But You Would Have Had These Schools Closed Already

The high school progress reports were released yesterday in NYC.

Some schools Kleinberg had slated for closure actually saw their schools grades improve:

Of the 19 schools the city unsuccessfully tried to close for poor performance last year, two schools had their grades jump multiple rungs. W.H. Maxwell Career and Technical Education High School and the Choir Academy of Harlem, both of which got D’s last year, and got B’s this time.

Chancellor Joel Klein said the Department of Education would take the new, higher grades into consideration when deciding whether to try and close the schools it had once deemed “failures” a second time.

“We put great weight on the grades,” he said at a press conference this morning at Manhattan Bridges High School. “We announced those schools based on the information we had at the time.”

“I’m not making any decisions here today,” he added.

I'll make a prediction.

The number of schools Kleinberg want to close this year is 47.

You can add a few more schools that received D's or F's on the progress reports released yesterday.

Kleinberg will be forced to relent on Maxwell and the Choir Academy, but he'll double down on making sure all the others get closed.

And they'll try and get that school closure number to above 50.

They want to close as MANY schools as POSSIBLE in the next three years before their out of power.

Expect even more closures next year and the year after.

By 2014, the NYC school system will look vastly different than before these two men took control.

But this change in progress report grades for Maxwell and Choir Academy provides opponents of the Kleinberg school closure policy with the opportunity to point out that if Klein had gotten his way last year, these schools would have already been slated for closure and there would be little that could be done to save them even after the reports showed vast improvement from the previous year.

So clearly the Kleinberg school closure policy is flawed and MUST be suspended until independent auditors can test the validity of the school grades and the criteria these grades are based upon.

Klein and Bloomberg can NO LONGER be trusted to decide which schools get closed or not (not that I ever thought they could, but you know what I mean...)

They have made too many mistakes in the past to be allowed to continue with this policy (some would argue these aren't mistakes at all...they just want to close as many schools as possible and cause as much chaos - or creative destruction, as Klein calls it - to destroy the unionized traditional public school system.)

Either way, the policy MUST be suspended.

Opponents MUST hit this point over and over.

If SUNY charter schools that are "failing" are given second life instead of being closed, then traditional public schools and the staffs that serve in them deserve the same.

NO MORE CLOSURES must be the mantra from now on.

Chant it at Bloomberg and Klein.

Chant it at Obama and Duncan.

Chant it at Cuomo, Steiner and Tisch.

Here in NYC, Klein and Bloomberg have proven once too often they are engaging in destructive practices that harm children and teachers.