NYC Dept. of Ed. sets up schools to fail: steered "challenging" students to them to close them

[Hannah Bell]

The Department of Education has for years been able to predict which schools will fail based on a number of factors, but many disadvantaged schools have been blamed for their crummy performance and marked for closure anyway, according to a department analysis obtained by The Post.

The report shows that education officials created a dividing line between schools so that those whose "predicted" graduation rates were less than 50 percent -- based largely on their size and concentration of low-achieving students -- were likely to be closed rather than receive support.




Other recent reports that have questioned the department's role in supporting schools marked for closure sparked hundreds of protesters to rally outside its headquarters in lower Manhattan yesterday.

Two dozen -- including Brooklyn City Councilmembers Jumaane Williams and Charles Barron -- were arrested for civil disobedience after they formed a human chain to block traffic.

"It's very troubling that there are a lot of internal studies that show that the DOE knew what the impact was of steering large numbers of more challenging-to-educate students into specific high schools and now we're looking to close those," said Patrick Sullivan, a Manhattan representative to the Panel for Educational Policy.


Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/dept_of_ed_sets_up_many_schools_n7IKUYTlYKTfdMwh8q2N4H#ixzz1CmkjFOta

[Solly Mack]

1. and many teachers warned that would happen

"...impact was of steering large numbers of more challenging-to-educate students into specific high schools and now we're looking to close those,"

[xxqqqzme]

2. That's the probem w/ teachers.

They're educated!

[ThomCat]

3. None of this is a surprise, and it is part of their campaign

to convert the city to for-profit charter schools.

If they want to steal a certain space and give it to a charter school, but a public schools is currently in there, flood that public school with non-English speaking students, students with disabilities, and students with behavioral and emotional problems.

The public school with immediately have an immediate huge black hole in their budget and a huge drop in scores that cannot be avoided. Big increases to language services, more tutoring services, more counseling services, and massive ramp-ups to Special Ed cost huge amounts of money, and the city doesn't want the school to survive so they tell the school to find a way to make due with what they already get from the existing funding formula.

All three groups of students are likely to have lower than optimal test scores.

If you have a language deficiency with English, then standardized tests in English are going to be a problem, and of course scores are going to show some level of lag.

People with emotional and behavioral difficulties are not going to be able to perform at their ideal capacity as students, and their test scores are going to reflect this.

People with disabilities, depending on what their disability is, may either have some difficulty with the tests, or may be outright incapable of learning, understanding, comprehending and scoring as high on the tests as students who don't have disabilities. At least some of those students will be very, very, low scoring students because they are profoundly disabled.

All of this adds up to a large cumulative deficit in scores that the district is Deliberately inflicting upon the school, knowingly, for the sole purpose of shutting down that school so that the building and all the resources that were used by that school can now be given to a charter school instead.