Once again, a large group of New York City public schools will close their doors, their staffs will be fired and replaced, and new schools will open. Among the schools that will be closed are Flushing High School, reputed to be the oldest school in the city, and John Dewey High School, once highly regarded for its progressivism but now burdened by a steady influx of low-performing students. (http://www.nytimes.com/schoolbook/2012/04/26/with-panel-vote-once-venerable-city-schools-will-close/).
Some schools were saved by last-minute expressions of interest by the Borough President of Queens, Helen Marshall, and the chair of the State Assembly Education Committee, Cathy Nolan, which apparently sufficed to save Grover Cleveland High School in their borough.
As the closing of “failing” schools becomes an annual ritual, along with the opening of brand-new schools (some of which will eventually join the ranks of “failing” schools), it is time to ask about where accountability truly lies.
I wonder if it ever occurs to anyone in the New York City Department of Education that their own policies of closing schools and shuffling low-performing students around like checker pieces on a checker board have actually created “failing” schools. Every time they close a large high school with large numbers of low-performing students, those students are then pushed off into another large high school (like Dewey) that is doomed to “fail.”
Why doesn’t the leadership of the DOE ever take responsibility for helping schools that have disproportionate numbers of students who enter ninth grade with low test scores, including students with disabilities, homeless students, and students who are English language learners? Their methods of “reform” look like 52-pickup: Just throw the cards in the air and hope that somehow you come up with a winning hand.
Instead of providing resources, technical support, extra staff, or whatever the school needs to help students, the DOE declares that the school is “failing.”
Mayor Bloomberg took control of the schools in 2002. His reforms were put in place in September 2003. We are now in the ninth year of mayoral control with no checks or balances. The students in the “failing” schools started school when the Mayor was in charge. At what point can we say that the Mayor’s reforms have worked? Every time a school fails, the responsibility and accountability belong to the New York City Department of Education, which proves each time that it has no idea how to help schools improve.
No wonder that New York City voters (and public school parents) expressed their dissatisfaction with the Mayor’s policies in the latest poll. New Yorkers are tired of the parade of school closings and openings. (http://www.nytimes.com/schoolbook/2012/04/24/poll-new-yorkers-want-new-city-school-policies-from-next-mayor/)
Accountability starts at the top. If school officials don’t know how to help schools, they should get out of the way and stop wrecking what is left of the public school system.
Diane
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Diane, what is really insane is that John Dewey had 68% four year graduation rate this past June (higher than the city average) and is 8% higher than the city average on their metric for “College Readiness”. The staff of the school turned the school around, steadily improving but not able to shed the label of a PLA school, ( which is based upon data from years ago).
In 2002 the DOE did the same thing to the High School for the Humanities (Bayard Rustin). The school population increased from 1800 to 2400 over the summer as other schools were phased out. On my ATR rotation I recently spent a week there and the school will disappear in June. It was a sad situation to see a phased out school at the end of its life and the impact it had on the remaining students and staff. It is a bit comical to see what the administation, the UFT and the Network is doing in the school to “support” the teachers as they transition out.
This all started with Andrew Jackson in the late nighties. The UFT has been standing back and putting up little or no resistence and has no real strategy to actually challenge what is happening. You see all these unsuccessful principals being shifted to other schools or hired by the networks. There really is no accountability at the top.
Tom, you have a point about the UFT. As teachers, we need to resist. What’s disappointing, I think, is that NYC teachers seem so passive these days. . A If the UFT has been so ineffective, might that also be a reflection of the teaching corps, who are too submissive? Interested in what you think about that.
I would argue that NYC teachers are more passive these days. In the 20+ years I have been around NYC high schools there has always been apathy towards being a union member. In the larger schools, you always had a core of active, usually older teachers who handled union matters. Part of the strategy to break the larger schools is to continue to dilute union influence in school matters. Many schools do not have a trusting relationship with administration and chapter leaders often come under attack for standing up. The teaching corps in many of the small, new schools are new, untenured teachers who do not have the mentors in the schools to strengthen the chapters at the school level. Because of such a large turnover among the teaching corps I would argue the responsibility of education and organization should fall on the UFT, from the top. If you go school to school and examine individual chapters, it is not a pretty picture. This is most convenient for the Unity Caucus to avoid true opposition within the union. The DOE also benefits from allowing corporate system education reform.
It seems like the NYC DOE only cares about numbers, which seems to be the reason they want to get rid of the Global Regents. Kids don’t do as well, and the scores drag down the graduation rates. So, instead of…double periods for global history, and working harder on the curric, the response is to get rid of the exam, and to dumb down the curric to make it easier! Instead of improving those schools in constructive ways, like reducing class size, etc…close them. These are purges.
This happened to a school I worked at in Brooklyn, “The School for Legal Studies.” We had a strong principal with a lot of experience, and our school was starting to be a successful place for students. He then retired, and the school was forced to endure a string of principals who had no idea what they were doing.
A nearby neighbourhood school was closed, and our school was forced to take in 300 of their students, which meant our school increased from 500 to 800 students with no apparent increase in resources available (from a teachers’ perspective).
One of the consequences of the additional group of students was that student over-crowding occurred, and occasional jostling in the hallways became an epidemic. We had fights in the hallways nearly every single day, often caused by groups of students accidentally bumping into each other during class changes.
Our resources were appalling too. We had 8(!!) assistant principals for our school, many of whom as far as I could tell, were forced to do endless paperwork required by the city. We had to use legal sized paper because regular letter sized paper was too expensive. Teachers would then spend time trimming the paper for students since the legal sized paper didn’t fit into student binders. The message to teachers was clear – your time is worthless to us.
In the year that I left (because the NYC DOE “forgot” to renew my visa), we had a teacher turn-over of over 50% at the school, most of whom left because of a dissatisfaction with the current principal.
A serious problem with the school was a lack of resources, which is presumably caused by insufficient funds. We also had way too many managers and required paperwork (top-down control), the resources for which could have been much more effectively spread in other ways. Our leadership was mostly terrible, which is a problem of too few competent leaders to choose from, and was not solved by the Leadership Academy. The teachers at the school were a mixture of a small number of experienced teachers (who were mostly effective) and teachers with less than 2 years experience. Teacher training was awful with the few professional development sessions we were able to attend being either not at all what we needed, or repetition of previous workshops. These problems are huge. I’m not clear how any system could solve all three of them without significant changes in funding. It is certainly clear to me that the school-closure model that NYC has currently adopted is a huge failure.
John Dewey’s downfall really began when they closed Lafayette and all of the kids who couldn’t get into the charter schools (which have since failed) came to Dewey.
Please look at jdhsarchives.webs.com for the Dewey legacy, documents related to Dewey and videos.
It seems that this round of closings, at least in cases like John Dewey High School, was partly in retribution for the Union’s arguments with the Mayor’s administration. JDHS has had numbers on the rise, in fact better than the NYC average by many percentage points, for at least three years.
The PEP’s appointed members never considered the option to forestall closing school’s that deserved it; and the SI rep didn’t have any schools in SI to defend. This is unconscionable behavior, and it proves that the Mayor never had Student interests or constituent interests at heart or head or in policy.