Raising the Educational Achievement of Secondary School Students - Volume 2 Profiles of Promising Practices - 1995

A r c h i v e d I n f o r m a t i o n

Learning Beyond the Traditional School Setting
Bringing Students from the Margin to the Mainstream

City-As-School High School
New York, New York

Key Characteristics

Carefully structured experiential learning relates learning to the outside world

Flexible scheduling and an array of courses withing and outside the school teach students to take responsibility for their own learning

Advisory system personalizes the school experience
Number of Students: 1,042
Grades Served: 11-12 (Some students are admitted as sophomores)

Racial/Ethnic Breakdown:

40% Hispanic

38% African American

17% White

5% Asian

(6% LEP)

Eligible for Free/Reduced-Price Lunch: 76%
Chapter 1 Program: Schoolwide project
Major Sources of Outside Funding: National Diffusion Network (NDN)

Overview

At his former high school, Estefan was usually bored. He had earned a reputation as a mediocre student, his attention wandering regularly in class. But at City-As-School High School in New York, Estefan's attention never flags as he works as an assistant pastry chef in one of many internships available through the school's network of more than 1,000 community learning resources throughout the city. When he's not baking, Estefan works as a clerk at a private law firm that specializes in medical malpractice; he assists in case research and preparation. Estefan takes classes at City-As-School's Manhattan campus, including an art class that uses mural painting to teach community history. For two evenings a week he also commutes to a local community college to attend a writing workshop, where he sits alongside college freshmen and sophomores as well as a few of his CAS peers.

Over its 20-year history, CAS has emerged as a national leader in the alternative schools movement by taking secondary education beyond the confines of the traditional school setting. Through internships called "learning experiences," CAS links students with hundreds of careers that await them in the community.

School Context

CAS, which opened in 1972, was designed and piloted by a team of teachers and students with funding from the Ford Foundation. As an accredited public high school, CAS operates as an external learning school for students who have not met with success in the traditional classroom setting. CAS targets students who do not thrive in a traditional, classroom learning environment or are at risk of dropping out of school.

CAS is not a remedial program and is not intended to replace a complete four-year high school experience. Students demonstrate a range of ability, from special education to gifted-and-talented. Although sophomores are occasionally accepted into the program, CAS targets high school juniors and seniors who have completed the requisite ninth- and tenth-grade mathematics and science courses. Community internships engage students in the learning process, capitalizing on their knowledge and skills from academic courses completed in their traditional high schools.

CAS's faculty has 60 resource coordinators and teacher-advisors. In addition to a main campus in lower Manhattan, CAS has satellite campuses in Long Island and the Bronx.

Major Program Features

CAS's school year is divided into four eight- to nine-week cycles. Students design their own blend of community internships, in-house classes, and college courses from those listed in the CAS resource catalog. A student's schedule may be made up entirely of internships, course work, or a mixture of the two, as long as it meets the program's credit requirements and balances scheduling needs. Academic classes and external internships are ungraded; students receive "credit," "credit with reservations," or "no credit" based on their performance.

Learning Experiences

More than 70 percent of CAS students choose to participate in external learning experiences. These students spend between 20 and 32 hours per week at off-campus internship sites, called "resources." As in a real job, students interview with their prospective site supervisors and, if accepted, assume real-world responsibilities. As they become more familiar with the placement and its requirements, they accumulate substantial work experience. CAS students graduate from high school with a resume of work experience rivaling those of many students entering the workforce after college.

Students receive high school credit for each successfully completed learning experience. A student's program must include at least 20 contact hours per cycle; however, these hours may be spread across several short learning experiences or two lengthy ones. A learning experience, depending on the nature of the activity, can last for either one or two cycles.

Curriculum. Each external learning experience is structured by a curriculum called a Learning Experience Activities Package (LEAP). LEAPs are developed collaboratively by the CAS resource coordinator and the external learning site supervisor and maintained as an ongoing set of course offerings. Each LEAP consists of a series of content-area goals, specific activities and tasks designed to attain those goals, and learning outcomes. All activities meet New York State curriculum guidelines and are measurable and observable. All activities are related to students' on-the-job performance and involve completing a major project; some also involve reflection, such as keeping a journal or preparing a summary report; and some are homework assignments that require students to expand on the larger experience. Learning outcomes vary according to the nature of the placement and its facilities.
Internship placements. CAS oversees a network of 1,000 student internships throughout the city at such sites as the American Committee on Africa; Marvel Comics; American Stock Exchange; Queens Museum of Science; Clairol, Inc.; Sassy Magazine; Columbia Records; and the New York Police Department. Students select areas of interest and are placed in internships subject to availability. Two popular internship resources are the New York City Department of Environmental Protection, where students take samples of the city's coastal waters and test for evidence of pollution, and the U.S.S. Intrepid Aeronautics Museum, where CAS students earn social studies credits by working as docents. CAS staff say that internships broaden students' horizons by putting them into contact with adults whom they would not normally meet--from garage mechanics to architects--and by enabling them to participate in the work of these professionals.

Schoolwide Project

Two years ago, CAS became a Chapter 1 schoolwide project school. The greater flexibility in the allocation of the school's Chapter 1 funds afforded by schoolwide status enabled it to add a pilot enrichment program that provides advanced assignments for students with weak academic skills. The program also includes a weekly tutoring session to help students gain strength in mathematics and writing. The preliminary assessment of the enrichment program was so encouraging that the school plans to expand it in 1994-95 to serve 40 percent of students.

On-Campus Learning

Students may enroll in academic classes at any of CAS's three campuses. In addition, they may take college courses at any of the program's 11 community and four-year college partners, at no cost. Each term, about 24 percent of students sign up for college courses; more than half of graduating seniors have taken one or more college classes; and nearly three-quarters of students who exercise this option successfully complete the coursework.

All CAS students must attend a two-hour weekly seminar for 20 to 25 students conducted by a teacher advisor. Seminars serve primarily as a debriefing for student interns; the teacher advisor focuses on what students have learned from their internships and provides guidance on positive strategies for working on the job. Students not taking internships share their in-school experiences and participate with their peers in career awareness and clarification exercises.

Staffing

Resource coordinators. Resource coordinators have primary responsibility for coordinating and supervising student learning, writing LEAP curricula for new learning experiences, and forging partnerships with businesses and the community to develop new learning sites. Each of CAS's 12 resource coordinators oversees between 35 and 40 students at a time. Oversight responsibilities include visits to the student work site at least once per program cycle and biweekly telephone contact with the on-site supervisor.
Teacher-advisors. Although resource coordinators typically see each student only once or twice a cycle, teacher advisors interact with students at least weekly. Teacher advisors work with their students to create individualized programs and serve as the "first line of intervention" if a student develops a problem. In addition to counseling students individually and in the weekly group seminar, teacher advisors teach in-house classes in their areas of expertise.

Support for Implementation

Although it began with a grant from the Ford Foundation, CAS has continued operations with funding from the New York Public Schools, receiving the same per-pupil funding as other New York City high schools. In addition, CAS has received funding from state and federal sources for many years to support dissemination activities. For example, between 1983 and 1992, it received approximately $476,000 from the U.S. Department of Education's National Diffusion Network (NDN) to train interested schools and districts to implement the CAS model.

Teachers share in policymaking decisions at peer-level department meetings, and teacher representatives are elected to serve on the School-Based Management Team, along with selected students and parent representatives from the Parent Association.

Evidence of Success

A self-evaluation submitted to the NDN compared two randomly selected samples of 75 CAS students--about 25 percent of the total enrollment for the main Manhattan campus--with baseline performance data and with matched groups of students attending traditional high schools. The evaluation found that CAS students demonstrated a decrease in absenteeism and a decrease in the dropout rate--only 13 percent of CAS students dropped out in 1991-92 as opposed to 27 percent of controls. In addition, CAS students earned a larger number of academic course credits--an average of nearly five Carnegie units, versus an average of only about two Carnegie units for students in the control group. CAS students had a higher high school graduation rate--77 percent, versus only 27 percent of students in the control group; in addition, about four-fifths of CAS graduates went on to attend two- and four-year colleges.

The CAS program has been adopted by other high schools and has been used by educators and communities as the basis for new alternative schools. In 1977, CAS won a grant to replicate its model in New York State. In 1983, the program was certified by the NDN.
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