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Supporting Struggling Schools
The great promise of public education is that it is for all children, and a strong public education system has long been understood as one of the pillars of a democratic society. The great challenge for educators is thus not only how to raise standards and achievements but also how to raise them for our most vulnerable and disadvantaged students. The UFT disagrees with the current DOE administration’s strategy of the mass closure of struggling schools because it represents an abrogation of the fundamental obligation to educate all students. We believe that we must do everything we can to support struggling schools and educate all of our city’s students. The DOE must provide the necessary resources, staff and proven research-based strategies to help struggling schools succeed.
It is increasingly clear that the DOE does not have a strategy for helping struggling schools and educating our higher-needs students, only a strategy for shutting down schools and displacing these students to other schools without ever engaging the challenge of how to provide them the education they need and deserve. In early 2011, two reports were released that documented what UFT educators and parents have been saying all along: the schools the DOE has targeted for closure have more students with high needs, the DOE knows this and knows that it is bad for students, but it has done nothing to provide support for those schools or to address the concentration of high-needs students in them. One report was from the city's Independent Budget Office; the other was a report commissioned by the city from the Parthenon Group.
The issues at stake in how to respond to struggling schools were in sharp relief in an epic battle over the proposed closing of 19 schools in early 2010. The DOE’s plan was met with an outcry of protest from parents, educators, community members and civil rights advocates, and it was successfully challenged in court by the UFT, NAACP and others. The courts found that the DOE failed not only to properly include parent and community input, but also to take into account the educational impact of the closings. While touting the virtues of smaller schools, which have generally not had the capacity to offer the kind of support so many students in the closing schools need (such as ELL of self-contained special education students need), the DOE neglected entirely consider how these students would fare.In the wake of the litigation, the DOE agreed to provide specific assistance to help many of the schools it had tried to shutter, an apparent step in the right direction of supporting struggling schools rather than abandoning them. However, it failed to provide most of the assistance it had promised.
In the fall of 2010, the DOE announced its intention to close a record 26 schools (25 district schools and one charter school), and once again there was a groundswell of opposition from students, teachers, parents and community members, culminating in protests by thousands at back-to-back Panel of Educational Policy meetings in February 2011, where the Bloomberg appointee-dominated panel rubberstamped the DOE's decision to close the schools. Students led a walkout at the Feb. 3 PEP meeting, and taking inspiration from the democratic movement unfolding in Egypt at the same time, dubbed the DOE the "Department of Egypt" and chanted "This is what democracy looks like." At its February and March meetings, the PEP voted to closed 22 schools, including 15 it had sought to shut in 2010.
Once again, the UFT, NAACP, parents, elected officials and community groups went to court. The 2011 lawsuit asserts that the DOE failed to provide the assistance it had promised to schools targeted for closing in 2010. (The suit also argues that the DOE violated the state’s charter law in its plans to co-locate 15 charter schoolsin existing school buildings.)
State and federal officials have also sought to address the challenges of struggling schools. The UFT has worked with State Education Department officials along with DOE officials to address the needs of schools placed on the state’s Persistently Lowest Achieving schools list. Federal regulations now require that these schools must undergo one of four intervention models to restructure in an effort to bring about improvements. The UFT has advocated for the schools and negotiated with the DOE to make the implementation of these models as educationally helpful as possible, though the decision on which model to choose is solely the DOE’s. In July 2011 the UFT and DOE reached an agreement for 33 schools on the state’s PLA list, securing additional state funding to help these schools, which will implement the “restart” or “transformation” models.
While education “reformers” talk about achievement and standards and recommend punitive consequences for schools that fail to meet their benchmarks, the UFT will continue to insist that we must educate all children and we must support all schools in their efforts to do that.