Reorganization? Or reshuffling the poor?
The New York City Department of Education closes down bad schools (they often exaggerate or distort the problems) and opens new schools, often smaller, in their place. For example, this year they are beginning to shut down MS399 in the Bronx, below Fordham, and replace it with 3 smaller middle schools. (actually, I think 399 itself is a reorganized school – the building had a different number back when it was Elizabeth Barrett Browning…)
Did Bloomberg and his Chancellor do this on purpose, to harm kids? Or was it by accident?
That’s the picture, and it happens a lot. Shut, shuffle, reopen. They say they are making the schools better.
We say they don’t look at how needy the population is. We say that they often ignore real gains that have been made.
And me, I say that they do this intentionally. They add chaos and disorganization; they break continuity; they add insecurity; they create ATRs; they disrupt education – specifically for those schools, neighborhoods, teachers, families and especially children who most need consistency, continuity, stability.
Daily News exposes something: lies? or just incompetence?
Who’s right? Today’s Daily News has part of the answer. Read it, and ask yourself, “Did the DoE do this on purpose, to harm kids? Or was it just gross incompetence?”
Four schools in bottom 10 in state tests were newly opened
They closed schools making gains (MS399’s scores were rising), and opened some, ahem, that aren’t performing particularly well. The complete article is below the fold:
Four schools in bottom 10 in state tests were newly opened
BY Meredith Kolodner and Rachel Monahan
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITERS
Sunday, July 12th 2009, 4:00 AM
Bonifacio/NewsPublic School 90 in Morrisania, the BronxCall it the dis-honor roll.
Some of the schools with the highest percentage of students flunking state tests were the ones the city opened to replace previously “failing” schools, city data show.
Of the top 10 schools with the worst student performance in math tests this year, half were opened in the past four years as part of Mayor Bloomberg’s new schools initiative.
The four Brooklyn elementary and middle schools and one Harlem junior high school were put into buildings after the city shuttered the schools that had occupied them.
Some educators believe the strategy of closing elementary and middle schools is an expensive experiment with unconvincing results.
“There’s a lot of intuitive appeal to it,” said William Mathis, a professor at the University of Vermont who just completed a national study on closing down schools.
He charged, “Research shows it just doesn’t work for most schools, and in a lot of cases it makes things worse.”
Education Department officials say that overall, the new small schools have outperformed the ones they replaced, but that they too might be closed if they don’t perform well.
“There’s accountability for all of our schools,” said Ed Department spokeswoman Melody Meyer.
Meanwhile, some of the schools targeted for closure this year have posted test score improvements twice that of the citywide average.
Many of the closing schools still have low test scores, although a few are close to the city average when the student demographics are taken into account.
At Public School 90 in Morrisania, the Bronx, about half the students are not proficient in English.
The students scored only a few points lower on state reading tests than the citywide average, based on student demographics. In math, they actually scored higher.
The city made the decision about closing schools this year before tests were taken. “We didn’t have this year’s data when we chose to close the school,” said Meyer.
At PS 2, also in the Bronx, which has three times the number of special education students as the average city school, students improved their math scores at twice the rate of students citywide.
Scores were roughly 7 or 8 percentage points lower than the citywide average on both the English and math exams, based on school demographics.
“We’re not comparable in terms of the populations that we serve,” said PS 2 technology teacher George Morales. “Our school was beginning to progress and they shut us down.”
http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/education/2009/07/12/2009-07-12_many_new_schools_in_bottom_10_in_state_tests.html#ixzz0L4Jl0GNR&D
This is all part of a bigger picture: People like Bloomberg and klein want public schools to fail and they want families and communities to become disenchanted with them: They want to turn virtually all of the public schools into privately run and organized charter schools. This way all of the “fat cats” get to seize a huge part of the funds slated for “public education”, as they keep trying to say that charter schools are really public schools. They are not; they are actually private schools that are run with public funds or rather a new style voucher system type program. Moreover, people like Bloomberg and Klein want to destroy the public schools so that they can break and destroye the unions in the way that Reagan broke and destroyed the union for the air traffic controllers. Additionally, they want to turn teaching into a temporary career choice and not an actual career so that they won’t have to give anyone a pension or pay anyone a decent salary with benefits.