Wednesday, May 18, 2011

High schools on chopping block to stay open

From the NY Times:

There was a sense of relief at nine low-performing city high schools on Thursday as the city’s Department of Education announced they would not be closed next year. The decisions came after months of uncertainty about the schools’ future.

But with the relief came concern and confusion over what exactly would happen to the schools, which instead will go through a federal process known as the restart model, which has not been tried before in New York City.

Each of the nine schools is eligible to receive up to $6 million over three years to transform its lower-than-average graduation rate into an educational success story. But to qualify for the money, the city has to contract with outside organizations to see if they can do a better job managing the school than the city did.

That raises a host of questions about how much authority these organizations, nonprofit groups that will be called educational partnership organizations, will have to lead the schools.

The schools that were announced on Thursday for restart include Herbert H. Lehman High School in the Bronx; John Dewey High School in Brooklyn; and Richmond Hill High School, John Adams High School and Newtown High School in Queens.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

If the main criteria is to get graduation number up, how do you do that when many of the vibrant and diverse students take no value in education and drop out the first day they can legally do so???

They are basically trying to put the burden onto the staff to change entire "communities" cultural values (or to even give them some).

Its like trying to teach a monkey fresh from the jungle not to throw shiat on the walls