Times Article on High School Grades Reveals Dark Underbelly of Large School Closures

Over the last three years, high schools that received the lowest marks from the city have been the ones with the highest percentages of poor, black and Hispanic students, despite an evaluation system that was meant to equalize differences among student bodies, according to an analysis by The New York Times of school grades released this week.

Blacks and Hispanics make up on average 77 percent of the student population in the 139 schools that received A’s this past year, compared with more than 90 percent of the schools that received C’s or worse. While the vast majority of A schools have a high minority enrollment, 14 of the 15 largest high-performing schools in the city have drastically lower black and Hispanic enrollment.

Thus begins the article in today's NY Times titled "Schools' Grades Reflect Persistent Disparity."
Of course, the Times won't clearly state what everyone has been saying for years: that the replacement of the large high schools by small ones and charter schools forced thousands of kids from the so-called failing schools who couldn't get into the new schools, to roam the city looking for the closest large school.

See Aaron Pallas, alias Skoolboy at Gotham:
Comparing Small Apples to Large Apples

Leonie Haimson commented:
Subtly suggested in this article is that the claim of increasing equity that the DOE makes was not borne out in reality. Finally, what we have been making for six years about the flaws in the implementation of the small schools initiative makes the NY Times.

Followed by Angel Gonzalez, whose semi-prose post, I took a bit of poetic licence with:

"High School Institutional Racism Reigns in NYC!"

What's the Obama Dept of Ed & the NYC DOE response to this historic institutional racist apartheid system of education? (read article below)

.......to the racist high stakes school/teacher/student rating/testing system?

Breakup the bigger Black & Latino public schools down into smaller schools. And set the stage for Charter privatization.

Overcrowd and Super-overcrowd the traditional public schools to create more disparate multi-tiers in the apartheid schooling.
Let the bigger Black & Latino schools continue to fester into the downward spiral.


Add more and more Test driven irrelevant pedagogy.
Add cutbacks to essential spaces, library & other support services.
Give the students, teachers and schools more negative ratings.

Negative data reports.

Blame the students.
Blame the teachers. Divide and conquer. Shut 'em down!



And again DOE sets the stage for closing them down.
Unleash the Charter floodgates.
Make everything "nice" for the charter-corporate private takeover of public education.
DOE (the Dept of Privatization) will make everything nice for the profiteers of Wall St.
Our Black & Latino parents & communities increasingly become the shock-troops for the charter-privatization of the all public schools, White community schools inclusive.


And in the final analysis, we all lose to the interests of capital. Our communities get The Wall St.school-venture-vultures public school takeovers...and all the while...the AFT AND UFT officialdom ferries in the charter school movement as its bell-hop enabler to this grand ripoff !


Our grassroots teachers and parents across NYC and the country are starting to get hip to this Madoff corporate scheme and are starting to fight back!


STOP OBAMA'S "RACE-TO-THE-TOP" PRIVATIZATION SCAM!



Angel Gonzalez



http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/18/education/18grades.html?hpw for full article