New York City has plans to close 22
"failing" schools, taking the view that if those schools can't do right by their students, they shouldn't continue to exist. Because students deserve better, and if you don't agree with what Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his assorted education chancellors think is best, then you don't care about kids.
But the New York Times finds that, for at least one of these "failing" schools, there may be some external reasons for its troubles:
According to an analysis by the city’s Independent Budget Office, [the 15 "worst" high schools] have more poor children (63 percent versus 52 percent citywide), more homeless students (6 percent versus 4 percent), more special-education students (18 versus 12). For 24 percent of Jamaica High students, English is a foreign language, compared with 11 percent citywide.
The “worst” high schools are sent the eighth graders who are the furthest behind: their average proficiency score on state tests is 2.6 out of 4, compared with 2.9 citywide, and more of these students (9 percent versus 4 percent) are over age, suggesting they have had to repeat grades.
The article focuses on Jamaica High School, where:
There was no money for lab lessons in advanced biology, which upset Doreen Mohammed and Tonmoy Kabiraj, who hope to be doctors. Courtney Perkins’s advanced math class did not have graphing calculators until eight months into the school year. The last music teacher was sent to another school, which really frustrated Mills Duodu, who plays violin, trumpet, drums and piano.
Nevertheless, many of the students profiled in the article are going to excellent colleges on scholarship, and several of them say they were aided in getting there by their school's teachers' union representative, who has naturally been lambasted by the media as caring about jobs, not kids.
New York City, under Michael Bloomberg, created the recipe for a failing school by funneling struggling students to Jamaica and others in its category, then depriving them of funding and teachers. Then they talk about the failures of these schools as somehow internal, the fault of the teachers or just some strange alchemy that turns some schools to gold and others to shit. It's one of the key tactics of education "reform": exacerbate inequalities and then blame everything that goes wrong on teachers.