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“I want to make a bet,” Chancellor Joel Klein told three students from Bayard Rustin Educational Complex School for the Humanities. The students had come to a panel about high school dropouts sponsored by the Harvard Black Alumni Society to confront Klein about his decision to close their high school by 2012.

(begin watching at 82 minutes)

“I believe that this decision is unfair,” one student said. “Many of our students under the twelfth grade will have to worry about transferring to other schools unprepared. The only thing that we have received is hate toward our school in the neighborhood’s newspaper. They do not care if we graduate, they find that minorities make the neighborhood unsafe for people who live there, which results in our school failing and teachers in the school who care get fired and the teachers who are only there for their pay check stay.”

“I want to make a bet all three of you will graduate,” Klein responded. “And I’ll cut a deal with you. If you do, and you would like, I will come to the graduation to salute you, because I know it hasn’t been easy.”

Come June, someone remind me (and Chancellor Klein) of this.