By MICHAEL POWELL
Published: April 16, 2012
New York City is filled with schools marked twice over for death.
Jennifer S. Altman for The New York Times
Juan Pagan, a frustrated father.
The Bloomberg administration long ago determined that its education revolution would occur at the edge of an ax. So far, officials have closed 140 schools, which they routinely describe as failing, and replaced them with smaller schools and charters, which they routinely describe as making “historic gains.”
Perhaps this is so. But for tens of thousands of children who live in the purgatory of schools marked for closing, boasts of an education revolution bring little comfort.
Last week, I talked with Juan Pagan, the parent association president at Legacy High School for Integrated Studies in Manhattan. This year, the city’s Panel for Education Policy, a public board as obedient to mayoral desire as any in the city, voted to begin the shutdown of Legacy, a process that takes years.
Mr. Pagan described a school slowly bleeding out. Elective classes and after-school programs falling away. Favorite teachers seeking new jobs. But for his daughter, a 19-year-old senior in special education without enough credits to graduate, the most grievous recent loss was the social worker.
“They say the school is shrinking, and the social worker was excessed,” he said. “The teachers are great, but, I mean, oh my God, that social worker was keeping her in school.”
He talked faster. “I’m sorry; let me take a deep breath,” he said. “I want to know how you can shrink a school while so many kids are still inside of it.”
Bloomberg officials can point to genuine accomplishments: more small schools, some beautiful new campuses and good principals freed to hire new staffs. They have usefully challenged the teachers’ union.
But as the Working Group on School Transformation, a coalition of reform advocates, points out in a paper to be released Tuesday, the Bloomberg education record remains littered with failure, including startlingly low rates of graduation for black and Latino students, and the need for 50 percent of graduates to take remedial courses at four-year colleges. Asked about these problems, officials often pick up the war club.
“Contrary to these misleading reports, a major study showed in January that because the city replaced large, failing high schools with new, small schools, our students have seen historic gains in graduation and college enrollment rates since 2002,” an Education Department spokesman, Matthew Mittenthal, said in a statement. “We refuse to go back on a strategy that has changed thousands of lives and given families better options simply because of a report with inaccurate data.”
Education officials in fact pointed to few inaccuracies in the Working Group report, in no small measure because it draws on publicly available department data. And this is not a reflexively anti-Bloomberg band; one Working Group member, Carmen Fariña, served as a deputy chancellor under the former Chancellor Joel I. Klein.
More to the point, the statistics tend to speak in their own grim language.
The 23 schools marked for closing began this year weighed down with higher percentages of special education and over-age students than other public schools in New York. In there are strong students, but many more arrive at the front door with pitifully low math and reading scores.
Many of these schools will, in their last years of existence, become gathering places for the forgotten. Homeless children, teenage parents, those struggling with English: it’s as if the department channeled the most troubled students to the most troubled schools.
The administration decided to close Paul Robeson High School in Crown Heights, Brooklyn; fully 13 percent of its students live in homeless shelters or in homes with more than one family.
To live this reality is to feel the weight of impossibility weighing down. Joanne Frank, once the principal at Norman Thomas High School in Manhattan, retired 10 years ago. But she recalled when a previous administration closed two high schools. Within weeks, waves of students from those failed schools began washing up at her door. “The administration is depressed and angry, the teachers are depressed and angry, and the kids feel they failed,” she said.
Back at Legacy High School, Keyla Marte of East Harlem has battled that fate. She’s fought to save her school. She plans to go to college and perhaps become a teacher.
I listened to her bubble over with ideas. But in the end, even her hope sounds strained.
“Our school,” she said, “is slowly fading away. You can say that, and it’s very sad.”
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