The conditions and demands took their toll, on individual teachers and the schools themselves as they tried to build a culture of success amid staggering turnover. "New teachers come in—12 new teachers, 12 distinct cultures. It affects the gestalt. The sum of the parts doesn't equal the whole," says Ukoidemabia.
City Limits Magazine
March 2010:
Hope or Hype in Harlem
News Topics
Justice
Education
Author
Helen Zelon
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The tension between the teaching staff at Promise Academy I and the HCZ board came to a tumultuous head in March 2007, when, after three years of consistently dismal test scores, Canada elected to close enrollment in the middle school for a year. No new sixth-graders were to be admitted—a luxury that an open-enrollment neighborhood school, which is by law obliged to educate all youngsters within its catchment zone, could never entertain. (The school also decided not to admit sixth-graders the following year, "restarting" the middle school in grade five. It also ended the practice of the middle school admissions lottery and began the preschool lottery that determines eventual enrollment in the Promise Academy. Neither strategy would be permitted in conventional open-enrollment schools.)
As it closed the entrance to new kids, the Promise Academy also ushered existing students out the exit. Of the 100 eighth graders who were the inaugural Promise Academy middle school students—those who entered the school with the understanding that they would continue through 12th grade there—65 remained in the academy when the board stopped enrollment. That May, they were hastily "graduated" and placed in city and private high schools. Where the kids ended up is not clear.
"We don't track them in the sense that we evaluate our own kids," says HCZ spokesperson Lipp, who couldn't detail where that cohort went to high school or discuss their progress toward graduation. "We don't track them as a group, like we would track our eighth-graders." This division—"our" eighth graders vs. the children who were once Promise Academy eighth-graders—stands in sharp contrast to the oft repeated promise of the Promise Academy and the HCZ: Once a child is in the HCZ pipeline, they're secure and supported all the way through college. Here, children who once were in are now out.
In the fall of 2008, the Promise Academy I middle school again accepted new students. But instead of admitting sixth-graders, the decision was made to start fresh with fifth graders who came up from the Promise Academy lower grades, effectively controlling the quality and previous education of students entering the middle school. The eighth-graders whose 2007 test score gains inspired Fryer and Dobbie's enthusiasm, just a year after the middle school hiatus went into effect, are now in the Promise Academy high school. In 2014, 10 years after it opened its doors, the Promise Academy will finally reach its full K-12 enrollment.
