The Chancellor Saved a Failing Harlem School, but Can It Be Fixed?

NEW YORK — At a celebratory concert in May, the new schools chancellor, Richard A. Carranza, stepped onto the stage of the Wadleigh Secondary School for the Performing and Visual Arts in Harlem to belt out “El Rey,” a mariachi classic.

Carranza, in one of his first moves as chancellor, had just reversed a Department of Education plan to close Wadleigh’s middle school for poor performance. In his brief remarks before launching into song, he rallied the crowd by casting those who had doubted the school — including the very department he now leads — as the villain.

“There are people out there that don’t think you can make it happen at Wadleigh,” he told the students, faculty and community members gathered in the auditorium. “There are people that don’t think that Wadleigh has the spirit to rise like the phoenix and be the school that it has always been.”

The truth is that Wadleigh, which serves grades sixth through 12th, has been a struggling school for years, especially its middle school, which was slated for closure in 2012, only to be saved by the efforts of politicians and community leaders, including Bill de Blasio, then the public advocate. In 2014, Wadleigh was placed in de Blasio’s program for failing schools, Renewal, giving it access to new resources and strategies.

Despite those efforts, not a single middle school student passed the state math test in 2015, 2016 or 2017. Enrollment plummeted, with only 47 children enrolled in the middle school by the 2016-17 school year. The historic school on West 114th Street became caught in what David Bloomfield, an education professor at Brooklyn College and the City University of New York Graduate Center, calls “a death spiral,” in which “low scores engender low enrollment, and that engenders lower scores, and then even fewer people will send their kids there.”

But within weeks of his arrival in New York, Carranza met with elected officials, community leaders, alumni, parents and rank-and-file staff who believed in Wadleigh, and listened to why they felt the school deserved another chance.

With their input, he announced a plan to save Wadleigh’s middle school. The plan will center on increased collaboration with another middle school in the building, Frederick Douglass Academy II. A new Wadleigh advisory board of community leaders will work out the details. The idea is that they will be able to hold school leaders accountable if necessary changes are not made.

“Everyone in the community recognized that we need to be a lot more hands-on with what’s happening in the school, and we can’t just leave it to the powers that be,” said Gigs Taylor-Stephenson, the school’s parents’ association president. “The only way you get answers to questions sometimes is to have a seat at the table.”

Carranza’s actions may signal his approach to other failing schools throughout the city, emphasizing community involvement. It is a shift from Carmen Fariña, the last chancellor, who spent most of her time working on improving schools from within. And it is a sea change from the Bloomberg administration, which closed dozens of schools it deemed to be failing, with little regard for community pushback.

Carranza summed up his philosophy in a statement: “We can’t do things to communities, it is not enough to do things for communities, we have to do things with communities,” he said.

But whether the plan can actually change Wadleigh for the better is an open question.

Aaron Pallas, a professor of sociology and education at Teachers College, Columbia University, noted that Wadleigh has trouble with order, safety, teacher-principal trust, instructional leadership and the coherence of its teaching, according to city statistics. Only 53 percent of Wadleigh’s teachers, for example, agreed that order and discipline were maintained there.

How the new plan will result in “better leadership, better teaching, more trust, more order and safety is still a big mystery to me,” Pallas said.

The school’s supporters — including nearly the entire political establishment of Harlem, the president of the NAACP’s New York branch and the head of the Harlem Chamber of Commerce — argue that its abysmal test scores are not the whole story. The school, which moved to its Harlem location in 1902, had met two-thirds of its Renewal school bench marks, though the rigor of those requirements has been questioned.

Enrollment in the middle school increased to 70 students last year, they pointed out, with some 300 city families listing the school on their middle school applications. And its test scores, as low as they were, were only slightly worse than those at schools with similar student populations.

The community leaders explained to Carranza that the school’s math teachers had left en masse in the 2015-16 school year, after differences with school leaders, and that there had been a revolving door of math teachers since. Despite two new principals in the past few years, someone with experience in improving struggling schools had not been put in place.

“If a school is a turnaround school, you need to give them a principal that knows how to turn around schools,” said Brian A. Benjamin, a state senator, who came up with the idea to have the school collaborate with Frederick Douglass, where 30 percent of middle school students were proficient in math last year. “If you start an ice cream company, wouldn’t you bring in someone who knows how to deliver ice cream?”

Daisy Fontanez, Wadleigh’s current principal, declined to comment.

Paul McIntosh, the school’s longtime librarian and another leader in the fight to save the school, said, “There have been efforts to blame the victim for a long time. But if there was the will to make this right, to really edify these young people; if one is approaching it with a pure heart, it would be done.” The deal was struck after an April 19 meeting at City Hall with the politicians and leaders. At the meeting, de Blasio explained that the school’s current performance was not acceptable, several leaders said. Then Carranza asked for suggestions, and Benjamin suggested the two middle schools work together. Carranza said he thought it could work, but also asked the leaders to commit to participating in the schools’ transformation.

He withdrew the closure four days later, and asked the Harlem leaders to sign a “covenant of unity” agreeing to work with the city toward merging the middle school grades of the two schools. Since that time, however, the education department has walked back the idea of a merger, saying community leaders preferred a less formal collaboration.

Omitted from the plan was any mention of the third middle school in the building, the high-performing charter school on the fifth floor. At Success Academy Harlem West, some 91 percent of middle school students passed the state math test last year. But there is little collaboration between the two district middle schools and the Success Academy school, because tensions in the building are high.

Success Academy’s chief operating officer, Eva S. Moskowitz, is suing the city to get more classrooms in the building, pointing out that as Wadleigh’s enrollment shrinks, it has far more space per child in the building than her growing middle school.

“Charters are treated from a space perspective as second-class citizens,” Moskowitz said in an interview. “At Wadleigh, for some time, it has been particularly egregious. We have been asking for diminished discrimination.”

The charter school was the “elephant in the room” in the meeting with Carranza, but it was not mentioned, Benjamin said. It is difficult to overstate the antipathy some of the gathered leaders have toward the Success network, whose 46 schools now teach 15,500 children citywide.

“We will fight till hell freezes over,” said Hazel Dukes of the NAACP. “Whatever she got now, that’s all she’s going to have.”

The details of the turnaround plan will be developed in collaboration with the new community advisory council, Taylor-Stephenson said. Wadleigh will continue to receive additional resources and instructional time through the Renewal program, and Wadleigh’s high school will receive an infusion of money through the Arts High School Planning Process to help it become a popular citywide arts school. A leadership change has not yet been announced.

In Wadleigh’s district, District 3, children choose the middle schools they want to attend, so part of the school’s challenge will be getting families to put it on their lists despite its difficulties. One argument for saving Wadleigh’s middle school was so it could serve as a feeder for neighborhood children into the high school. But the high school at Wadleigh has problems, too.

Last year, 51 percent of its students were chronically absent, meaning they missed 10 percent or more of the school year, according to city statistics. Though many students graduated with accomplishments in the arts, only 27 percent of them graduated college-ready, compared with an average of 47 percent citywide. Pallas of Teachers College said he thought Carranza’s decision to save Wadleigh as a first act seemed more about building a political constituency than about crafting a detailed turnaround plan. Asking community leaders to sign a written pledge, he said, seemed like a strategy to share responsibility, and perhaps blame, if something goes wrong.

On stage at the school on May 7, Carranza told the crowd that proving Wadleigh’s doubters wrong was not just his responsibility, but theirs, too.

“I’m going to ask you this,” he said, his voice rising. “If you are here today, l want you to join with us, and let’s make a solemn promise, that we are going to do everything we can to not only show those haters that we can do it, but we are going to show them just how good we can be.”