Bloomberg School Closure Policy A Failure

The NY Times has a front page article about the expected closing of a high-profile school in the South Bronx, the Jonathan Levin High School for Media and Communications, opened in 2002 as a tribute to a former teacher in Taft High School who was murdered by a former student.

 The expected closing of Jonathan Levin High School for Media and Communications is making some waves because Levin's father is a former chairman of Time Warner and the school named in Levin's honor had such grand promise.

Lots of money had been raised for college scholarships for students and the school had been awarded a grant to be used for media studies.

But like so many other schools in impoverished neighborhoods around the city during the Bloomberg Era, the school was set up for failure:

Levin’s graduation statistics show that between 2009-10 and 2011-12, as the percentage of students classified as “English language learners” shot up to 40, from 29, the graduation rate fell to 31 percent, from 50 percent.

The school did not receive support from the DOE to deal with the changes to the student body demographics.

Instead they got the usual warnings schools in trouble get from the DOE - get the stats up or you will be closed.

The stats did not go up and so they ended up on the closure list.  The closure will be voted on by the Panel for Education Policy on March 11.

Since the PEP is a rubberstamp board for the mayor, there will be no reprieve for the school.

Buried within the story of the Jonathan Levin High School for Media and Communications' birth, brief life and death is an accurate and devastating critique of Bloomberg's closure policies and his market-based education policies:

A 2009 study by the Center for New York City Affairs at the New School found that new public schools tended to do better than the schools they replaced, but that their graduation rates and attendance began to slip after a few years.

“What we are doing now is we are starting from scratch after having just started from scratch,” said Clara Hemphill, who is project director for the center and the editor of insideschools.org, a guide for parents. “We cannot keep doing the same thing over and over again and expect getting a different result, creating another brand new small school which is just like the other brand new small schools. It is not going to solve the problem.” 

And therein is the rub of this - many schools that have been opened in the shells of the old large zoned neighborhood schools have themselves been deemed "failing" after a few years and are slated for closure (or have already been closed.)

Bloomberg and his toady chancellor blame these failures on the teachers and the administrators in those schools.

According to them, the teachers just do not work hard enough, just are not good enough, to get the job done and keep the test scores up.

But of course the reality is so much more complicated than that.

First, many of these schools serve children coming into school years behind in skills and the DOE does not provide the extra support these schools need to have in order to help those students.

Second, some of these kids are coming from families and neighborhoods so dysfunctional that they have to have their socio-emotional needs addressed and healed before they can begin to excel at their studies. 

It is very, very difficult to try and educate children who come to school seething with fear, anger, hatred, and sadness from all the trauma they have experienced throughout their lives.

You can be sure that the KIPPsters and the Success Schools do NOT take these kids and if somehow one slips in unbeknownst to David Levin or Eva Moskowitz, they are quickly gotten rid of.

But the so-called "failing schools" take these kids and try and work with these kids and help them as best they can despite the long odds that are made worse by a lack of support from Tweed and a DOE always looking to deem schools "failures".

Jonathan Levin's mother and father both get at that in the Times article about the school named for their deceased son:

“It is actually very painful,” said Mr. Levin’s father, Gerald M. Levin, 73, who retired from Time Warner in 2001. The schools chancellor personally called Mr. Levin in January to prepare him for the heartbreak. “I said that: ‘Well, there are some special things taking place at that school and those statistics may belie the efforts that encourage a couple of students to go on. We could have future leaders and future writers somewhere in that group.’ ” 

...

Though many agreed it was failing, they said the theme at the center of it — the media program Mr. Levin envisioned — was so vibrant it meant the entire institution deserved a second chance.

Several alumni singled out Mr. Cerrone, the Hollywood veteran, in the audience, crediting him with giving them a lifeline to their futures. He was “like a father to many of us,” said Quintasia Stratton, who graduated in 2008. “When I got here, all I had to do was say, ‘Hey, what’s that?’ And he put a $600 camera in my hands and trusted me with it.” 

One of those in attendance was Mr. Levin’s mother, Carol N. Levin. His death prompted her to put her own teaching degree to use. By 2005, she had taken a job at the Bronx High School of Business, in the same building where her son had worked, which last year got its third consecutive C grade on a progress report and is seen as being on its last legs. 

“Jon just had such a feel for poor, disenfranchised students,” his mother, 72, said in an interview last week. “He held them to a standard. He expected great things from them.” 

At the public hearing, she praised Mr. Cerrone and lashed into the officials for evaluating the school as if it were a business. “I just hope that everything that has happened tonight will help to keep the doors open, although I don’t feel particularly optimistic about this,” she said. 

“I want to thank you for your patience,” she concluded, “for those who’ve stayed the night. And, victory might be ours.”

If victory does come for the Levin school in the form of a ninth inning reprieve from closure, that will be because of the high profile status of the namesake of the school and the Times article that does a good job of shaming the DOE and Bloomberg over this "so-called failure".

But victory will not come for 23 other schools expected to be closed officially on March 11 at the rubberstamp PEP meeting and they, like this Jonathan Levin High School for Media and Communications have also been set up for failure by the free marketeers in the DOE who live by their dehumanized market codes.

We may hope that the next mayor will not set so many schools up for failures as the current one has.

 

A good start would be getting a mayor into office who does see closing schools as some kind of victory of the free market but rather a failure of his own education policies and vision.