Corridor Cultures: Mapping Student Resistance at an Urban School

7 A Eulogy for Renaissance: Looking Forward

7 ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ A Eulogy for Renaissance Looking Forward In June 2007, on the restored green lawn of the Old School campus , Renaissance High School graduated its last class. Failing to significantly improve student outcomes, it met the same fate that the original Old School had thirteen years earlier. This book chronicles Renaissance’s school reform effort and offers insight into why the student-centered and democratic model failed to bring about the hoped-for changes. Having worked doggedly for four years to make those reforms work and even more time analyzing , reflecting, and revisiting them and the substantial student resistance they met, Renaissance’s closing leaves me with mixed feelings. I am disappointed that the vision of a democratic and student-centered school was not realized at Renaissance. We really wanted to make a difference , we worked long hours and pushed ourselves to our limits, but all the hard work couldn’t make up for the huge gaps between school discourses and those of students. We also worked against great odds, given that the school was far too big to be a small school, had little control over curriculum, and had to address the systematic and historically poor academic preparation that students brought to the classrooms. We dealt with all this also while the school was grossly underfunded by an unjust school finance system that left us short on resources, understaffed, and overworked. The declaration of the school as a failed project doesn’t acknowledge these structural obstacles. More than this, it negates the significant human effort that was made there. I loved my students and many of my colleagues and for all the harshness I report in these pages, there was also a lot of warmth and friendship that 190 ❙ A Eulogy for Renaissance made Renaissance humane at least some of the time. So though I believe its closing to make way for newer, smaller, and better conceptualized schools is in the best interest of students, it is still worth noting that the failure of Renaissance was not for lack of effort or commitment. The second wave of restructuring that replaced Renaissance took a distinctly different form than the first and represents the significant development of small schools and school-reform agendas over the last decade. When Renaissance was created, Old School had simply been divided into three smaller units with all teachers in the building guaranteed a job at one of the new schools and all students being evenly distributed among them. These schools began as smaller versions of Old School and had to forge new identities without a clean slate. In this second wave of restructuring , Renaissance and its two sister schools were phased out over four years by not admitting any new students. At the same time, six new schools were phased in, admitting a new ninth grade each year. This next generation of schools are truly new schools with new staff and new students and are much freer from the history of Old School itself. They also have had the opportunity to grow into full capacity rather than having to “build the plane while flying,” as the former principal of Renaissance described the reform effort there. Further, when Renaissance was created, the small schools movement was relatively young. Over the last decade, this movement has matured and these new schools will benefit from its accumulated wisdom. These new schools are no larger than 450 students (at least, that is their design), whereas Renaissance enrolled twice that many. I suspect the smaller scale will change the nature of spatial formation and perhaps establish a less-formidable hall culture and a less contradictory classroom culture . Perhaps, too, these schools are more coherently designed and some of the contradictions that undermined student academic engagement at Renaissance will diminish. And perhaps the schools will be considered less violent so that the scanning rituals will be loosened to further reduce the kinds of student-school conflicts that Renaissance’s reform effort was unable to resolve. These new schools operate in a very different policy context as well. Since 2001, the New York City school system has been radically reorganized twice—first dissolving the community school boards and consolidating the nearly forty local superintendencies into ten, and second, A Eulogy for Renaissance ❙ 191 disbanding those ten superintendencies and giving principals far more autonomy in running their schools. Today, principals, particularly, and schools in general are far more accountable on more...