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Topics in the News:
struggling schools
The state Public Employment Relations Board on May 15 rejected an appeal by the city’s Department of Education of PERB’s earlier decision to appoint a mediator to help resolve the issue of teacher evaluations in 33 schools. In the ruling, PERB said that the attempts by the Department of Education to change the improvement model it planned to use for the schools “does not nullify its obligations” to negotiate with the teachers’ union.
Citing school closings that have led to reduced services and increased dropout rates, the NYC Working Group on School Transformation on April 17 said closing a school should be the last resort.
Charging the mayor and the city Department of Education with politics and arrogant indifference in their march to close schools, community activists, parents, political leaders and staff from August Martin HS pointed to the steady rise in graduation rates and test scores at the Jamaica school over the past three years as they stepped up their fight to save the targeted school.
The mayor’s original list of 33 schools targeted for closure dropped to 24 by the time of the Panel for Educational Policy’s vote on April 26 as he and the Department of Education backpedaled on school after school in the face of a wave of public outrage and political pressure.Two schools — Brooklyn’s Bushwick Community HS, and Grover Cleveland HS in Ridgewood, Queens — were told that they had been spared closure just hours before the panel’s vote.
The students at Long Island City HS have a lot of school pride — and they’re not afraid to show it. Scores of them, ranging from athletes to musicians to members of the school’s respected JROTC program, turned out to defend their school and their teachers at an April 17 public hearing on the Department of Education’s plans to shutter and then reopen it with half the original staff as part of the “turnaround” model.
Scores of parents and teachers rallied outside City Hall to protest the mayor’s school-closing policy on April 26, just hours before the city’s Panel for Educational Policy voted to shutter 24 struggling schools, dismiss their staffs and reopen them in the fall under new names.
As the fight to save endangered Long Island City HS came to a boil, two chefs at upscale Manhattan eateries abandoned their stoves and rushed to an April 17 hearing at their alma mater.
The UFT and the Council of School Supervisors & Administrators on May 7 filed suit in New York State Supreme Court to prevent the “sham” closing and restaffing of 24 schools that would be reopened almost immediately in the same buildings and with the same students. The lawsuit seeks a temporary restraining order and injunction that would be in effect until the issue can be resolved through arbitration.
In case you missed it during the break, Mayor Bloomberg has announced that he is now working with Joel Klein, former D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee, Eva Moskowitz and a cast of other characters from the so-called education “reform” movement to form a new statewide organization, StudentsFirstNY.
Students, teachers, community supporters from Grover Cleveland HS on April 2 joined together for a protest rally on the school steps before the evening’s public hearing on the city’s plans to close the 80-year-old institution.
Fordham Leadership Academy for Business and Technology, one of five schools colocated at the Bronx’s Theodore Roosevelt HS Complex, is one of the 26 schools on Bloomberg’s list to be closed in the summer and reopened in September with half the original staff. The faculty says the school’s success was sabotaged by its former principal, Richard Bost.
To date, the Department of Education under Michael Bloomberg has closed more than 140 public schools and has now begun to close new schools created under its tutelage at the same rate that it closes older schools. It is no exaggeration to say that the Bloomberg DOE is bereft of ideas and solid educational strategies and has adopted school closure as its one and only policy.
Sporting school-color orange T-shirts and hoodies reading “We’re Open” superimposed over “Sorry, We’re closed!” the Sheepshead Bay HS community in Brooklyn is fighting for its life.
The Department of Education announced on April 2 that it would not proceed with plans to shutter seven of the 33 schools that the mayor first targeted for closure in January after the DOE failed to reach an agreement with the UFT on a new teacher evaluation system for those schools. Those seven schools received an A or a B on their most recent School Progress Reports. Under the mayor’s proposed “turnaround” plan, the 33 schools were to close and reopen this summer, retaining their students but replacing up to half of the current staff. The city’s Panel for Educational Policy will determine the fates of the remaining 26 schools at its April 26 meeting.
Outraged teachers, parents, students and community and political leaders rallied in every borough on March 15 in a Day of Solidarity to protest the Bloomberg administration’s decade of mismanaging the city’s schools.
The UFT on March 5 issued a subpoena and deposition notices to compel former Schools Chancellor Joel Klein and 11 other Department of Education officials to testify about the DOE’s failure to live up to its promise to provide resources and support to the threatened schools.
The UFT asked the Public Employment Relations Board on March 6 to compel the Department of Education to negotiate in good faith after the DOE refused to return to the bargaining table to develop a teacher evaluation system for 33 restart and transformation schools.
The state’s Public Employment Relations Board (PERB) has decided to grant the UFT’s request for the appointment of a mediator to help break the impasse between the union and the Department of Education over teacher evaluations in 33 schools.
Blue ribbons on trees and fence posts, posters blasting the mayor in neighborhood stores, buttons and school-based protest actions are the markers of a blue-ribbon campaign launched by the UFT in concert with the teachers, parents, students and community members at 33 “persistently lowest achieving” schools, who refuse to sit by while Mayor Bloomberg moves to gut their staffs.
Mayor Bloomberg’s drive to close Flushing HS, the city’s oldest public high school, isn’t happening without a fight from the community it serves. Queens State Sen. Toby Stavisky joined an array of local politicians, parent and community leaders at a Feb. 24 press conference to denounce the mayor’s move and to detail how the school has improved over the past three years.
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