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Let’s close public schools and fix charters. Brilliant.

of course,what else? disgusting. destroying schools and communities to further bloomberg/klein political ambitions. What a mess we new yorkers have gotten ourselves into.47 schools-47-just ponder the number for a moment. oh yea, and term limits- what a joke,huh? whats good for bloomberg is only good for bloomberg. i have grown to despise this man.

Not defending it, but $9M in Buffalo on cosmetic procedures should force New York City to ask… how much has Klein spent to put lipstick on a pig?

How much money has Klein (with Steiner in cahoots) redirected away from the explicitly targeted purpose of those funds?

What is the budget for the office that gave 98% A’s and B’s last year (so that Bloomberg could run as the Education Mayor) and this year has placed a limit on how many grades a school could drop?

What is the fair reflection of how our kids and our schools — the Chancellor’s schools — doing: 84% A’s alone in an election year, or 60% A’s and B’s combined this year?

Re closing schools:

I have yet to hear how closing schools is good for the individual students of those closed schools, especially those students who ride it out for the phase-out years while the lights are being turned out.

I appreciate how scattering low-scoring students, like dust to the wind, assimilates their previously collected scores into higher scoring schools. And I appreciate how the buildings can undergo wholesale swaps of low-scoring students for different higher-scoring students.

SO WHAT! That’s “value-added” for senior administrators — not kids. And it throws all teachers from those schools — regardless of THEIR individual skills and dedication — down the ATR rabbit hole.

Note that Chicago post-Duncan reversed this course that Klein has us on. Some cities learn faster than others.

Fix ‘em, don’t close ‘em. Because is SHOULD be about the kids. But it ain’t.

What is the budget for the office that came up with the grades for the school. Given that charter schools have a 10% lower score on these reports, yet Klein still supports them, he would have to say that the report card system is broken.

Another area of DOE waste: Home Instruction

$160,000 per student

30 million dollars total

For all of those interested in “fixing” failing schools – how many of you would put your child in one and wait for it to be fixed? Seriously, do any of you have a child in one of the schools on the latest list??? And I still don’t understand how closing a failing school hurts a community…that’s like saying that buldozing a crackhouse is unfair to it’s residents.

The problem Miss Understood is that it’s not an ultimate (JS be careful with your choice of words here)….all it does is shift the problem to the next school and then the next school and so on…..if they set up provisions to take the worst of the worst out of all these so called “failing” schools which would change much of the school tone of these schools, you would find there is really not much of a difference between the teaching staffs and capabilities in any of the schools. But what the I am the Mayor for life and too bad if the public twice voted for term limits and the unqualified incompetent inept lawyer masquerading as an educator are doing is closing a school, allowing new schools to open in the buikldings without these students and then bragging about how their wonderful educational “reforms” are improving education. But what about the students the new schools don’t take in? They go on and starty dragging other schools down the same path. What are they going to say when there are no schools left to take these students? Therein lies the problem in this approach.

Authorizers ought to close bad charters. Period – that’s the deal: autonomy for accountability.

I worked for three years in a school that is now closed. I left when the building was restructured, as did more than half the staff. I know people who still work in that building and it’s finally starting to thrive ten years after it was closed and restructured. I have to wonder how things would have been if more effort had been made to improve that school, as opposed to closing it, if the turnaround would have been quicker. Lousy leadership seemed to be more of a problem than the kids or teachers.

One clarification and one note of agreement with previous commenters.

1. Agreement. I work for a charter school and strongly support them. But I agree here with commenters (mostly charter opponents) who say a charter which reaches its 5th year, and is struggling, should be shut. End of story. Any efforts at “fixing” should happen after Years 1, 2, 3.

2. Clarification. There seems to be a suggestion of a double-standard where NYC “closes” traditional schools and the SUNY group “fixes.”

Actually, what SUNY is proposing is exactly parallel to NYC and traditional schools. NYC has slated, I believe, 47 schools for either closure or turnaround. In a turnaround, principal is fired as are many teachers.

SUNY, similarly, has closed some charters; in this case it is proposing a turnaround (new staffing).

I once lived in a building with some crackheads. I’m glad they were finally evicted and my apartment wasn’t bulldozed.

Fixing problems is a good thing.

Re closing under-performing charters:

At CECD2 Wednesday night, Chancellor Klein cited the 40,000 kids trying to get into charters as the reason to open more of them.

Aside from that such a number represents roughly 4% of all the kids he’s responsible for, Klein’s factoid ducks two key questions:

Why listen to 4% and ignore 96% !?!

If parents want to get into an under-performing charter, would he tell those parents that he’s had a change of heart over the rigor of “outcome-based” thinking, and they should NOT be allowed “choice?”

Well more than 4% of the parents in the schools he wants to close would “choose” to keep them open.

The selective rationalizations are glaring.