The Indypendent e-news
Parents, educators and community activists are mobilizing to save 21 public schools, including 16 high schools, that the New York City Department of Education (DOE ) has announced it will begin to phase out in 2010.
“They dropped a bomb on the schools without any notice,” said William McDonald, a Queens parent and a leader of the Save Our Schools Coalition, a group that opposes the school closings. “The principals didn’t know. The teachers didn’t know. The parents didn’t know.”
Public hearings are being held at each of the affected schools this month in advance of a Jan. 26 meeting of the city’s school board where a final decision will be made. Organizers with the Grassroots Education Movement are also calling for a demonstration outside of Mayor Bloomberg’s Upper East Side mansion on Jan. 21.
The DOE says the schools are being closed because they were underperforming. Under the Department’s plan, the schools won’t accept any more new students and will be shut completely once the current students graduate.
Critics of the closings say that the affected schools enroll a disproportionate number of special needs students while receiving fewer resources per student than private charter schools favored by Mayor Michael Bloomberg and DOE Chancellor Joel Klein. They also note that the closings primarily target schools in communities of color.
“They don’t play the same game with every community,” said Vanessa Sparks, a former member of the District 28 Community Education Council in central Queens, referring to Bloomberg and Klein.
The Jan. 26 meeting of the Panel on Education Policy, which replaced the old city school board in 2002, will be held at Brooklyn Tech High School in Fort Greene. Opponents of the school closings face an uphill battle as Bloomberg appoints seven of the Board’s 12 voting members. Still, opponents of the school closings say they are not giving up.
“Jan. 26 will be ground zero in this fight,” McDonald said.
For more see grassrootseducationmovement.blogspot.com.
Comments
The teachers at Jamaica HS don't teach. Their inattentive and disruptive students don't learn. It's time to admit that the school is a failure. Send the teachers into the rubber room and give them one year to find new jobs or join the growing ranks of America's unemployed.
that John sound more like a student who is failing many of his classes or has not reached his potential and doesn't want to either. Therefore, he's blaming teachers. Or it can be an administrator who is frustrated because the teachers have rights and he can't get his way.
Either way. The comment made by the blogger is false and has no substance. If the majority of the students, the parents, and the community know that Jamaica should not close because the programs in the school do really work, why should the public listen to John a disgruntled person with a vindicative attitude.
Jamaica should stay open and everyone in the community should continue the fight to tell Klein that he's making a big mistake.
Both of the responces to the article ("Bloomberg School Closings Draw Ire") are off target... The first a lot, the second a little. It does no good to engage in ad hominem attacks ("that john sound more..."), because they end up discrediting the attacker's argument and are unconvincing in the face of reality. The reality is that John's perception is shared by many, and has some substantive claim to truth. As a former NYC high school teacher and current NYC college teacher, as well as a parent with a son in public school, I can attest to the gross inadequacy of our apartheid public school system. However, this is not due to some intrinsic flaw in public education, as the privatizers would have it: quite the contrary. Years of cutbacks, combined with chronic neglect of schools serving oppressed communities, combined with Bloomberg's and Klein's imposition of a "business model" in our schools that is anathema to student learning have produced a self-fullfilling prophecy of failure in public education and schools that are ripe for the picking by the privatizers. The ultimate goal in this process, of course, is to have union-free schools in which teachers serve the whims of management and education is driven by the bottom line or out-and-out profit margins. Charterization and privatization must be stopped, but they must be stopped because education is a public right and a public good. And hand in hand with a struggle to protect public schools must come a struggle to make them live up to their potential and provide quality education for all. That struggle is just as much with Obama/Duncan as it is with Bloomberg/Klein.
John,
Why no mention of UFT? I think this is a solid article, but the union peice is missing. You can check out two examples of our coverage of the closings here:
http://www.uft.org/news/teacher/top/columbus_worth_saving/
http://www.uft.org/news/teacher/top/fix_our_schools/
Best,
Micah
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