Normally I wouldn’t write about the fate of a single school. But this is a special case.
I recall that when Bill DeBlasio ran for Mayor in 2013, he said emphatically that he would not follow the Bloomberg script of closing schools. I moderated a debate back in that first election where he pledged to take a different path. He has recently hinted that he has national ambitions, so his reversion to the previous Mayor’s plan of closing schools as a matter of course, over the protests of the school community, is very disturbing.
Here is a statement by the PTA president of a school that is slated for closure. It is a “transfer school,” that is, a high school for kids who have persistently struggled and are trying to earn a diploma. In other words, it is a “last chance” school for kids who have not been able to make it in the general education program.
Read this and see what you think. Should this school die?
“For Immediate Release
Contact: Shaunte Williams, PTA President
(718)-877-3821
“Crotona Academy, a transfer high school in the South Bronx, is actively rallying its community of students, alumni, parents, and staff to challenge a New York City Department of Education proposal to lock its doors to more than 150 at-risk students.
“Superintendent Paul Rotondo informed the school’s community in early February that the DOE had put the alternative high school on a fast track toward closure by August 2018. “This proposal threatens a major disruption in the education of teenagers who are at Crotona precisely because they have already suffered a disruption in their education,” said Shaunte Williams, president of Crotona Academy’s parents association and the parent of a current student at Crotona Academy.
“Unlike other identified NYCDOE schools proposed for closure, the decision to close the transfer high school Crotona Academy was left totally at the discretion of the Superintendent of transfer schools, Paul Rotondo. Superintendent Rotondo has been granted the authority to select which of his transfer high schools he elects to merge, co-locate, replace the school leader, or close completely. On February 9, 2018, Superintendent Paul Rotondo shocked the Crotona Academy community of students, parents and staff by stating that the school was proposed for closure effective September 2018.
“For thirteen years, Crotona Academy High School, the “Little Transfer School That Could” has dedicated itself to educating and supporting at risk, over aged, under credited students in their determination to earn a traditional high school diploma. Crotona Academy High School is a small transfer high school located in the poorest congressional district in America in the heart of the South Bronx. Since its inception, Crotona Academy High School has worked in conjunction with community-based organizations to offer in depth-individualized support, job readiness and career exploration to students who for a litany of reasons could not succeed in a general education high school. A large proportion of the Crotona students and their families are struggling with poverty-induced obstacles such as homelessness, unemployment, substance abuse, and mental health issues. Nearly half of Crotona Academy’s total enrollment compromised of special education and English language learners. In September 2016, the Crotona Academy school community was grateful to move into a new school building location after eleven years of being relegated to receiving instruction situated in series of TCU trailer units.
“Superintendent Rotondo’s decision to close Crotona Academy High School leaves many questions to bear in mind…
“Crotona Academy High has been identified by NYSED as a school “In Good Standing” for over five consecutive years. There are currently nine underperforming Transfer High Schools identified by the NYSED ESSA as “Focus” or “Priority” schools. Four of these underperforming Transfer High Schools identified by NYSED as Focus or Priority transfer high schools are located in the Bronx. Superintendent Rotondo however has elected to select only Crotona Academy High School, a school in GOOD STANDING for closure. Crotona Academy High School is actually the only transfer high school Superintendent Rotondo has selected for closure.
“Crotona Academy has made significant educational gains within the last three years in student attendance and has experienced a steady increase in student enrollment, graduation rates of English Language Learners and Special Education students and the inclusion of a variety of multi-cultural and college/career ready programs.
“Unfortunately, Superintendent Rotondo in the published Impact Statement has strategically concealed much of this data in order to support his rationale to close Crotona Academy High School.
“In spite of the educational gains Crotona Academy has made, the school’s five year identified status as a school “In Good Standing” by NYSED ESSA, and the fact that Crotona Academy students were just moved into their new school building less than two years ago, Superintendent Rotondo has still chosen Crotona Academy High School for closure. To add insult to injury, the proposed plan for the school building is to move the Crotona Academy students out and designate the school building to another school currently located in TCU trailer units.
“What message does this send to the Crotona Academy students? Those Crotona Academy students are less worthy than other students to be educated within a nice school building. That although NYSED has identified Crotona Academy as a school in good standing for the past five years, that this information is irrelevant, that the gains made at Crotona Academy in attendance, enrollment, graduation rates and post-secondary enrollment rates, is deemed by Paul Rotondo as inconsequential. What is the rational for Superintendent Rotondo to TARGET Crotona Academy High School for closure rather than those underperforming transfer schools identified by NYSED? What was the rationale for Superintendent Rotondo directing Crotona Academy High School to seize enrollment in August 2018 and preventing admissions although there was a demand from the community and no indication that the school was being proposed for closure that announcement was made later in February 2018.
“Clearly, many unanswered questions deserve to be answered before a decision is made to close Crotona Academy High School. It would be a travesty to punish at risk students by forcing them to relocate to other schools due to the questionable and possibly bias decision making practices of Superintendent Rotondo.
“A public hearing on the DOE proposal will be held on Thursday, April 12, 2018 at 5:00 P.M. at Crotona Academy High School located at 1211 Southern Boulevard, Bronx, NY, 10459. The panel for Educational Policy will vote on the proposal at a meeting on Wednesday, April 25, 2018 at 5 pm Murray Bergtraum High School, located at 411 Pearl Street, New York, NY, 10007. The Crotona Academy community encourages supporters to attend and voice their opposition to the proposal at both hearings.
“To voice your opposition to the closure ahead of the above-mentioned hearing dates, contact the DOE (anonymously) calling 212-374-5159 or email D12proposals@schools.nyc.gov”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I truly DO THINK the OLIGARCHS want a TWO tiered society … slaves and themselves. Honest. They need slaves to do their work, because they have NO CLUE and have been sheltered their entire lives from doing anything of value, except deceive.
Diane Great piece But as I understand the situation Rotunda is not the villain. It’s the state Commissioner Elia who wants to get rid of the transfer schools. And alternatives. It endangers a lot of my allies and friends. How can we help? The Regent! Elia? The new chancellor ?
It’s an awful situation and hardly what a new head of DOE needs to face.
Have you had any contact with him? I hear positive things about him from California colleagues
Sent from my iPhone
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Sorry. The new chancellor sounds like the same old, same old – college for all, AP for all, etc. Got to keep the big money machine rolling.
At risk children and teens often do not do well in regular, overcrowded classroom environments. Alternative schools like this one offer an environment that is designed to adjust to their needs so they can learn and succeed.
I’m looking for some kind of logic behind closures in general (under DiBlasio). Is it presented as ‘routine mgt’ in the sense of underenrollment/ most efficient use of space? Are closures relatively rare & each a special case, e.g. this one redundant, that one ‘failing’, etc? Or are closures just announced w/o preamble, justification provided only when there’s public/ media pressure?
If Rotondo’s choices re: transfer schs are restricted to merge/ co-locate/ replace sch leader/ close, that supports debmeier’s note that Elia wants to get rid of transfer schools. Why (& is the alternative to let these students flunk/ drop out)?… If so, why do it one by one, starting w/the best of the lot??
I suspect there is logic behind this. What I find odd is that instead of journalists asking the right questions — why this particular transfer school and not another one with much worse results closed? — we just get people who decided the Mayor has just gone to the dark side and is looking to close whatever schools work so he can help destroy public education as fast as possible because he hates public schools. It is ridiculous.
With the other school closing that Diane Ravitch wrote about, the closing was of a seriously under enrolled public school. Some grades had 17 students total but more than half of those 17 did well on state tests. The DOE had already made some efforts to get kids to enroll and yet the population wasn’t growing. Other schools didn’t have as good results and yet many more parents wanted their kids in them. I suppose in a perfect world every single school should be able to remain open, and I am sure that in a perfect world de Blasio would not object.
But we don’t live in a perfect world. We live in a world where there is limited funding and choices. You vote for politicians who you trust to make the choices not to please the billionaires but to manage the competing interests with an eye to doing good. Apparently no one trusts de Blasio anymore and I find the reasons to be ridiculous.
He picked a good new Chancellor. He started universal pre-k. He directed huge resources at renewal schools while the easiest thing would have been to close them. He is approaching integration in a sensible way that is leading to success albeit more slowly than people seem to be certain some other method would bring.
Now he is being forced to make some choices. I would certainly like to know why this school would be closed rather than another one. I would certainly like someone to ask the Superintendent and new chancellor and de Blasio why. But I doubt it is for some nefarious reason in which de Blasio’s aim is to close all good public schools that work until the question is actually asked.
Just because a politician does something you do not agree with does not mean it is because they are corrupt. When Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren support charters and refuse to support the NAACP’s moratorium I don’t assume it is because they are corrupt. But there are certain politicians who stand in the way of the right wing billionaires having their way in NYC and those must be attacked as corrupt whenever possible.
The rationale is always either under-enrollment or poor academic performance. I wouldn’t call them rare. Bloomberg was the king of school closures, but De Blasio’s done quite a few, too. I recently read that by next fall, around 50 schools will have been closed under De Blasio, either through closure or mergers. Almost all, if not all, of those decisions were made on the basis of academic performance.
FLERP, if you find a scorecard comparing the two mayors on their record of school closures, post here. DeBlasio has a long way to go to catch up with Bloomberg. Mayor Mike lives in many cities. As a billionaire, he never had much concern for communities, traditions, stability. He lived in a ratified world. His chancellor, Joel Klein, seemed to be animated by animus towards the schools that educated him and took pleasure on closing them and breaking large ones into little ones.
Yes, there’s no doubt Mike was the king.
I haven’t seen anything resembling a scorecard, but I’ll post if I do. There were a bunch of stories in late December 2017 about the DOE’s proposal to close 13 “struggling” schools, including several renewal schools. Then a new bunch of stories in February 2018 as the PEP voted on that plan. Several of those stories stated that “[a]fter closures and mergers, there will be 47 Renewal schools left next fall, down from 94 at the program’s start in late 2014.” Assuming that’s true, and including other school closures (of schools other than renewal schools) that have happened and are slated to happen, 50 closed schools seems like a conservative estimate.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/new-york-city-to-vote-on-closing-13-struggling-schools-1519858225
FLERP!,
Why are you equating voting with closing? Many of those closings were held up.
It should be easy enough to find a list of the ones that “closed”. I suspect many of them were when all those tiny schools that Bloomberg insisted were better were combined into larger schools.
Are you saying that if a Mayor has no choice but to either close a school or to take money from the budgets of other schools to pay the private rent costs of every single charter who demands lots of space, de Blasio should never choose to close a school?
It seems to me that closing a school that is under enrolled with 17 students in a grade makes as much sense as closing a school that parents like and use for the sole reason of it having poor test scores.
Note also that a lot of Bloomberg’s school closures were in effect breakups of large schools into several small schools. I don’t know if any of De Blasio’s school mergers have been re-combinations of small schools that were formerly one large school.
Bloomberg also closed some of his own small schools. Disruption and chaos were valued strategies. The small schools were given two years in which they could exclude students who were Sped and ELL. That made his “reforms” look better.
Diane,
This is so true about Bloomberg and Klein. They had no concern about real reform. It was all about looking good. And that is the mark of the entire school reform movement. What LOOKS good is far more important than what is good. And if you can make your school LOOK good, you are rewarded.
I have truly seen very little of that with de Blasio. He directed money toward schools that were unlikely to show swift results unless they adopted a process of “kick out the underperforming kids and declare success”. The fact that these schools weren’t improving rapidly tells me that the educators there weren’t trying to manipulate statistics to look good. They were simply using their resources to teach some of the most difficult to motivate kids.
The problem is that we live in an era where trying to govern like that is impossible and all it gets you is fewer resources. de Blasio has been trying to walk a fine line between doing what is best for ALL kids and figuring out how to prevent the state from taking over with claims that allowing schools that aren’t improving to exist instead of closing them means he needs to be impeached or have the state take over. And there are no prominent progressives fighting that lie — instead too many are happy to jump on the bandwagon and attack de Blasio as soon as he makes any compromises as “a complete sell-out who is doing this all to please right wing billionaires”. it is ironic because the right is having a field day claiming every de Blasio move is about pleasing the teachers’ union but their trolls post exactly the opposite on progressive websites.
I’m not seeing de Blasio making the corrupt decisions that Klein and Bloomberg did where looking good was a all they cared about.
If that was the case, de Blasio would keep open any school with 17 kids per grade with high test scores and declare it a success and let the other schools now having to make to with less just have to suffer. He is trying to balance what is right for ALL kids. And while his choices may not always be “right”, that doesn’t mean that they are wrong either. His motives are correct. As were Hillary Clinton’s. But progressives will shoot and destroy candidates trying to do the right thing by repeating the right wing propaganda that they are all co-opted sell-outs trying to destroy every progressive ideal they can because some rich guy is paying them to do so.
Put not thy faith in any politician.
Choose the best of those running.
But be ever watchful and expect to be disappointed.
I SHOULD be disappointed by politicians! I represent my own interests and if I am getting every single thing I want from a politician then it probably means something is wrong. What I expect is to have a politician who is managing competing interests in the way that philosophically aligns with my own view that rich people should not get special privileges and that poor people need more but you need to be cognizant of the middle class and how policies might affect them as well.
I have low opinions of politicians who act as if they have all the answers and it is so easy. It is hard. It is difficult. Hillary Clinton spent years trying to get health care and so did Ted Kennedy. They BELIEVED in it but also knew there would be some people who would not be better off and it wasn’t just the rich. It might be union members and other middle class people lucky enough to have top notch insurance due to their employers’ generosity.
From what I have seen, there are two kinds of politicians. One kind are completely corrupt and have no moral core. Not just Trump and most of the Republicans, but many Republican Senators owned by the Koch Brothers. And Andrew Cuomo. I think the jury is still out on Corey Booker but I am skeptical he wants to do much except get re-elected and convince himself he is doing it for the right reasons when it is simply about how he likes keeping power. Same with Susan Collins.
The other kind often gets a bad rap like LBJ, Hillary Clinton, and de Blasio. They are hated but they get things done because they are willing to compromise somewhat but also fighting for the right thing ultimately.
South Bronx (with apologies to Langston Hughes and the great blog poet SomeDAM)
What happens to a dream DFERed?
Does he dry up
every school under the sun?
Take hedge fund campaign gifts —
And then run?
Does he stink like rotten meat?
Accept payola over —
Treating schoolchildren sweet?
…sweetly. It’s grammatically correct, but just doesn’t rhyme.
I am so disappointed in DeBlasio. I’m from Indiana but sent him a small contribution when he first ran, but he has lost his way. Innovative, alternative schools were a public school creation that preceded charter schools supposed ‘innovations’. Alternative ed. designed to meet specific student needs is what schools SHOULD be doing. Now this school designed to prevent at-risk high school students from dropping out is on the chopping block. It’s SO wrong-headed. The Mayor is not getting any more support from me, and I’ve deleted him from my address book. I don’t want to hear from him amymore.
Good points, Nancy. Any update available on this situation?