In 2009, the City of New Haven and New Haven Public Schools (NHPS) announced the start of a set of educational reforms within the district to improve schooling experiences and outcomes for students: the School Change Initiative (School Change). By design, School Change is being implemented in stages over five years, with components of the reform starting at different points. Launched in the 2010–2011 school year, the 2013–2014 school year marked its fourth year of implementation. It is organized into three pillars: portfolio of schools, talent, and community and parent engagement. The three pillars are designed to work...

The City of New Haven and New Haven Public Schools (NHPS) have embarked on improving schooling for the students the district serves through a comprehensive and sweeping K–12 school reform, the School Change Initiative (School Change), which was announced in 2009. The 2010–2011 school year marked the initiative’s first year with the launch of the Teacher Evaluation and Development System (TEVAL)—created in collaboration with the local teacher’s union, the New Haven Federation of Teachers—a school climate survey, and a process to support schools deemed to be in the most need, among other programmatic efforts. School Change’s...

School climateinvolves patterns of behavior and interaction in a school’s environment that are influenced by shared beliefs, values, and attitudes (Brown, Anfara, and Roney, 2004). School climate often comprises order, safety, discipline, school facilities, and nonacademic measures of social relationships and school connectedness (Griffith, 2001; Wilson, 2004; Blum, 2005). Studies have shown that perceptions of a healthy school climate are correlated with promoting positive student outcomes (Scales and Leffert, 1999; Marshall, 2004; Miron, Jones, and Kelaher-Young, 2011), including increased student achievement (Brown, Anfara, and Roney, 2004; Benner, Graham, and Mistry, 2008; Wang and Holcombe, 2010; Zullig et al., 2010)....

The previous chapter explored student, parent, and teacher perspectives on changes in school climate, learning environment, school safety, and engagement to provide a general understanding of what has happened within schools since the inception of the reforms through the eyes of key stakeholders. This chapter examines the progress NHPS has made toward meeting one of the goals of School Change: eliminating the gap in academic performance between students in NHPS and students in the rest of the state. The analyses described in this chapter report trends in CMT scores for students in grades 3 through 8, as well as the...

In this chapter, we examine the progress the district has made cutting the dropout rate in NHPS. We analyzed three years of data directly preceding the implementation of School Change and the first two years of the reform’s staged implementation to answer three research questions:

1. How does NHPS’s dropout rate compare with those of similar districts in the state? How did NHPS’ progress in improving dropout rates compare with the progress that sociodemographically comparable districts across the state made?

2. Did a school’s tier make a difference? Did trends in dropout rates vary across NHPS high schools with different tier designations?...

This chapter examines the progress the NHPS district has made toward meeting its goal of ensuring that every graduating student in the district has the academic ability and financial resources to attend college, and the progress Promise has made toward meeting its goal of cultivating an aspiration for a college education. We first look at overall trends in college enrollment for graduates to assess whether changes took place at the time of School Change and Promise. This aggregate look at trends in college enrollment rates provides a context for understanding the role of the entire series of reform efforts in...

School Change was announced in 2009, and Promise was announced in 2010, with the first year of each reform starting in the 2010–2011 academic year. By design, both reform efforts were to be implemented incrementally. School Change will be fully implemented in the 2015–2016 academic year. The graduating class of 2014 will be the first cohort of Promise Scholars eligible to receive the full amount of the scholarship. This study was conducted from 2013 to 2014, using available data through the 2012–2013 academic year. Since the reforms had not yet been fully implemented at the time of...