Since 2005, the New York City Department of Education has invested over $42 million in high-school alternative programs, like the one at Cascades High School, a transfer school that shares a 100-year-old Chinatown building with three other schools and a child-care center, where students' babies play as their young parents learn.

Alternative high-school programs permit only about 10% of the city's 168.000 hardest-to-reach youth the chance to earn their high-school diplomas. These programs have multiplied during the Bloomberg-Klein tenure like mushrooms after a summer rain, often in neighborhoods long linked with poverty and failing high schools.

Rotondo and his team plan each Cascades student's program individually, a task made feasible by the school's low student teacher ratio (15:1) and increased per-pupil spending. The result is a highly personalized, deeply invested school environment, where students sign a contract for their participation – and where a 70% attendance rate, deplored at most good high schools, represents a human triumph. Kids are coming to school; they weren't before. "Kids with 14%, 28% attendance -- previously, they were zeroes, they were not in school. It's all relative," says Rotondo.

"It was different in my old school," says 17-year-old Khandese Capriz, who attended two high schools and dropped out before coming to Cascades. "Here, everybody knows each other." She especially likes the phone calls she gets, to urge her to come to school in the morning – and to hustle her back into the building, after lunch.

The phone calls don't come from Rotondo or any of his staff. Instead, they come from workers at Union Settlement's Rivington House, the school's community partner. Transfer schools, unlike traditional high schools, work in collaboration with community partners to give students opportunities to thrive and succeed at school: For many kids, it's their last, best chance at finishing high school – a goal that eluded many of their siblings and parents.

Rivington House organizes internships for eligible Cascades students (who need good attendance and passing grades); it plans college visits and prom, and offers career and college counseling. But mainly, the kids say, the CBO "ladies" care about them. That kind of constant, intensive attention, in the classroom and beyond, is integral to Cascades' success.

"They keep going and going, until you get there," said Khandese. "They call me 6 in the morning, every morning; they call at 9 o'clock; they call after lunch. If you don't answer, they call your parents. If your parents don't answer, they mail your house."

"It's not just easy graduation – you have to earn the credits," Kandese adds. "But outside, stuff is hard."

For many students, life beyond school is the biggest challenge: Six Cascades students have toddlers across the hall, in the child-care center. Most are poor; many live in public housing; more than a few are separated from parents and siblings, in foster care, and a few have 'aged out' of foster care and live independently, working and attending school. Kids struggle with depression and other mental health issues, says college and career counselor Fay Staley. Their families have problems, too – with money, work, alcohol, other substances, and with their fists.

"If we want the school to do well, we have to focus on the families, not just what's happening in the building," says Principal Rotondo. Asked if the school structures are strong and deep enough to stand in for the absent community, Rotondo asks, rhetorically, "Who else?"

Since 2007, the city has added a dozen new transfer schools. But accountability is lacking: Fully a third of the transfer schools are too young to report graduation rates. Save for one state-chartered school, none report how many students took Regents exams – required for graduation – or how many passed. For another third, their long-term survival, under the statistics-driven scrutiny of New York State, remains uncertain.

Sharon Rencher, Executive Director of the Office of School Improvement in the Division of Teaching and Learning at the DOE, says that "the traditional way of holding high schools responsible did not work for transfer schools." Developing what she and New York State Education Department sources describe as "alternative accountability cohorts" took long months of work and negotiation with both the state and federal authorities.

"Transfer kids, they're starting behind the eight-ball – they had always been at a disadvantage," said Rencher. "Transfer schools were more frequently identified for improvement by No Child Left Behind and state requirements. They were not being fairly evaluated."

Even though transfer schools are not held to the same accountability standards as the city's conventional high schools, transfer schools that don't make strong progress can still find themselves on the state's bad-schools list, where they can remain there, for at least two years. (Removal from the list requires two consecutive years' progress.) Consequences – restructuring, principal firings, school closure – still follow the same timeline as for other, non-transfer schools. For all intents and purposes, as far as the city and state are concerned, the schools are classified as failing schools.

When Failure Means Success

The city's Progress Reports rate schools based on academic progress. The state, bound by No Child Left Behind (NCLB) targets, outlines Annual Yearly Progress (AYP) goals and sets minimal testing standards. Every year, some schools fall onto the state's watch list – Schools Under Regional Review (SURR)– because they don't make their targets.

Many city schools meet or approach those state and federal standards. Many transfer schools, by default, do not: With students overwhelmingly behind, it's a virtual impossibility to hit targets for Regents exams and other goals set by the state. And that's the case at Cascades High School, which is on the State's SURR list of failing schools.

Cascades is in trouble because it hasn't met targets for the English Regents exam.

Not enough students have taken or passed the critical test. Nearly 65% of the 2000 cohort graduated within six years, besting city averages, but AYP shortfalls plague the school's test scores. Principal Paul Rotondo says letters from the state, saying "your son/daughter is attending a failing school," unsettle parents, who worry the school will close. It's another stress for already-stressed households.

Cascades isn't the only transfer school on the state's short list of failing schools. Also included there are Manhattan Night and Day Comprehensive – legendary school for ELL and older students, long favored by Brooke Astor and other deep-pocketed donors – and City-As-School, the innovative alternative-school and one of only two transfer schools that earned an A on the city's progress reports. All of these schools predate the current administration. Bad rankings by the state mean all three schools risk the loss of their principals and eventual shutdown.

The state and the city's targets presume a conventional sense of high school progress, to four-year graduation. Cascades kids don't fit that mold; often, they've been out of high school longer than they attended. Counting credits, they look like 9th graders; counting birthdays, they should be graduates.

"They're wrong," says Principal Rotondo, of state sanctions. "The state says I have to magically give them four years of classes in two. "I'm not willing to make up numbers to get off the state's bad list."

Rotondo says the standards don't mesh with NYC graduation measures, because the city's 6-year graduation rate – not uncommon for returning students – "doesn't fit" within federal guidelines. Cascades got a high B on the city's progress report. "My kids are moving," says Rotondo. "They're doing well."

"If you're not on the bad [SURR] list, you're taking kids who need 10 or 11 credits to graduate – is that a transfer school?" challenges Rotondo. Some former transfer schools have re-opened as small schools, he said, which "creates a perverse incentive to cream off the top." The end result: "The neediest kids get the short end of the stick."

"If this was every high school in New York City, the Board of Regents would take it up tomorrow morning," says Rotondo. "But if a transfer school is doing the right thing, they should be 'failing,'" says Rotondo. Even so, there's a risk: "The end of the SURR process is my removal."

Dropouts in Waiting

Students who fall far behind are the same students who will drop out of high school in time, unless robust interventions lasso them back into school. These same students often face the biggest, deepest, and most persistent academic and social challenges.

More than half of at-risk high school students lack basic proficiencies – reading, writing, and math skills. Thirty-five thousand are new English speakers, or English language learners (ELLs), in DOE parlance. More ELL students drop out than graduate in four years; those who become English-proficient, though, earn diplomas at rates that parallel or even exceed their American-born peers.

Students with special needs make up about a tenth of public-school students. Among at-risk students, one in three have special needs, which require a spectrum of services, from in-class support by special-ed teachers, out-of-class ("pullout") instruction by teaching specialists; and occupational and/or language therapies; to collaborative team teaching (CTT) classes (which mix able and challenged kids) and self-contained classes.

It seems logical that nontraditional high-school programs, like transfer schools, would be designed to meet the needs of these challenged students. Yet only half of the city's current transfer schools offer services to ELL students; another fraction serve "advanced" ELL students only. Despite state requirements, most of the city's transfer schools do not work with ELL beginners.

Special ed students face still grimmer odds: Advocates say that fewer than one in five transfer schools citywide offer classes for the least-impaired kids. Services for students with more profound needs are even more scarce. The DOE's 2008 high-school directory lists only eight of 37 transfer schools with special-ed classes, including only two with self-contained classes. Most are not ADA-accessible, as required by government standards.

Students at the greatest risk of quitting school do not have the support the law requires – or the support they need to return to high school and earn their diplomas.