Many children left behind

As this illustration shows, the bulk of the schools closed or being closed are clustered in the same geographic location. It might seem like the Department of Education is closing schools all over the city. But that’s not the case. The 123 closed and closing schools are tightly grouped, mainly in the South Bronx, Harlem and central Brooklyn — the city’s poorest and highest-minority neighborhoods.

This year’s 25 district schools that the DOE wants to close follow the pattern: they serve students with greater needs than other schools, and their proportions of high-needs students have grown — sometimes dramatically — in recent years, according to a new brief by the city’s Independent Budget Office. Since 2005, the shares of special education students, homeless students and overage students in schools slated for closure have increased faster than in the rest of the city’s schools.

Concentrating high-needs students in a school stacks the deck. In a confidential report that has just come to light, consultants hired by the DOE told the department several years ago that a high school’s size and concentration of “challenged” incoming students — those who enter over age for grade, with weak 8th-grade scores and poor attendance history — can substantially predict its graduation rate.

An African-American or Hispanic girl with an 8th-grade proficiency of 2.7 and 8th-grade attendance of 92 percent, who is neither an English language learner nor a special education student, has a 70 percent chance of graduating high school on time, the Boston-based Parthenon Group told the DOE. But if she goes to a school of 400 students with relatively low concentrations of challenged students, her chances rise to 83 percent. While if she were to attend John F. Kennedy HS, for example, with 3,000 students and relatively high concentrations of challenged kids, her chances of graduating on time drop to 55 percent, it said.

Despite knowing this, the DOE continued to flood many large schools in the poorest areas of the city with low-performing, high-needs students.

The DOE would say that it is simply identifying schools that don’t serve poor and minority communities well, shutting them down in order to offer better options. But what seems more evident is a pattern of willful neglect of certain schools, which pushes high-needs kids further to the margins with no plan or intention to actually educate them, in order to make room for favored schools, including charters, which serve a different student base.

In a New York 1 news program in January, Chancellor Cathie Black made the assertion —which went unchallenged by the interviewer — that the closing schools and the schools that will replace them serve the same children. Not true.

The DOE’s own data show this [see chart below]. The replacement and co-located smaller schools inside large comprehensive schools take in higher-performing students (as judged by the 8th-grade average scores) and students with fewer academic challenges (as judged by the percentage of special education and self-contained special education students, over-age students, English language learners and homeless students).

Most of the small schools opened between 2002 and 2006 did not take special education or non-English-speaking students initially. Highly challenged students had “no choice but to enroll in the remaining large schools,” according to a 2009 report by the Center for New York City Affairs, increasing the burden on the large schools.

At least nine of the schools on the closing list either have charter schools in their buildings that are eager to expand or have charters scheduled to move in. Charters do provide options, and certainly many parents in these neighborhoods seek them out. As they have grown to serve more than 3 percent of city students, the UFT has moved to build alliances with charter teachers as well. But it’s pretty clear that locating charters in these same neighborhoods, and often the same schools, is a strategy to replace the schools, and their children, with different schools and children.

Charter management organizations that oppose the right of charter teachers to unionize have worked hand in glove with the DOE in concentrating new charters in Harlem, the South Bronx and central Brooklyn. In “Flooding the Zone,” Joe Williams of the Democrats for Education Reform details how his organization, working with Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academies, pursued this strategy in Harlem.

Former Chancellor Klein told the New York Post [Sept. 28], “Despite all the litigation, we’re going to close schools. We’re going to close a fair number of schools and open up new charter schools.”

But these charters do not serve the same high-needs students either.

To take one example, the DOE is closing Brooklyn’s MS 571, where the students’ needs based on rates of special education and incoming scores are greater than 96 percent of the middle schools in the city. Waiting in the wings to take over their space in an already-crowded district building is Brooklyn East Collegiate Charter School, run by the Uncommon Schools/Collegiate management group. Collegiate’s three Brooklyn schools take students with the highest scores in their districts.

Another example is the closing New Day Academy, where special education students now constitute 56 percent of its student body and English language learners are 38 percent. The charter that is slated to replace New Day, Dr. Richard Izquierdo Health and Sciences Charter School, takes more special education and ELLs than other charters, but so far that’s 28 percent special education and 15 percent ELLs.

If the DOE wants to claim that new small schools and charters will better serve the same neighborhoods of schools they plan to close, they must at least serve the children of those neighborhoods, and not just the kids that they select.