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School closings enrage communities
Dec 17, 2009 11:38 AM
Teachers, students, parents and communities reeling from Department of Education-announced school closings that reached 20 in December are fighting back.
UFT teams, fanning out across the city to meet with the thousands of union members and parents whose schools are facing the ax, reported that staffs together with the wider school communities are building well-organized campaigns to save their schools.
UFT President Michael Mulgrew has offered the union’s full support as schools reach out to political leaders, set up phone banks, design flyers and plan meetings and rallies like the very successful rally at Brooklyn’s Maxwell HS held last week [see ‘Phase out’ despite two years of earning bonuses] to bring their stories to the community.
The proposed closings include an unprecedented number of high schools with 15 on the block along with four middle schools and one elementary school. The Bronx is taking the biggest hit, losing five high schools and two middle schools. Eleven of the targeted schools are small schools, eight of them created by Chancellor Joel Klein, who ironically has boasted of how successful “his” schools are.
As Mulgrew has reminded Klein on many occasions, all city public schools “are your schools.” The increased rate of closings, Mulgrew said, reflects the failure of this administration’s education policies.
While the DOE maintains that its revolving-door policy of openings and closings is based on hard data including graduation rates, state test scores and annual School Progress Reports, many of the schools facing shutdown are not among the city’s lowest-performing schools. So targeted schools are asking, why me? Others see an opportunistic plan to seed charter schools in some of the freed-up space.
Where does the responsibility for failure lie?
A teacher at Business and Computer Applications HS in Queens challenged Superintendent Doris Unger, who had come to announce the school’s closing: “When I fail a student, I am expected to have done outreach in every possible way to turn that failure around. What has the DOE done to help this school succeed?”
Unger’s answer: “We gave you professional development at the beginning of the year.”
Another teacher stepped up: “According to the DOE, we have been failing for a number of years. Instead of giving us resources, you gave us oversized classes, only two social studies teachers for our 470 students and a science teacher teaching out of license.”
Lack of leadership is also an issue at many of the schools. Principals at seven of the schools have less than two years’ experience and, at Norman Thomas HS in Manhattan, the principal started in September. In Brooklyn, the superintendent has never visited the Metropolitan Corporate Academy, a school abandoned by Goldman Sachs that is housed in a dreary building with narrow hallways not suitable for the adult student population. Repeated promises by school officials of a new venue remain unfulfilled.
Principals at the surrounding high schools left standing fear the influx of students from the closing high schools will present them with the same problems of overcrowding and lack of resources that hit Maxwell HS.
Jamaica HS, with 1,500 students, one of the largest schools targeted for closure, has rolled up its sleeves and is ready to fight. The Queens high school has a new principal and has been making strides, the school’s staff said, but the chancellor is not building on that success.
A UFT team strategizes ways to fight school closings. At front, Paul Egan, director of legislation and political action, shares information with student intern Amy Garland. At back, Vice President Sterling Roberson, and Special Representatives Janella Hinds and Amy Arundell gather data school by school.
Mulgrew accused the administration of “thumbing its nose” at the new governance regulations passed in August, which require that school closings must be officially approved by the Panel for Educational Policy following public hearings. But by scheduling those hearings for Jan. 24 on Staten Island, the only borough not affected by closings and one not easily reached, the DOE is obviously making it difficult for interested constituents to be heard, he charged.
The DOE is also dragging its feet in providing an educational impact statement for each closing school as required by the new state governance law. The statement is supposed to include the current and projected enrollment of the affected school, the prospective use for the school building, the ramification of the school closing on the community, and the initial costs and savings resulting from those that are closing.
The DOE has provided no details about the new schools to replace those that are closing.
Schools want their stories told. Heading for the chopping block are Kappa II middle school in East Harlem and the middle school of Frederick Douglass Academy III in the Bronx, both modeled after successful schools but with significantly higher class sizes than their models. Kappa II has had five principals in as many years.
What about the demographics and social issues that closing schools have faced? Most serve high-needs English-as-a-second-language students, large immigrant populations and a growing student population from homeless families.
Paul Robeson HS in Brooklyn saw the number of its students in homeless shelters jump from 16 in the 2007-08 school year to 156 last year.
Even newer schools created by Klein like the Bronx’s New Day Academy, which opened in 2005, Global Enterprise HS, which opened in 2003, and Brooklyn’s Middle School for Academic and Social Excellence, which opened in 2005 to replace another failing school, are on the way out.
Teachers are wondering whether, if Klein doesn’t get it right the first time, does he get a second chance? What about the students being closed out and phased out? They don’t get a second chance.
