A Bronx Tale
Kevin Martinez was a 19-year-old New York City student with a checkered past and a slim chance of graduating. Then he went to City-As-School.
In his red, white and blue USA basketball track suit and standing at a burly 6-foot-4, Kevin Martinez was hard to miss.
While other students sat quietly, looking squeamish on their second day of orientation at City-As-School High School, a West Village school for kids who dropped out or transferred from other high schools, Martinez appeared confident, ready to share his story.
“It’s about what you put in,” Martinez instructed the room of about 15 students, who, like Martinez, arrived at City-As, one of 48 transfer schools, seeking refuge from the schools they left, voluntarily or involuntarily, from across New York City.
“They’re basically putting a rope in front of you,” he continued. “You can either hang yourself or use it to climb.”
Only five months earlier, Martinez was in a similar position to the 70 students who were enrolling in City-As this past January. He was frustrated by his past schools and performance, lagging on credits and spinning in place, seemingly miles from graduation. Already four years into his high school education, he had little to show for it except two failed high school experiences and a criminal rap sheet.
Plus, at 19, the clock was ticking. He had only two more years before the doors to high closed for good.
But by January, Martinez progressed so much at City-As that teachers asked him to speak to incoming students who arrive in August, September and mid-way through the year in January. His teachers and counselors credit Martinez for his newfound success in school. Martinez passes the praise back to them. The answer falls somewhere in between.
“The teachers here have a passion for what they do,” Martinez explained a few weeks after orientation. “They try not to dwell on your past. When you get accepted at City-As, it’s more so a new beginning.”
City-As has been an example of progressive education since it formed in 1972. At the time, the “Schools Without Walls” model, which emphasized experiential learning outside of the classroom, was being adopted in cities like Washington D.C., Philadelphia and Chicago. City-As was one of the first such schools in New York City. From the start, the school has used outside internships as a form of learning and credit, supplementing math and science classes with work experiences at businesses, non-profits and government agencies in the city. Students are also not required to take the Regents exams, the New York State issued tests that every other student must pass to graduate.
Instead, City-As uses Performance Based Assessment Tasks to evaluate progress. As an alternative to tests, students submit papers on topics within science, math and social studies and then present their findings in front of a panel of teachers. In New York State, 38 schools, called consortium schools, use performance assessments.
In the decades since City-As started, the school has become a landing place for young people across the five boroughs as a transfer school, or a school specifically designed for students who have dropped-out or fallen behind in credits. Transfer schools were created as part of Mayor Michal Bloomberg’s education reforms in the early 2000s, explained David Bloomfield, professor of education at Brooklyn College and City University of New York graduate center. With smaller classes and additional social services, the schools were tailored to help students who were failing in the New York City public school system, particularly black and Hispanic students.
Hispanics nearly doubled the dropout rates of whites and Asians at 12 percent of the dropout population in 2014, according to numbers from the Department of Education. Black students made up 10 percent of that figure.
City-As has reflected those figures with 43 percent of the students Hispanic and 33 percent black. Last year, 57 percent lived under the poverty line.
About a third of the students entering City-As do so with grim statistics. Of the 612 students enrolled at City-As last school year, about 250 were considered “overage and under-credited” according to Department of Education standards, meaning the amount of credits accumulated during their high school careers fell at least two years below their expected grade level or age. For instance, the average 17-year-old who has likely been in school for three years should have about 33 to 36 credits, assuming they’ve averaged 11 to 12 credits a year. For 17-year-olds, the DOE defines anything less than 33 as overage and under-credited.
Among those students at City-As, Martinez fell into an even more dire subset labeled as “at-risk” youth. These are young people similarly behind in credits as well as successful Regents exams. This summer, when Martinez transferred from DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx, he had only 20 credits.
City-As, though, has a proven track record in helping students like Martinez. Among New York’s 48 transfer schools, 12 graduated at-risk students at rates above 40 percent last school year. City-As was in that group.
Martinez’s odds at completing high school derailed almost as soon as it began. He started his freshman year in 2012 at Wings Academy, a respected school for struggling kids about an 18-minute subway ride north from his home in the South Bronx. Martinez had already been held back a year in seventh grade, but Wings offered a new start. He was on his way until January, when a teacher told him to collect all his belongings from his desk and head to the principal’s office. Waiting for him were two police officers who arrested him on the spot for a crime Martinez wouldn’t specify. (The specifics of the crime cannot be verified as Martinez was 15 at the time. Minor crime reports are not available to the public.) He said he was held at Horizon Juvenile Detention Center for the next 12 months.
“I spent my 16th birthday in the system,” he said.
At Horizon, Martinez managed to earn about 10 credits from mandatory high school classes. (He actually earned more credits at the center than in a half year of high school.) Upon release, he enrolled at DeWitt Clinton, one of the few remaining large, comprehensive high schools in New York. With a student body of more than 2,700, it’s in the top 30 for high school enrollment size in the city. The high school had a bellow-average graduation rate and a dropout figure nearly three times the city average, but also a strong reputation in sports, and Martinez was attracted to its football team. He had never played, but was often prodded to try because of his size.
Football brought some stability. The offseason workouts kept Martinez tired and out of trouble. The spring semester went by without a hitch. He even earned a starting spot that summer.
His grades, though, remained poor, and the team’s coaches revoked his starting nose guard spot in the fall. In response, Martinez said he become indignant — jawing with coaches and showing up late to practice, or not at all.
Fed up, the coaches cut him from the team, and without football, Martinez set his sights on his next school. He began searching for transfer schools, letting his studies at Clinton fall behind. He assumed he’d be gone before any of his credits were secured, so he didn’t bother doing any work. His junior year, he said he had an attendance rate of 41 percent.
Meanwhile, even transfer schools rebuffed him because of his spotty record. He received multiple rejection letters from schools, sometimes more than once. When his guidance counselor at Clinton told him about City-As, it felt like a last chance.
Martinez’s turnaround since then has been nothing less than remarkable. In one semester, he earned 10 credits. With his current pace, Martinez will double in a year what took him two and a half to complete. He thinks he’ll have his diploma by August and an attendance rate above 90 percent should help.
In many ways, Martinez is equal parts average and exceptional. By Department of Education standards, he’s a rarity — a blip in the 12,892 students who are yet to graduate from the class of 74,000 that entered high school in 2012. But administrators at City-As emphasize that the arc of Martinez’s progress is not an aberration in their school. Many enter City-As in similar situations — behind in credits, or labeled troublemakers, or both, as in Martinez’s case. But they’ve routinely found success. Last year, only 11 transfer schools bettered City-As and its graduation rate of 64 percent. City-As matched that same grad rate during the 2014 to 2015 school year as well.
“I honestly can’t tell you what the big thing is,” said Carl Oliver, an assistant principal and teacher who instructed Martinez in a math class last semester. “It’s magic.”
That, or something similar. Oliver can point to several factors as to why students like Martinez can redirect their education. First, individualized classes and lessons let students pick courses that jive with their interests and learning styles. The acquisition of credits is also faster. Each semester is divided into seven or eight week halves. Regular classes earn students a half credit, but internships, which all City-As students take throughout the city, can earn up to three credits. Students can make up a semester in what typically takes a full year.
Then, there are the performance assessments, the portfolios students complete instead of standardized Regents exams, which allow them to demonstrate knowledge they know, rather than the standards they’ve repeatedly failed to reach anyway.
“These are students who have not responded to the typical system of schooling,” said Bloomfield, the professor who also volunteers at City-As as a judge in a moot court staged by one of the teachers. “The philosophy of the consortium model … creates an opportunity for these students to succeed where bubble tests were an obstacle.”
“I think a lot of the students come in with that intrinsic motivation where they are really ready and focused and want to make that change,” explained James Carroll, a City-As special education teacher. “And then there is a lot of individualized support.”
Carroll is a first year teacher at City-As and Martinez’s school advisor. Perhaps most important for young people like Martinez is the network of adults assigned to each student. Besides the teachers students have in class, they’re also assigned an advisor like Carroll that they and other classmates meet with for 90 minutes each week as a kind of academic and mental checkup. On top of that, each student is connected with one of four guidance counselors, an internship coordinator to monitor their out-of-school work and a college and career coordinator for plans after high school.
All of which are willing to help when things get dicey. In Martinez’ first cycle, he nearly failed a science class when he misunderstood a class assignment. The instructor called for students to take notes each day to be graded at the end of the cycle. Martinez thought the notes were optional and so had nothing to show for at the end of the class. The teacher threatened to fail him, so he approached another assistant principal, Joselyn Peña-Phillips, who arranged a sit-down between the two and created a compromise. Martinez would turn in three to five sheets of notes as well as a final paper.
“At my old school I had a tendency if I failed a class to be like, ‘It is what it is whatever,’” Martinez said. “I made a promise to myself that I was really going to put my best foot forward.”
For the most part, Martinez sparkled in his first semester. About a month ago, his mom placed a letter next to his bedroom door. Martinez had begun applying to colleges and the letter came from Tompkins Cortland Community College. Nearly four years after he spent a year in a juvenile detention center, he learned he had a spot waiting for him at Tompkins. Since then, he’s added three more schools to the list.
“I feel like students that do come in typically have a stronger motivation, especially the older they are,” Carroll said. “I think they realize that they might have not made the best choices when they were younger and probably some of them have reflected on that and made a change.”
This story was published as part of LynNell Hancock and Duy Linh Tu’s Covering Education class at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism.
