VP's Soapbox

A Review Lesson On High School Overcrowding

In more than four decades of teaching I have worked with many students for whom learning did not come easily. But I can honestly say that I have never had students who had more difficulty grasping the obvious than the current crew in charge of the Department of Education.

For the last three years we have tried to educate Tweed on the growing crisis of overcrowding in New York City’s public high schools. We have used the developmental lesson plan: the Delegate Assembly adopted a resolution calling upon the DOE to obtain new space. We have tried cooperative learning techniques: meeting with the DOE brass in small groups. We have devised strategies to appeal to their “multiple intelligences”: preparing charts which gave visual pictures of the problem and manipulatives which allowed them to “touch” the hard data. We’ve organized “field trips” to schools for first-hand observation. We have even tried the equivalent of a 10-minute mini-lesson for the chancellor. Nothing has worked.

Then, this year it hit our Tweed class that the mayoral election was upon us, that Children First was failing badly and that they needed to figure out ways to address this overcrowding problem. It’s rather late in the term and if anyone ever deserved to fail a class it has to be the folks at Tweed. But at the UFT, we are always teachers first, looking out for the best interests of our students. So here’s one last review lesson for the DOE on how to address the problem of overcrowding in its high schools:

1. Stop Playing with the Numbers
As we show in this issue of HS, the numbers you give for student capacity in the current high schools buildings are not credible. They have been changed so often and so capriciously, and have been so inflated in a time of growing overcrowding, that they cannot be trusted. Do an honest inventory of space, and stick to the real numbers.

2. Think and Plan for the Long Term
For many years, it has been clear that population demographics would produce a large increase in the number of high school students at the start of the 21st century. In 1995, a commission established by the chancellor told you that 180,000 more seats would be needed in a decade. Yet you made no plans for how to manage this increase. Instead, you engaged in actions, such as the unplanned conversion of large high schools to campuses of smaller high schools, which exacerbated the already serious problem.

3. Develop Full Plans for the Creation of Small High Schools
When you take a school building with one large high school and transform it into a campus housing a number of small schools you lose student seats because each new school needs its own administrative office space. You must have a plan, based on real numbers, for where you will put the displaced students — you cannot just squeeze them into a smaller, already overcrowded space in the same building and you cannot force them into neighboring schools that are just as overcrowded.

4. Expand — Don’t End — Existing Transitional Programs and Transfer Schools
You are doing a real disservice to new “over the counter” students when, over the course of the school year, you drop them into overcrowded classes where they have already missed much of the course work. And the receiving schools have their academic programs constantly disrupted by the addition of new students. You need to expand the few existing transitional programs, like those at Liberty Academy, which serve newly arrived immigrant students, and to develop more alternative transfer high schools, which take in students over the course of the school year who drop out of other high schools.

5. Use Your Existing Space More Wisely
Your high schools are far more overcrowded than your middle schools and elementary schools. In many parts of the city, middle school buildings are now under-utilized. New, small high schools could easily be placed in some of those buildings, to the benefit of both the existing middle school and the new, small high school.

6. Obtain Additional Space
The overcrowding crisis runs so deep that you cannot manage it without more space. Rather than delaying the capital plan for building new seats, the mayor should be engaged in real negotiations with the state to obtain the Campaign for Fiscal Equity money which is needed to solve this problem. Stop pretending that the city has no responsibility here, and kick in your fair share.

That’s it, my Tweed class. Final exams start on Monday.