25 more schools marked for closure

Twenty-five more city schools face shutdown or phaseout — 11 of them opened by the Bloomberg administration — in what UFT President Michael Mulgrew charged is the Department of Education “playing three-card Monte with children’s lives and education.”

“This announcement — particularly in the wake of disappointing scores in national reading and math tests — represents another stunning failure of DOE management,” Mulgrew said. “Rather than doing the hard work of helping struggling schools, the DOE tries to close them, making sure the hardest-to-educate kids end up concentrated in the next school on the closure list.”

For the first time, middle schools took the hardest hit with 12 proposed closings, six of them lopped off from larger schools. The list also targets eight high schools and five elementary schools.

Culled from the DOE’s recent list of 47 low-performing schools, the Dec. 9 and 10 closing announcements include Washington Irving HS in Manhattan and Grace Dodge Career and Technical Educational HS in the Bronx, two “transformation” high schools scheduled to receive up to

$2 million a year in federal School Improvement Grant funds to help in a three-year turnaround. But the rug is being pulled out from under them after only three months; the DOE plans to redirect the money to schools that will replace them.

The elimination of Dodge, Samuel Gompers Career and Technical Education HS and Jane Addams HS for Academic Careers leaves the Bronx with only one comprehensive Career and Technical Education high school (Alfred E. Smith).

Bronx Borough Representative Jose Vargas called the decimation of CTE high schools in his borough “a crime, leaving the population they served with almost nowhere to go.”

Vargas said that thousands of the students who were in the early grades when the Bloomberg education reforms began and should now be ready for graduation have been the victims of the DOE’s highly criticized school-closure policy, some of them shuffled from one school to the next more than once as shutdowns multiplied over the years in low-income, high-minority communities.

It’s a pattern that Merryl Tisch, the chancellor of the State Board of Regents, described as warehousing kids.

“They’ve warehoused thousands of kids,” she said, “and when I say warehoused, I mean warehoused. These kids don’t have a shot.”

Between now and February when the Panel for Educational Policy will vote on the proposals, the DOE must hold hearings at each of the schools, where strong opposition from parents and community is expected. The panel, dominated by mayoral appointees, has never voted against any of the previous proposed closings.

Mulgrew has made clear that if union attorneys find any violations of state law in the closings, the UFT will go to court again on the issue as it has in the previous two years.

If the schools in this latest round are indeed closed, it would bring the number of schools closed by the mayor to 117 since 2002.