Peer Leaders Boost Achievement in a New York City High School

In this Education Week Quality Counts article, Sarah Sparks reports on how Bennett Lieberman, the principal of New York City’s Central Park East High School, reached out to unlikely peer leaders to turn around the school’s apathetic, low-achieving ethos. “If you’re going to change the school’s culture, you need to find the influencers,” says J.B. Schramm, the founder of College Summit, which was involved in the turnaround effort at Central Park East. “Most of the time, [top academic students] aren’t the most influential; often, other students look at the academic superstars and think they are from another planet.”

Lieberman’s initial efforts when he became principal in 2005 weren’t successful. He hired three guidance counselors and a social worker and started pitching the idea that students should think about post-secondary education. “It was a challenge to be brought on to promote the college-going culture because there wasn’t any,” says Joanna Nowlan, one of the counselors. “It was me basically chasing the students around, interest was so low.” That’s when Lieberman reached out to College Summit and began looking for students whom other students admired and turned to for help and advice. The school recruited among juniors, got lots of applicants, and selected peer leaders based on essays they wrote about why they wanted the positions. During senior year, the peer leaders began working with their classmates on the college application process and changed their own behavior. “Sometimes, I’ll want to argue with someone, but I think to myself: I’m a peer leader, I have to be a role model,” said one. All 13 of this year’s peer leaders have boosted their grades to above 80 percent. 

The program has also had an influence on top academic students who were not selected. One high-achieving girl was passed over because she was not a team player and seemed more concerned with herself than her peers. “I’ve seen a big change in her this year,” says Nolan. “She’s more connected to other people. She was always involved in really petty drama, and I don’t see that anymore.” 

The graduation rate at Central Park East has jumped from 36.5 percent in 2004 to 85.4 percent last year, and 62 percent of the 2012 graduating class enrolled in college. The school now has peer leaders for juniors, and each incoming freshman is assigned a student mentor. “It’s become a self-fulfilling prophecy,” says Lieberman. “On academics, every year we add new layers of difficulty to the kids’ programs, and our experience is they are rising to meet us.”

“Plucked from Back in the Pack, Unlikely Peer Leaders Step Up” by Sarah Sparks in Education Week Quality Counts, Jan. 10, 2013 (Vol. 32, #16, p. 19), 

http://ew.edweek.org/nxtbooks/epe/qc_01102013/index.php?startid=2 

From the Marshall Memo #468