Lessons of NYC school closings
By Joe Williams
(From NY Post, January 26, 2012)
As the Department of Education closed nearly two dozen of the city’s worst large high schools at the height of the “small-schools boom,” one of the critics’ most common complaints was that the educrats were doing too much, too soon.
A new report that tracks thousands of students who entered the small high schools created on Mayor Bloomberg’s watch makes you wonder what would have happened had they done even more, faster.
From 2002 to 2008, the Department of Education closed 23 large high schools, and in their place opened 216 small schools, many offering such specialized themes as sports management or environmental studies. A good chunk of the reorganization was paid for with $150 million in grants from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
The breathtaking pace of change was certainly justified — the huge, dysfunctional high schools that Bloomberg’s team closed, such as Martin Luther King High in manhattan, were dangerous academic wastelands where the idea of someday graduating was often a sick joke.
Graduation rates were often well below 45 percent in the closed schools. At Theodore Roosevelt HS in The Bronx, it was 3 percent in 2006, its last year.
But naysayers — including me at times — wondered whether moving so swiftly would cause more harm than good.
The report, from the nonprofit-research organization MDRC, argues that the reforms were worth the risk. Students in the new, small high schools, the study shows, are making it to the high-school finish line at a much higher rate than at those old, large schools.