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City Council pounds Tweed officials on closings

by Dorothy Callaci

Mar 18, 2010 1:34 PM

During a heated and contentious seven-hour hearing on March 2, City Council members grilled Department of Education officials on the accuracy and fairness of the policies, procedures and criteria they used in designating 19 schools for closure.

Again and again council members from the Education Committee and the Oversight and Investigation Committee demanded to know how schools were allowed to get to the point of being declared failures and what had been done to try to turn them around. They questioned the discrepancy between the city and state lists of failing schools, the disproportionate numbers of high-needs and minority students in the 19 schools, and whether the closings were designed to make way for more charter schools.

The same questions kept thousands of educators, parents and students fighting to save their schools until 3 a.m. on Jan. 26 when the Panel for Educational Policy rubber-stamped the closings.

Since the DOE cited the schools’ grades on the annual School Progress Reports to justify the closings, City Comptroller John Liu announced at the hearing that he will audit the reports for accuracy and fairness. The public, he said, “must be assured and confident about the accuracy of these high-stakes Progress Reports.”

During the testimony by DOE officials, Councilman Lewis Fidler of Brooklyn charged that the policy of closing schools and expanding charter schools sets up a two-tier education system and was aimed at union-busting. “Instead of closing schools,” he challenged, “why not figure out what causes failure and fix it?”

Criticizing how the neediest students from closed schools get funneled to other schools that subsequently fail, Councilman James Vacca of the Bronx asked, “Where will the domino effect stop? Will all zoned, large academic high schools be closed?”

It was clear that council members were in no mood for the endless parade of DOE data presented at the hearing that failed to provide any evidence of interventions to help the schools. In a scathing attack, Brooklyn Councilman Charles Barron charged the mayor and the chancellor with failing the city’s children and turning schools into “test-taking mills” and challenged them “to do for public schools what they’re doing for charter schools.”

In his testimony, UFT President Michael Mulgrew called on the DOE to stop playing the blame game and focus on “the hard work of educating.” He cited a recent meeting at DeWitt Clinton HS, a school not on any lists but facing the challenges of steep increases in homeless students, English language learners and over-the-counter students, where worried staff have been asking for help but not getting any.

“Education,” he said, “is not about here’s a budget and good luck.” The DOE provides extra money to schools during the phase-out, he noted. “Why not before?”

In response to Education Committee Chair Robert Jackson’s insistent but unanswered question to the DOE officials about specific action plans for each threatened school, Mulgrew indicated that the union had visited and worked with staff at the 19 schools on the city list and the 34 schools on the state list to design action plans to support and help each school to turn around.

Noting that schools “don’t flip overnight,” Ernest Logan, the president of the Council of School Supervisors and Administrators, asked “Why is it that these schools had their first visit from community supervisors the day their closing was announced?”

“The mayor wanted control of the schools,” parent Richard Barr noted, “but now he’s not taking responsibility for them.”

Teachers from several of the targeted schools presented oral and written testimony that the PEP vote to close them was unjustified.

Dina Gordon of Jamaica HS questioned a report card grade of B that was quickly revised to a C and pointed to work on rewiring and new windows and science labs at the landmark school. “Who’s coming?” she asked. “They’re not doing this for us.”