacity to respond to special needs, hidden tracking and segregation may well become the unintended consequences of smaller schools. It would be useful to know what kinds of supports smaller schools are currently able to provide, how small schools and small learning communities can work together to provide additional supports for students, and how smaller learning environments can leverage community resources to offer additional activities and classes.
Final Thoughts
Implementing a portfolio of schools requires careful and watchful management and requires the steady collection and use of data to ensure that inequities do not reemerge. It also requires districts — working closely with community partners — to take on some unfamiliar roles. In particular, districts and their partners will have to create a pipeline of new schools to ensure a steady supply as needs change, design and manage a transparent and equitable guidance and admissions process, build the capacity of schools to excel for all students, and provide operational supports to schools.
We believe the portfolio approaches now emerging in urban school districts offer benefits that outweigh their risks. Remaining loyal to the core values that underlie our concept of a portfolio of schools — excellence, equity, diversity, and choice — offers our best chance to reap the benefits and minimize the risks. We must continually measure our efforts against those values to ensure that the portfolios of schools being developed in our cities continue to serve our young people well.
----------------------------------------------
FOOTNOTE
1
REFERENCES
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