School closings assailed at Council hearing
By NAIMA RAMOS-CHAPMAN
An angry City Council panel lashed out at the Department of Education’s rationale for closing 19 New York City public schools.
In a March 2 hearing, some Council members accused the Bloomberg administration of making the move for reasons that included political grandstanding, union-busting, an attempt to cash in on federal funding for charter schools and even race. City officials said they just want to phase out the low-performing and often large public high schools.
Department of Education officials defended a Jan. 27 decision by the city Panel for Educational Policy to close 19 schools against the Council members’ barrage of accusations with a slew of statistics referencing grim graduation rates and failed recovery strategies.
Deputy Chancellor for Strategy and Innovation John White said the list was not random. “These are the lowest performers even considered among a set of schools where students are not achieving at acceptable levels,” he told the Council committees on education and investigation.
But Council member Lewis A. Fidler (D-Brooklyn) accused the Department of Education of purposely shutting down the schools in order to open more charters. “It is the clear policy of the Bloomberg administration to open charter schools,” he said. “You are privatizing a very public function of education.”
When Council member Jumani Williams (D-Brooklyn) asked why charter schools seemed to have a disproportionate amount of resources at their disposal compared to their public counterparts, White cited an Independent Budget Office report in response.
The report, said White, found that the opposite is actually true. Charters located in public school buildings receive $300 to $900 less per student per year than district schools, and charters located in private space receive $3,000 less per student than district schools, he said.
Council member James Vacca (D-Bronx) charged the department with failure to plan ahead for displaced students likely to be sent to overcrowded schools nearby. He predicted that students at Christopher Columbus High School in the Pelham Bay section of the Bronx – his alma mater – will go nearby to Herbert H. Lehman High School, which he said already has 4,400 students. “I don’t know how many more kids you can put into Lehman High School, but you’ll keep putting them there until two years from now when you close Lehman,” he said.
Other council members complained that department officials failed to consider community feedback, stripped funding from neighborhood high schools, and put too much emphasis on test-taking. They said that the push for quick results contributed to the schools’ inevitable failure.
“You turned our schools into test-taking mills,” said Council member Charles Barron (D-Brooklyn).
“I have heard it from the mouth of babes. The pressure is all about getting those test scores up,” said Councilman Mark Weprin (D-Queens), taking Barron’s argument a step further by suggesting that the heightened anxiety surrounding the standardized tests have both students and teachers pushed to the breaking point, forcing them to resort to cheating.
Council member Eric A. Ulrich (D-Queens) talked about Beach Channel High School in Rockaway and the lack of community outreach on the department’s end. “You talk about consultation with the community leaders. You know how I found out Beach Channel was closing? I opened up the Rockaway Wave, the local newspaper. I didn’t get a letter, I didn’t get a fax, I didn’t get an email, I didn’t get a phone call.
In conjunction with the hearing, Comptroller John Liu announced in a news conference that his office is beginning an investigation of the school system’s progress reports – the assessment indicators that are heavily based on student test scores.
The Department of Education places great weight on the annual progress reports in making decisions from school resources, Liu said, adding that parents, teachers, students and the community at large need to be assured that these high-stakes reports are accurate.
