Andrea Dupre taught at Murray Bergtraum High School in Manhattan. It was one of the best high schools in the nation in 1999. By 2011, it was a “failing” school.

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Categories Accountability, Bloomberg, Michael, Education Reform, New York City

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Chiara says:

February 8, 2019 at 9:44 am

US Dept of Education Retweeted
Betsy DeVos
‏”The brain-dead debate between charter and neighborhood schools should be replaced with a focus on quality over mediocrity.” I agree, Chicagos Mayor. “Labels” don’t matter, quality does.

Ed reform Democrats are unable to draw a single distinction between themselves and Betsy DeVos.

One big, bipartisan echo chamber.

They invest nothing in public schools and pour dollars and advocacy and marketing into charters and private schools, yet claim to be “agnostic”.

It’s really unfair to students and families who attend the ideologically incorrect public school “sector”. They should tell them the truth.

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Chiara says:

February 8, 2019 at 10:04 am

If she wants support from ed reformers in government, the best bet would be to become a charter school.

That’s the condition precedent to funding, support and advocacy from ed reformers. The schools government must be ideologically correct (privatized) and also eradicate labor unions.

They’re sending a clear message to parents too- choose wisely, or you lose.

It’ll open a spigot of funding from the both the federal government and the billionaires, one that is specifically denied to public schools. They’ll also get a huge cadre of paid lobbyists, along with a marketing team.

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FLERP! says:

February 8, 2019 at 10:35 am

Here’s a more legible presentation of this piece.

https://outline.com/sY3mnH

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Yvonne Siu-Runyan says:

February 8, 2019 at 11:11 am

SAD.

All of these “so-called” reforms, are actually DEFORMS. We have a two-tiered education system — one for the entitled, another for the rest.

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NYC public school parent says:

February 8, 2019 at 11:28 am

This is a very enlightening article. I have often passed by that high school and wondered what happened to it.

It is interesting that the Bloomberg “reforms” seemed to designate a few large schools to be the dumping ground so that his vaunted “small schools” could choose to teach the students they wanted. I had not realized that Murry Bergtraum was one of them. I do seem to recall that at that time Eva Moskowitz was chomping at the bit to use this high school so she could open a Success Academy charter school that would ONLY give priority to the affluent students who live in District 2 (which include all the rich families who – conveniently – lived downtown in multi-million dollar lofts). So perhaps Bloomberg’s decision to keep undermining that high school also had an ulterior motive that included rewarding his very favorite charter school with some of the most expensive real estate space in NYC – with the DOE footing the bill. In his last month in office – December of 2013 – Bloomberg’s DOE handed space at Bergtraum to Eva Moskwitz, which was likely planned for a while. After the incoming de Blasio administration reviewed the ridiculously DOE giveaway of many free school locations to Moskowitz, the Bergtraum location was one of the 3 they did not allow. (That led to Moskowitz’ temper tantrum that made her look like a spoiled child who only got 5 expensive new gifts when she was expecting 8 expensive new gifts and she would not be denied every one of the gifts she knew was rightfully hers.)

I could never believe anyone fell for Mayor Bloomberg’s idea that if he just broke up large schools to make a few “good” schools and one terrible large school, he was “reforming” education. There were so many better ways he could have approached making schools better, and instead he just went for PR over substance. It’s rather shameful but perhaps reflects the Bloomberg/Moskowitz/Ed Reformer’ belief that if you make thousands of students’ situation worse to give a few hundred “worthy” students something “better”, it is always a good choice.

And it seems as if de Blasio’s DOE has not helped matters. What a shame.

I always think of Edward R. Murrow High School as one of the jewels that models what a large high school can be. It is large, it is diverse, 70% of the students are economically disadvantaged. It teaches students at all levels, with classes for advanced students and classes for students who are below grade level. I’m very glad the small school movement Bloomberg used to fool the public into believing he had “reformed” education did not destroy Murrow the way it did Bergtraum.

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- ciedie aech says:
  
  February 8, 2019 at 1:04 pm
  
  “… he just went for PR over substance.” The saddest truth being that the PR wins over the public every time.
  
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- Beth says:
  
  February 9, 2019 at 9:42 am
  
  I remember this now. At the time the Success Academy people were so indignant. They were so angry that de Blasio would not give them the school they were promised by Bloomberg at the 11th hour. I fail to see how anyone would expect the new mayor to give them something promised by the old mayor, but then again the audacity of Success Academy knows no bounds. They thought they deserved the space more than the “failing” school that was occupying the building.
  
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  - NYC public school parent says:
    
    February 9, 2019 at 10:58 pm
    
    Yes, if I were a conspiracy theorist I would wonder if Bloomberg’s DOE helped speed up Murry Bergtraum HS’s demise because a well-connected charter wanted a location in the most affluent District in NYC.
retired teacher says:

February 8, 2019 at 11:30 am

Comprehensive high schools work when they contain a range of different types of students. When there are options for some students to attend other schools, in the case of Bergtraum High School, the “leftovers” remained in a school of last resort. The student body became a combination of conduct disorders and limited English students. The desire to create “small schools” upset the balance of the student population. The lesson that should be learned here is that choice may provide options for some students, but not those that do not normally get high scores on standardized tests. Comprehensive high schools produce a more balanced student population, and they also create a diverse environment where all types of students can mix and learn to be more tolerant of individual differences.

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- Laura H. Chapman says:
  
  February 8, 2019 at 11:40 am
  
  The desire to create “small schools” upset the balance of the student population.
  Yes, but this idea from Bill Gates failed miserably. Small schools cannot offer the rich array of courses and co-curricular activities that large schools can and should.
  
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  - ciedie aech says:
    
    February 9, 2019 at 1:42 pm
    
    and the man still hasn’t given up on it; he and his diehard small schools cronies keep buying up districts before aggressively pushing the population-devastating breakup of larger traditional schools in poorest neighborhoods
markstextterminal says:

February 8, 2019 at 11:46 am

I worked for ten years in another Lower Manhattan high school quite near Bergtraum. The rumor circulated in our school that the principal was another of these geniuses who was going to make her mark on the school and show teachers who was boss.

So people started leaving en masse, which is never good for a school. The same thing started happening at the High School of Economics & Finance, where I worked. The last four years I was there the school churned 25-40 percent of its faculty every year.

When I tried to discuss this with the principal, he blithely told me he didn’t see it as a problem.

So I left too.

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Roy Turrentine says:

February 8, 2019 at 12:02 pm

Thanks so much for this article. From my rural perspective, I have always thought that small is the way to go. This article suggests that I would be in error where larger schools are concerned.

I am inclined to believe that smaller schools tend to represent the community better. That comes from my experience in which larger schools were the result of countywide consolidation. This was often an excuse to ignore the rural poor, warehousing them in classes that were just to oversee their behavior. I watched teachers ignore behavior because they did not know who the students were. I watched the students dissolve into cliques of wealthy, rural poor, drama students, druggies, you get the picture. I still think this is the tendency in many instances.

What this article taught me is that a person needs to look closer. Generalization, that all too human behavior which produces prejudice, is alive and well in my own thinking. This article suggests that I am often just wrong.

What if I were rich and powerful? Could I ever have come to the conclusion that I was wrong? Or would I be so overcome with hubris associated wi my social status that I could not see my logical error?

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- NYC public school parent says:
  
  February 8, 2019 at 12:20 pm
  
  I think you make a very good point about smaller schools in rural areas. And had Mayor Bloomberg been looking to legitimately trying to make public schools better for ALL students — instead of looking to create some small schools for some students so he could claim success — the smaller schools might have been a worthy experiment.
  
  The key difference is that the small schools in your rural area would likely teach every child in that rural area. What Bloomberg did would be tantamount to creating small schools in rural areas where each school could dump the students they didn’t want to teach into a large consolidated school elsewhere that would be starved of resources and left to rot.
  
  If you are parent whose kids are well-behaved with no learning issues, you might be fine with that because those “other” kids are out of sight now and you can pretend they don’t exist.
  
  However, if your rural area happened to be designated as the repository where all the students who were unwanted by the small schools in other rural areas, you would not be pleased. And you would be offended if everyone in all the other rural areas was bashing your school and telling you the teachers were awful when you saw that the only thing that had changed was that now your rural school was the designated dumping ground for the most difficult to teach students so the other rural areas didn’t have to have any student they didn’t want to teach in their schools. And thus they could crow about how “superior” they were to your school.
  
  That was what the small school movement in NYC was all about.
  
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- Roy Turrentine says:
  
  February 8, 2019 at 4:09 pm
  
  NYC: in light of the tendency of families to move to specific zip codes, the system tends toward what you describe anyway. Often as not, rural schools are the beneficiary of suburban growth for a time, changing them defacto to nice places to be, with some rural poverty mixed in with suburban expansion. Imitating that trend on purpose, creating winners and losers in the breakup of schools, seems horrifying. Yet hat is what this article describes.
  
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  - NYC public school parent says:
    
    February 9, 2019 at 2:20 am
    
    Yes, creating winners and losers was the name of the game under Bloomberg’s DOE. While Mayor de Blasio is not perfect and definitely makes many mistakes, overall his commitment is to public education and teaching all students — not in making winners and losers.
- BA says:
  
  February 8, 2019 at 4:56 pm
  
  All other things being equal, smaller schools are better. But things are not always equal.
  
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BA says:

February 8, 2019 at 4:54 pm

The larger problem is not that the school was mismanaged, but that it was ONE of the FEW decent high schools in NYC to begin with.

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- dianeravitch says:
  
  February 8, 2019 at 9:52 pm
  
  NYC has some wonderful high schools, and did then. Not just the selective high schools, but great schools like Murrow and Midwood.
  
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