Yonkers schools pulled off a stunning turnaround. Can their blueprint help others?
A story in four parts
Introduction: Yonkers schools pulled off a stunning turnaround. Can their blueprint help others?
Changing school culture: When 1 in 3 students weren't graduating, Yonkers overhauled school culture
Keeping students on track: What Yonkers can teach urban schools about keeping students on track
The next challenge: The next challenge is preparing Yonkers students for life after high school
In 2015, Roosevelt High School in Yonkers got the kind of report card you hide from your parents.
Roosevelt was deemed a "failing school" by the state. It was reprimanded for a decade of poor test scores and a graduation rate of less than 60% in several straight Junes.
The school was threatened with a state takeover or conversion into a charter school. Staff morale was low. Teachers fled.
"They were talking about shutting us down," said Karina Reggina, an English teacher who had arrived in 2012. "We had to turn it around."
Seven years later, the school known as Roosevelt High School Early College Studies is a different place.
Ninth-graders are given individualized attention by a team of staff. Teachers plan together, receive weekly training, and do yoga as a group. Students are pushed to complete required classes by 10th grade so they can take courses for college credits. Applying to colleges — sometimes more than 20 — is a schoolwide obsession.
And the graduation rate? It was 96% in 2020 and 94% in 2021, counting August graduates, as the state now does.
"The biggest selling point for me was college readiness," said senior Sydney O’Malley, 17, explaining why she chose the school. "Our teachers focus on it and energize us to reach for the stars. Being at Roosevelt is being part of a community."
Roosevelt's comeback is one chapter in a longer story: how the Yonkers Public Schools have quietly overcome one of the great challenges facing urban schools in America — getting its students to graduate.
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For better or worse, the nation's public schools have long been judged by standardized test scores and high school graduation rates. That urban schools with high rates of student poverty perform poorly on these measures is a narrative that's as familiar and dreary as a mid-winter weather report.
In Yonkers, a city that was long known for political and racial strife, as well as pockets of poverty and crime, the public schools' graduation rate hovered in the 60s during the early 2000s. In other words, one out of three students did not graduate with their class.
But during the early 2010s, something began to give.
Yonkers' graduation rate started to creep up, into the low 70s, the high 70s, then the 80s.
In 2016, Yonkers became the first of New York State's "Big 5" school systems to see its graduation rate (83%) exceed the statewide average (82).
Then Yonkers hit 91% in 2020 and again in 2021. Those numbers were pumped up, no doubt, by relaxed standards for all schools during the pandemic. Still, Yonkers equaled the overall graduation rate in 2021 for Westchester County, an accomplishment that would have seemed impossible a decade ago.
Odds stacked against Yonkers
There's a long track record in the U.S. of urban school systems with high rates of community poverty being unable to help students overcome their disadvantages.
In Yonkers, New York's fourth largest school district, 80% of some 25,000 students in grades pre-K to 12 were classified as "economically disadvantaged," as of 2020. Nineteen percent had special needs and 13% had limited English proficiency. In recent years, the schools have seen hundreds of immigrant students show up mid-year with not only limited English, but with a range of formal schooling.
And yet, over two (sometimes tumultuous) decades, the Yonkers schools have tenaciously pursued a series of goals that people across the system believe have helped remake an urban school system. Among them:
Maintaining stable leadership, particularly at high school principal positions
Raising expectations for students, giving them individualized attention, and having safeguards to prevent students from falling through cracks
Creating a "college going culture" from kindergarten through high school
Emphasizing relationships among teachers, students and parents that build morale and chip away at the schools' still questionable reputation
Developing a unique partnership with a research-driven nonprofit, Yonkers Partners in Education, dedicated to seeing students succeed
Reliance on sometimes disputed "credit recovery" courses that officials believe give students a legitimate second shot at passing required courses
All the while, Yonkers' efforts were pushed along and influenced by national trends, including impatient calls for urban schools to better serve students of color and improve their graduation rates. Indeed, graduation rates have risen across New York State and the country.
But Yonkers' rise has outpaced other big city districts in New York, reaching heights that are getting noticed. State Education Commissioner Betty Rosa said that Yonkers' responsiveness to what students need has led to its success.
"The growth in Yonkers’ graduation rate is proof of the innovative strategies city, district, and school leaders are using to ensure a high-quality, equitable education for all students," she said.
Dia Bryant, executive director of the Education Trust-New York, a nonprofit that advocates aggressively for students of color, credits Superintendent Edwin Quezada for leading the district past traditional barriers to success in urban schools. Quezada, who came to the Bronx from the Dominican Republic at 15, has been a Yonkers educator since 1998 and superintendent since 2016.
"He's a solid leader who knows the complexities of his community and gets what it takes," Bryant said. "In many districts, the focus is on lots of things other than instruction. But Quezada keeps the focus on learning. Yonkers layers one approach after another to help kids."
The next challenge: post-graduation
Ironically, as Yonkers' graduation rate has reached over 90%, the education world has started to look beyond the granting of high school diplomas.
Since college degrees have become a prerequisite for professional mobility, the focus today is on whether high school graduates are prepared to succeed in college and the workforce.
Many high school graduates with mediocre grades, in Yonkers and elsewhere, never make it to college or don't last there, raising urgent questions about what K-12 school districts, states and colleges should do going forward.
Michael Sussman, a civil rights lawyer who took on Yonkers in a nationally known desegregation case, said that Yonkers has outpaced other big-city school systems in New York, "but still has a long way to go."
He said low test scores show that many students in urban schools are still not ready for college.
"This is statewide, not merely in Yonkers, and we need political leaders prepared to review the data and tell our people the truth," Sussman said.
Quezada insists that Yonkers students are ready for what's to come. But he also believes it's time for a national conversation, a public reckoning, about the next stage of supporting students from urban communities. That means after high school.
"We're getting them into college," he said. "There's so much work that we need to do around this ... to create a sense of urgency around what happens in college too.
"To me it's a crisis."
Read the next installment: When 1 in 3 students weren't graduating, Yonkers overhauled school culture
This article originally appeared on Rockland/Westchester Journal News: How Yonkers Public Schools boosted graduation rates
