It was no coincidence that when Vice President Joe Biden came to Syracuse on Sept. 9 to talk about reviving the nation’s middle class, he brought along U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. Biden and Duncan gave their support to efforts by Syracuse University, the City School District and other partners in the pioneering Say Yes to Education program, which, supporters immodestly claim, “will change the landscape of American education in urban centers.”

Say Yes to Education, which began in Philadelphia, brought two huge promises to Syracuse parents who enroll their kids in city schools. The first is dramatic: We will finance their post-secondary education, whether in a four-year college, a two-year college or a vocational program. The second is frequently missed: We will make sure a kid in the city schools has the support he or she needs to succeed. 

“The scholarships get the attention,” says Syracuse City School Superintendent Dan Lowengard. “But for every dollar we will spend on scholarships, we will spend $10 on support services.” 

The premise of Say Yes is bold and, some say, revolutionary. Give people an incentive to move into the city (or to reconsider moving out when kids reach middle school age) and give kids from struggling families the support they need to succeed in school, and you can revitalize neighborhoods, schools, the urban economy and, ultimately, the city itself.

To that end, Say Yes has secured a commitment from New York state to waive State University or City University of New York tuition to students who graduate from one of the four city high schools after having been enrolled for three consecutive years. Twenty-one other colleges and universities have promised free tuition to students from families earning less than $75,000, while SU and Cooper Union offer a free ride regardless of income. The scholarship portion of Say Yes is being rolled out by city quadrant: Corcoran students graduating in 2009 are already eligible; this year it’s Fowler students. The Henninger class of 2011 qualifies, and Nottingham graduates will be eligible the following year.

Say Yes to Education President Mary Anne Schmitt-Carey says the two promises must go hand in hand. Educational research, she insists, demonstrates that the promise of college tuition is not enough to keep kids in school. “We find children failing due to health issues in the family, due to emotional issues, legal issues—like landlord/tenant disputes,” says Schmitt-Carey, who divides her time between Syracuse and her Westchester County home. “We find that 7,000 of the 20,000 students who are eligible for subsidized health care aren’t even enrolled. These are solvable problems. To succeed, many urban students need support across the board.”

Say Yes, which arrived in Syracuse in 2008, is making the school district a national showcase for how to turn around a low-performing district. It has racked up a record of success at schools in Harlem, Philadelphia and Connecticut but this is the first time such an ambitious program has been attempted on a district-wide level. “We’re on their radar,” says Lowengard, referring to the Obama administration. “Say Yes is the unique type of economic development and education reform that makes sense.”

In Syracuse, the trend has been clear for a generation: failing schools mean emptying neighborhoods, a reduced tax base and a cycle of despair. Gerald Grant, a professor emeritus of sociology and education at Syracuse University, blames the state of our schools on a generation-long series of bad decisions and a lack of political courage. In his book, Hope and Despair in the American City: Why There are No Bad Schools in Raleigh (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass.; 240 pages; $25.95/hardcover), he describes in painful detail how middle-class white flight was followed by middle-class black flight, leaving Syracuse with a school system set up to fail. 

“Can you imagine,” asks the retired sociologist and longtime Westcott Nation resident, “anyone planning a system like this—you set up a wall between the city and the county, and you put 80 percent of the poor kids on this side of the wall?”

Lowengard and Grant agree that the future of urban public schools depends on the middle class. The Say Yes program explicitly seeks to entice more-affluent families to come back to the city with the lure of good schools and a future without college loans. And this may be the last chance to reverse the slide. In a district of approximately 21,000 students that spends nearly $17,000 per student annually, only half of the pupils who enter the ninth grade will graduate with their class at the end of four years. Only 46 percent of black students will graduate, and barely one in three Latino students will earn the diploma that in today’s economy barely gives them a chance to enter the unskilled labor force. 

Lowengard, who took over the superintendent’s job from Robert DiFlorio in 2006, takes all of this personally. A former teacher and school principal, he says in a voice tinged with desperation, “I lose 600 students each year. It’s not our job to save a few of these kids. It’s our job to teach each and every one of them.” 

Making the Grade

The Say Yes foundation will spend $2 million of its own money in Syracuse each year. Based on an annual commitment from the city of $1 million, private donations and stimulus dollars, Lowengard is confident that the program will be fully funded. 

A successful lawsuit by New York City parents, known as the Campaign for Fiscal Equity suit, is expected to result in the New York state Legislature pumping an additional $3,500 per student per year into the Syracuse schools. Whether the recession and the state’s budget woes upset that budget scenario remains to be seen. 

Turning things around will not be easy. There may be wonderful things happening in the city schools, and many successful students emerging from the district, but the numbers don’t lie. According to the district’s own report card, 20 percent of students enrolled in the Syracuse city schools will be suspended at some point in the school year. For every 100 classroom teachers, 16 of them will call it quits by the end of the school year, nearly twice the rate of other districts in Central New York.

Grant says those numbers are not only unacceptable, they are the predictable result of deliberate policy choices. “If anything like this were to happen in Fayetteville-Manlius,” he says, “you’d have parents screaming from the rooftops. But when it happens in the city, we just shrug.” 

Grant’s book, a major study of where education went off the rails in Syracuse, compares the experience here with that of Raleigh, N.C. He maintains that Raleigh has built better schools by integrating city and county facilities, while Syracuse has built a proverbial wall around its poor students, many of them black and brown, while middle-class families made their way to surrounding towns and suburbs. No amount of tinkering, says Grant, can undo this de facto segregation by income level. “Why keep throwing money over the wall?” he asks. “Why not just tear down the wall?” 

During the mayoral campaign Stephanie Miner had a consistent answer to Grant’s question. “I think the idea {of consolidating districts} is an interesting one to discuss,” she told a forum on education at Nottingham High School. “But I am a politician, and that conversation has no political traction whatsoever.” In other words, the suburban school districts want no part of merger talks. (See accompanying story, page 17.) 

Schmitt-Carey, who worked in the U.S. Department of Education during the Clinton years, likes Grant’s history of the city’s school system but disagrees with his prescription, which includes restructuring districts and busing city kids to the suburbs and vice-versa. She argues that mandates, whether they involve court-ordered busing or George W. Bush-era standardized testing, rarely produce the desired results. Bringing the private sector, educators and philanthropists together with all levels of government in support of a program backed by research and experience, she says, makes Say Yes sustainable for the long haul.

So far, the program appears to be more popular than ice cream in July. Endorsed by all six individuals who ran for mayor of Syracuse, it has been championed by SU Chancellor Nancy Cantor and embraced by Lowengard, the Common Council, County Executive Joanie Mahoney, Parents for Public Schools and the Syracuse Board of Education, not to mention Gov. David Paterson, Biden, Otto the Orange and Eli the guy who plays guitar on Marshall Street. City, state and federal money have come in to supplement the private funding committed by the Say Yes Foundation. 

The calculus for families who want to take advantage of the college scholarships has changed a bit since Say Yes was first rolled out in 2008. Aside from SU and Cooper Union, which offer free tuition for all Say Yes-enrolled students, the rest of the private colleges participating in the program are limiting scholarships to students from families earning less than $75,000 annually. SUNY schools will still give full scholarships to qualified students.

A vice president of Beacon Federal Credit Union, Calvin Corriders has two children in the city schools. He has served on the Board of Education for a decade. “I don’t ever recall any program that has generated this kind of support,” says Corriders. “There isn’t a segment of the community that isn’t on board. In the worst of economic times, we have companies large and small stepping up and offering resources. I’ve been on the {school} board for 10 years, and everything we deal with is gray. In this one your constituents come up to you and talk to you about it. Kids who didn’t view college as an option will now consider it. Before they didn’t know how they could pay for it. This is a huge economic boon to the county and the region.”

Say Yes seeks to transform the city, transform the expectations of what school should lead to and transform the very concept of what a school is. Miner has called Say Yes “the flagship of what must be an innovative and holistic strategy for providing greater opportunities for our young people.”

Schmitt-Carey believes it is the widespread support and “community buy-in” that gives Say Yes such momentum. Grant likes that it deals with the need to address class inequalities, getting beyond race-based measures of equality. 

Kim Rohadfox-Ceaser is a mother of four and president of the Syracuse Board of Education. Elected in 2005, she recently lost her bid for re-election and will be stepping down at the end of this year. “Syracusans can sometimes be very cynical about new initiatives,” she says. “We’re always worried about when the strings will come out. People ask, ‘Will all children benefit?’ It’s my job to make sure that it is all inclusive and that every kid will participate.”

Teachable Moments

So why should anyone think Say Yes will work when other programs have failed? The steady slide in student achievement has occurred in the face of efforts to thwart it. New York state has seen an increase of 50,000 more teachers over the past 20 years. They are paid better than their colleagues of a generation ago. Median salaries of teachers in elementary and secondary schools have risen from $21,316 in 1980-1981 to $65,236 in 2008-2009. Funding formulas have been adjusted to provide additional aid to needy districts. 

But there’s more to this than better-paid teachers. “There is no magic bullet,” Lowengard notes. “People in this town need to be shown that this can work. We’re a tough town. I told Mary Anne Schmitt-Carey that people here wanted to fire Jim Boeheim the year before he won the national championship.”

But Lowengard does have a magic bullet. It’s called CFE, the lawsuit won by the New York City School District against the state two years ago. A state judge agreed that New York state had not met its constitutional obligation to provide every child a sound education. The state has conceded the point and acknowledged its debt to urban school districts, both New York City and upstate. Lowengard estimates that Syracuse schools will receive an additional $80 million in state aid over the next four years as a result. Combine that with $15 million from Say Yes, the city commitment of $1 million, county, state and federal monies, and you start to turn heads.

What will all that money buy? “I know people who say you can’t throw money at the problem, but it’s always people who have money who say that,” says Lowengard. “But we’re not just throwing money at a problem: We’re spending the money differently. We’ve started to reduce the number of personnel, from 4,400 to 4,000. We want fewer people, better trained, making more money. They will be working a longer school year— 11 months—under a new contract.”

Working with SU, the district is conducting summer camps for city students. Studies show that for many reasons city kids fall behind by six weeks of learning in comparison to suburban kids, according to Lowengard. The district is doubling the number of social workers it employs, with a goal of having one social worker for every 200 students, to deal with social and emotional issues that prevent learning. SU students from all disciplines by the hundreds have volunteered to work as tutors and mentors with grade school students in the city’s poorest neighborhoods. 

It’s easy to believe in the program if you have met Schmitt-Carey. She exudes a confidence born of her many years working in the trenches on educational policy. Three years ago she attended a benefit dinner in honor of her father-in-law, former New York Gov. Hugh Carey, and seated next to her was Nancy Cantor. The chancellor asked Schmitt-Carey what she was up to, and she told her about the Say Yes promise. “We’re looking for a mid-sized city where we can do this on a district-wide level,” reports Schmitt-Carey. “I think I’ve got your city,” replied Cantor, and an alliance that may remake Syracuse began.

“Nancy is the reason this city is doing this,” Schmitt-Carey continues. “She’s just been huge. The traditional culture in urban education was to try to save a few kids. We saw here the commitment to doing things differently, and on a large scale. It takes three to five years to successfully implement new learning programs and embed a new culture. Then you have to demonstrate that it can be sustained. We are not doing a pilot project; we are taking proven innovative programs to scale. I’m confident. We’re patient. It took us a long time to get to this place in this country, and it won’t change overnight.”   

For an update on Gerald Grant’s proposal, see next week’s New Times.

Can Consolidation Work?

Both Say Yes to Education and the consolidation plans pushed by local sociologist Gerald Grant recognize a simple truth: Kids learn better when they are with other kids who care about learning. Teachers and researchers all point to the same thing, when a classroom has a certain percentage of students without the parental support for learning, teaching becomes very difficult. 

According to Grant, that means finding a way to break down the wall between suburban and city schools that has existed since the 1970s. Say Yes promoters hope that the appeal of a free college education along with better schools will prompt more middle class families to move back into the city. 

Syracuse Mayor-elect Stephanie Miner, who has read Grant’s book, says she values the ideas in it, but consolidation isn’t an option. “Frankly,” she told an audience at Nottingham High School during the campaign, “I am a politician, and the conversation about consolidating city and county schools is a non-starter.” She strongly believes that Say Yes is the way to revive not only the city’s schools but to restore the city’s economic base.

Ned Duell, a member of the Board of Education in Syracuse, recalled a dinner of the Onondaga Madison Association of School Boards held earlier this year at which County Executive Joanie Mahoney was a featured speaker. She asked for a show of hands, seeking how many attendees would like to see consolidation of the school districts. All hands shot up at one table—where personnel from the Syracuse City School District was seated. According to Duell, “not a single hand anywhere else went up.” 

The wall seems pretty solid.

--Ed Griffin-Nolan

Yes, No or Maybe

Where you send your kids to school is a very personal decision influenced by a variety of factors. Parents across the city are watching Say Yes and monitoring their children’s experiences to decide if they think the program can deliver. 

City School District Superintendent Dan Lowengard is hoping the Say Yes promise will draw more middle-class families back into the city schools. “We’re targeting firefighters, cops and middle-income people,” says Lowengard, adding that it is far too soon to judge the results. “We are looking at three years to see an increase.”

Parents pay lots of attention to where teachers send their own kids to school and many of them in the city schools send their kids elsewhere. Caroline and Michael Messina-Yauchzy live in Jordan. Caroline teaches kindergarten at Levy School at Fellows Avenue and Harvard Place, which recently changed from a middle school to serving kids from pre-kindergarten through eighth grades.

The couple decided that when their daughter Sierra finished eighth grade they would take her out of the Jordan-Elbridge schools and enroll her at Nottingham High School because SCSD employees can send their kids to city schools even if they live elsewhere. Sierra made the switch in September, and now the family is planning to sell their house in Jordan and move to the Syracuse University area. Messina-Yauchzy wants to support the city schools, she has lots of friends in the city and she doesn’t like the environmental and financial impact of driving all the way in to work every day.

“My husband and I were debating,” she says. “I had some concerns.” When Say Yes came along, she says, “It tipped the scales. Now it’s a no-brainer.”

Sierra is doing very well at Nottingham, and her parents appreciate the diversity of her new school. “Her best friends are from Bosnia. She’s with kids from all over,” says Caroline Messina-Yauchzy. “Kids today are going to have to live in a more diverse world, and they might as well get exposed to that in high school. The city schools are not without immense challenges, but the diversity balances that.”

Annegret Schubert is a speech pathologist who works for the SCSD. Her 13-year-old daughter attends eighth grade at Manlius Pebble Hill on a partial scholarship. She and her husband Steve Reider live in the SU area. They decided to pull Emmi out of Ed Smith School at Lancaster Avenue and Broad Street, in 2008 and pay tuition for her to attend MPH. 

It was not a decision the family took lightly. Both personal and social concerns weighed on them. “We never considered moving to the suburbs,” says Schubert. “The hard part of taking your kid out is that with every kid you take out who is not troubled, the harder it is to teach the ones who remain.” Still, they made the decision to move Emmi “to get out from under endless state tests and the issues of discipline. We wanted her to be surrounded by more kids who wanted to be in school.”

Then Say Yes came along. “We thought to ourselves, ‘We’re spending a lot on high school and will be spending a lot on college.’ Here’s this program that will allow her to have not only a free high school education but also a free college education. At MPH she is in classes with eight to 16 students instead of 30 or more. She’s got support on emotional issues. The teachers are not completely strung out; they can pay attention to normal kids.

“You weigh all that against a huge financial consideration. We talked about it as a family. Emmi said she wanted to stay at MPH through eighth grade and maybe go back and go to Nottingham beginning in ninth grade.” When the private colleges announced that they would limit scholarships to families earning less than $75,000, “all of a sudden a major consideration changed. We are over the income limit.”

With a trace of sadness Schubert concludes, “Say Yes has become a non-factor in our decision-making process.”

For the Messina-Yauchzy family, the income limit was not an issue. “She can go to any of the SUNY schools, or to SU,” says Caroline Messina-Yauchzy. “I just hope they don’t keep changing the rules.”

Schubert, on the other hand, knows her daughter does not want to attend SU, and isn’t sure the SUNY offer of a free ride will hold up in the face of pending state budget cuts. 

“I’m hoping other people do it,” says Caroline Messina-Yauchzy, “but I don’t know any others yet.” As a teacher, she says that Say Yes offers her another benefit. “I can tell my kids, even in kindergarten, that they can go to college one day.”

--Ed Griffin-Nolan