Where Are The Stories About The NYSED School Closures?

I don't get it. NYSED dropped what I think is a nuclear bomb Thursday by releasing a list of 34 NYC public schools, many of them large high schools, that will be either closed (17) or restructured (17), and other than Gotham Schools, NY 1 and a blog post at the NY Times nobody covered the story.

Same goes for my fellow education bloggers. Absolute silence about the story, about the huge implications for students and teachers both in and around those schools (how many students will be shifted around the system as a result of these closings and restructurings? How much more chaos and instability will be added to a system already made chaotic and unstable by the annual closings announced by Klein and Bloomberg?)

I don't get it.

Is it because people think this won't really happen, that somehow the state will give a reprieve to the schools on the list and say "Oh, we were just kidding, ha ha ha ha ha..."?

Is it because they're so busy fighting the 20 closures Bloomberg and Klein already announced that they cannot even begin to fathom the additional closures the state wants and the amount of energy and organizing it will take to fight that back?

Or is it because these are a DIRECT consequence of the education policies of Barack Obama and many people in the education world cannot yet bring themselves to vilify Obama for the same pro-charter/pro-privatization policies he pushes that Bloomberg also pushes and that people have no problem vilifying Bloomberg for?

As I say, I dunno what is going on here, but you can look at the state website at NYSED and see what they have proposed.

These closures and restructurings are coming to a school near you.

In all, 46 NYC public schools will be either closed, restructured or turned over to charter and/or for-profit operators as a DIRECT result of Obama's Race to the Top education policy.

And that's just this time around. More schools may be added to the list in June. Almost certainly more will be added in 2011 when Obama plans to extend the RttT competition.

What kind of chaos will have been wreaked upon the NYC public schools system by the time Obama and the NYSED, coupled with Bloomberg and Klein, finish with their restructurings and closings?

Will any of it be left standing?

Or will Geoffrey Canada, Eva Moskowitz, KIPP and a bunch of hedge fund managers/education reformers be running the entire thing?

It's starting to looking like this is a KIPP world and we only live to serve in it until the charter managers decide it is time to put us out to pasture.