Yale Daily News

From his formalwear boutique on College Street, Greg Karachristos has been outfitting Yalies for 24 years. Now he has a new neighbor: the New Haven Cooperative Arts and Humanities High School, which opened in January and is a part of New Haven Mayor John DeStefano’s $1.5 billion plan to renovate or rebuild every facility in the New Haven public school district.

“It’s beautiful, very pretty,” Karachristos said of the school, standing in his small and somewhat industrial feeling suit-filled shop on Sept. 3, as he glanced across the street at the 140,000 square foot facility. But, he added, he still wouldn’t send his children there.

“I would rather send my kids to private school,” he said.

He is not without his reasons. For years, New Haven’s public school district has struggled to improve its reputation and students’ scores on state-administered tests. Now, DeStefano and Superintendent Reginald Mayo are leading what Mayo termed “an ambitious reform effort” to make New Haven’s school district a model for other cities. And, at a time when DeStefano is seeking a ninth term as mayor, he is making this effort a centerpiece of his campaign.

“Looking forward to another two years in office, [school reform] is the greatest opportunity and the most important goal for the mayor,” said Keya Jayaram, DeStefano’s campaign manager.

Meanwhile, 18 out of 20 community members interviewed said the mayor’s educational reform endeavors have yielded underwhelming results. Statistical reports by the Connecticut Department of Education also indicate that DeStefano’s attempts at improving the performance of New Haven’s public school students have met little success.

On the other hand, government officials said they are confident that the now reinvigorated effort will produce results. Given the views of community members interviewed, they have their work cut out for them.

CONCERNED CITIZENS

Wednesday afternoon, two hours after her school day had ended, freshman Sadie Schroeder prepared to board a New Haven bus for home.

A student at the Hill Regional Career High School in the Hill neighborhood whose favorite subject is science, Schroeder said she plans to become a nurse after graduating from college. But, she added, she is unsure the New Haven public school system will get her there.

“Our classes are so short,” Schroeder said of her school’s blocks, which run between 55 and 80 minutes. She said she believes she is falling behind others against whom she will be competing in the college admissions process.

At the Family Dollar store across from the bus stop, Michelle Hall said she is worried the New Haven public school system is not adequately educating her two children, who are enrolled in first grade and kindergarten at New Haven public schools.

While she said she does appreciate the building renovation effort that DeStefano has led, she said would rather her kids had more teachers, more class time and more after-school programs.

“They look nice I guess,” Hall said of the schools. “But what’s the point?”

Inside the Branford College dining hall, Yale Dining cook Flo Wexler said her kids need basics, such as better textbooks and more teachers; DeStefano, she said, had overspent on renovating all the new schools.

“I could learn in a box,” she said.

Down Chapel Street, Aleea Bailey, a senior at High School in the Community, said she was frustrated about overcrowded classes. Her Honors Spanish class, for example, has 32 students, up from 22 in previous years.

“He has made all these beautiful schools so people think he’s done a lot,” she said of Mayor DeStefano’s school reform efforts. “But we need a better education, not fancier classrooms.”

Asked about citizens’ criticisms of the school renovation project as too focused on building beautiful structures and not focused enough on addressing problems in the classroom, City Hall spokeswoman Jessica Mayorga said that, under the mayor’s stewardship, New Haven public schools have experienced dramatic improvements in the areas of increasing graduation rates and gains in students’ scores on the Connecticut Mastery Test, an assessment given to students in grades three through eight. Moreover, she said that city’s magnet school program continues to draw student from across the state to New Haven.

“The mayor, along with Superintendent Mayo, have made New Haven schools state of the art laboratories for learning, not only because of the impressive new buildings, but also because of what’s happening in the classroom,” Mayorga said. “But the mayor and Dr. Mayo recognize that while we’ve come a long way, we still have a great deal to accomplish.”

A MISPLACED FOCUS

School reform has been an integral part of DeStefano’s political platform since he first ran for mayor in 1993, but critics interviewed said his focus has been misplaced.

“He did a good job rebuilding the buildings,” said Paul Bass, founder of the New Haven Independent, author of several books on New Haven, and a lecturer at the Yale School of Management . “But for a lot of years he didn’t pay a lot of attention to what went on inside.”

Bass, who has been chronicling DeStefano for 23 years, said the school system’s low students’ test scores are the result of a lack of attention and low expectations.

Test scores among New Haven students have remained stagnant over the past decade. In 2009, about half of all New Haven public school students passed each section of the Connecticut Academic Performance Test, which is mandatory for all students, and that figure has hardly changed since 2001. These scores leave New Haven students far behind the average state rate of approximately 80 percent, according to the Connecticut State Department of Education.

Additionally, though New Haven’s high school dropout rate has fallen by almost 50 percent since 1997, it is still almost double the statewide dropout rate.

But administrators said that is changing now. In the past few months, school officials have been placing renewed emphasis on making “exponential improvements” instead of “incremental improvements” to students’ test scores, Mayorga said — a shift which the school system’s spokeswoman, Michelle Wade, attributed in part to President Barack Obama’s prioritization of educational reform.

Recently, DeStefano has been following closely the school reform efforts taking place in Chicago and Washington, D.C., and is determined to model his own efforts upon them, Bass said.

“There’s been a sea change,” he said of the mayor’s attitude over the last six months. “Education has been identified as the number one policy challenge to the city.”

The mayor’s three concrete goals for New Haven’s public schools are the elimination of the achievement gap by 2015, a 50 percent reduction in the dropout rate by 2014, and 100 percent of its students heading off to college, Wade said.

In order to help the schools meet these goals, DeStefano has recruited teams of experts on education from across the nation to improve the school system’s efficiency. One group of experts from the New Teacher Project, a national nonprofit dedicated to helping school districts hire and train educators, has been working with New Haven teachers and administrators to determine how the district can attract and retain teachers.

What specific changes the mayor will make are not currently known, and will not be until the New Teacher Project makes its recommendations. Mayorga declined to say when that would be.

Since winning his first mayoral election in 1993, DeStefano has served eight terms as New Haven’s mayor. This fall, he faces three opponents, all of whom are running as independents. The election will take place Nov. 3.

Correction: October 6, 2009

A previous version of this article contained several errors. The Hill Regional Career High School is in the Hill neighborhood, not Wooster Square. High School in the Community was misidentified as the Community Interdistrict Magnet.