(Photo from Mashable, Christina Ascani)
By Joe Williams
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, Attorney Gen. Eric Schneiderman, Mayor-In-Waiting Bill de Blasio, and scores of other local politicians, union leaders, and excited gawkers came out to the former Paul Robeson High School in Brooklyn Friday afternoon to celebrate a school that wouldn’t exist were it not for aggressive efforts to simultaneously create new, great public schools while closing down/phasing out longstanding dropout factories.
Excited students from the much-heralded and innovative P-Tech High School (Pathways in Technology Early College High School) welcomed the President, a former Brooklynite, while the enthusiastic group of Democratic politicians applauded Obama’s remarks about how there should be more P-Techs and how we should all be raising the bar for students.
The school, which also was featured in Obama’s State of the Union address last year, is one of several schools co-located in what used to be a school that none of the electeds in the room would have ever allowed their own children to attend. The school’s impressive birth relied upon some progressive education policies which some – including de Blasio – have been against, as part of the political backlash in Gotham to protect failing schools.
Mayor Bloomberg, in his remarks before Obama’s, thanked the president for his leadership on education reform, including the cover the president gave to folks like Bloomberg to close and phase-out failing schools (like the once-proud Robeson High) and re-open in their place innovative new schools where kids want to learn. Sadly, if it had been left up to much of the city’s political establishment, hundreds of kids would still be failing at Robeson rather than thriving at P-Tech.
For his part, Obama praised New York’s willingness to stay the course with necessary reforms statewide under Education Commissioner John King, making a subtle reference to the misguided pushback from suburban white folks to the state’s new Common Core standards.
“I also want to congratulate Governor Cuomo and all of you in NY for having the courage to raise your standards for teaching and learning to make sure that more students graduate from high school ready for college and a career,” Obama said. “It’s not easy but is the right thing to do and we should keep at it.”
NY Daily News covers the de Blasio angle here. NY1 has the Common Core angle here.