DOE blasted for ‘planned neglect’

Miller PhotographySocial studies teacher Marian Burnbaum, who chairs the school leadership team at Irving, accuses the DOE of low-balling the school’s graduation rate during the Dec. 20 rally.

Washington Irving HS was due to receive up to $6 million in federal funding a year for a planned three-year turnaround after being selected by the Department of Education as a transformation school. Just three months into the process, the DOE abruptly pulled the plug, announcing in December that the school was to be closed.

Angry parents, students and teachers protested the planned closure of the storied high school, near Manhattan’s Union Square, at a rally on Dec. 20 with picket signs that read “10 years of neglect” and “It was planned neglect.”

“What failed here is not Washington Irving, but the Department of Education,” UFT Vice President for Academic High Schools Leo Casey told the protesters. “The mayor’s policies create schools that are separate and unequal. This is not about educational merit, it’s about politics.”

The DOE cites an F on the school’s most recent progress report and a lower-than-expected four-year graduation rate as justification for the closing. But Marian Burnbaum, a social studies teacher who chairs the school leadership team, accused the DOE of low-balling the school’s graduation rate.

“They don’t allow for the 100 students that are missing,” Burnbaum said. “We don’t have the services or the facility to find out where they are, but Tweed won’t let us take them off our registers.” Burnbaum also slammed the DOE for not removing from the school’s registers students put in alternative programs. Absent those students, she said, the school’s graduation rate would be higher than the citywide average.

For over 10 years, Washington Irving has educated many at-risk students. Today, students with special needs represent 15 percent of the student body and English language learners, 21 percent.

“Bloomberg’s new schools don’t serve such students, yet he wants to close the ones that do,” Chapter Leader Gregg Lundahl said.

Lundahl also faulted the DOE for sending to Washington Irving the most violent students ejected from other schools and then in 2003 designating the high school an “impact school” where safety was a concern. “That move by the DOE gave the school a bad name,” he said. (Washington Irving shed the label two years later, but the damage was done.)

The DOE exacerbated the concentration of high-needs students, Lundahl said, when it sliced off the school’s successful performing arts program to create Gramercy Arts HS in 2008. That shift cost Irving more than 500 students and the funding and cachet that went with them.

Sharon Talbot said Washington Irving has well-served her son, a sophomore. “The school is transforming, but we’ve been cut off at the knees,” Talbot said.