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I am very disheartened by the DOE’s deliberate under-enrollment of large comprehensive high schools, specifically those on the city or state list. I teach at one such school and our incoming class is much smaller again this year. This is resulting in many of our departments being cut down and teachers being placed in excess. This is the DOE’s pattern. They choke the enrollment, send at-risk, LTA and special needs students to these schools, then complain of low 4 year grad rates. The very profession of teaching as a lifelong means of supporting a family and having security is at risk. Tenure is at risk. I hope teachers wake up and get serious about putting pressure on our union to really fight for us.

We’re not giving you the firing squad; we’re just cutting off your feeding tube.

Better?

It’s astounding that all of these professional teachers don’t get the fundamental point: parents get to choose!! We’re not stupid, we talk to our neighbors, we visit the schools and we have decided to vote with our feet. Parents in Queens know about Jamaica High, children in their churches go there, or used to go there, and while it has gotten a little better in the past couple of years, it’s still not a good school.

If only 23 parents signed on the dotted line, it means they escaped their fate and went elsewhere! The kids don’t want to go there, they’d rather go to Hillcrest or a school where the teachers are happy. Teachers, we’re not indentured to your schools and we don’t owe you a living!

Of course parents should rank choices, and all schools should be good schools. But failing to significantly improve the majority of the system, including the teaching profession itself, does not help on either end here.

Not so long ago teachers were offered extra pay to work in the more challenging schools. Now they are being punished for working in those schools, having stuck it out in harsh, dysfunctional and sometimes dangerous conditions. Perhaps a majority of the large schools should be broken into small schools with reduced class sizes as a means of improvement and support. Instead, this is being done asystematically and punitively, while many of the already smaller schools are getting overcrowded, forcing class sizes up instead of down. What’s happening is really and truly sick, and it is adversely affects many students, parents, teachers, administrators, and public education itself.

What an ass. “We dont owe you a living”. Reminds me of Nazi Germany. What was that saying “first they came for the Unions, then the Christians and I said nothing. When they came for me there was no one left to say anything”. The fact that a school is failing is not that of the teachers. All schools in NYC have the same average teachers. Its only the garbage that you put into it that makes it stink. Throw a little diodorant and it will smell a lot better. The school down the block that is overcrowded has plenty of nice smelling students. You want to make a school improve. Halt enrollment in that school and send them to Jamaica. That schould improve Jamaica. No better close Jamaica. As will be anyway. Reopen with another name. That should fool people.Then maybe you will be stupid enough to send your kids there.

All of the stories are about keeping these closing schools open– but what is being done to make them better? Jamaica & Beach Channel have somewhere around 50% graduation rate (+/- a few points), and low attendance (YTD at Jamaica is 79%– http://schools.nyc.gov/SchoolPortals/28/Q470/AboutUs/Statistics/attendance.htm).

Why would I send my child there, when all of the press, specifically that from the teachers themselves, is about saving them without any change strategy? I don’t want my child to be part of the “other” 50%.