Large High Schools in the City Are Taking Hard Falls | New York High Schools Fall Hard | City Education Official Read Out The Case

The boos cascaded over the auditorium as a city education official read out the case against Christopher Columbus High School, one of the last remaining large high schools in the Bronx.

Columbus has had a “long history of sustained academic failure” and “chronically poor performance and low demand,” Santiago Taveras, a deputy chancellor, told the standing-room crowd. As a result, he said, it should be closed.

But the frustrated teachers, soft-spoken students and former football players who stood up at the hearing said otherwise. They described a school that had served some students well, despite the difficult circumstances faced by many. They told of a school that, even after the city identified it as struggling, continued to receive an increasing share of the city’s most demanding students — the very students that needed the most help.

“And now that they have found a home here, and have been welcomed with open arms to our family, you want to take that away from them, too,” said Jaime Allen, a special education teacher.

Closing schools for poor performance, especially large high schools, has been one of the most controversial hallmarks of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s control of the school system. And it is taking on a new urgency, both in New York and around the country, with the Obama administration putting a premium on “school turnaround” policies in its nationwide competition, called Race to the Top, for billions of dollars in federal education grants.

Since 2002, the city has closed or is in the process of closing 91 schools, replacing them with smaller schools and charter schools, often several in the same building, with new leadership and teachers. This year, the city has proposed phasing out 20 schools, the most in any year. It is also the first year in which the city is required to hold public hearings at each school proposed for closing, as a result of a change in the mayoral control law that resulted from complaints about an insufficient role for parents.

The hearings are unlikely to save any school from closing; on Tuesday, a panel controlled by mayoral appointees will vote on the proposals. But in auditorium after auditorium at schools on the closing list, like Columbus, and Jamaica and Beach Channel High Schools in Queens, and William H. Maxwell Career and Technical Education High School in Brooklyn, the hearings have exposed a torrent of anger about how large high schools have fared in the Bloomberg years.

The city’s Education Department says that on the whole, the closings have been a success. The small high schools created in the shells of old large high schools have average graduation rates of 75 percent, 15 percent higher than in the city as a whole and far greater than those of the schools they replaced.

“Obviously, closing schools is not something anyone enjoys,” said Joel I. Klein, the schools chancellor. “By and large, what this is about is simply the fact that when you have many kids in a high-needs community, you find that the smaller schools, where they are highly personalized, where they have strong partnerships and involvement with various organizations, those things really have been a successful strategy for us.”

To education officials, the failures of Columbus, a 70-year-old school that graduated only 40 percent of its students on time last year and received a D on its most recent report card, are self-evident. And they say they make the closing process as painless as possible. For the closing school, it is a gradual death, with current students allowed to graduate if they do not fall behind, but no new classes admitted. As space opens up, the new schools come to life, adding a grade each year.

A study last year by the Center for New York City Affairs at the New School backed the chancellor’s argument that students at the smaller schools — which are organized around themes like science or community service — fare better. But the study also found evidence of a domino effect at the large high schools.

Because the new schools, at first, accepted relatively few special education and non-English-speaking students, those students began enrolling in greater numbers in the remaining large high schools. Overall enrollment increased at many large high schools, and attendance fell.

From the classrooms of Columbus, the last seven years have felt like forging ahead though a snowstorm, said Karen Sherwood, an English teacher since 1993. In 2003, for example, its honors programs were peeled off and became separate small schools in its large brick building on Astor Avenue in the Pelham Parkway neighborhood. Three other small schools moved in. (One is now on the city’s closing list for poor performance.) The result was severe overcrowding for Columbus’s 3,400 students, who had classes on the auditorium stage and attended in split shifts between 7 a.m. and 5:45 p.m.

As the Department of Education sent fewer students to Columbus, enrollment began to decline, but so did the academic level of its entering student body. By 2005, only 6 percent of the entering eighth graders were reading at grade level, and the proportion of special education students rose to nearly a quarter. Another reorganization led the school to create small clusters with names like “Equality” and “Justice,” and to form work-study and other structured programs that give students on the verge of dropping out a second chance.

Source: The New York Times

Tags: New York High Schools, York High Schools, High Schools Of York, New York Schools, Large High Schools in the City, Large High Schools in York School, Christopher Columbus High School, Global Enterprise Academy, Christopher Columbus High School, long history of sustained academic failure, chronically poor performance and low demand

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