Brooklyn Comprehensive Night High School has been closed for a full year, and in retrospect all I can see is the damage that resulted. The DOE didn't save any money -- all except one of the faculty, staff and adminstrators are still working. A school is a sum of its parts and all the parts have simply been moved to other budgets. All that has occurred is that there are fewer ways for at-risk youth to gain a high school diploma than before. With the closing of South Shore, Tilden and Canarsie high schools there will be more students without diplomas with fewer options available.
What would it take to re-consolidate the parts in a building (we didn't have our own)? Won't it be cheaper than the unemployment, the welfare and all the other monies which will be poorly spent helping young people subsist?
And which teachers are wandering? Teachers who refused to pass kids through the system if they weren't ready and people who helped those kids develop into students. In both cases, teachers did exactly what everyone expects of them. They held students accountable and they gave them as much attention as humanly possible.
It's ironic that the teachers who held to the standard and the teachers who helped students meet those standards in a smaller environment with extended time ARE BOTH being punished. None of us should be. What it shows us is that Bloomberg et al don't care about true student success. They want a cheaper, more quickly made product. Graduate the kid on watered down tests and in less time.
What's sad is that some parents actually buy in. A friend boasted about her child's "4" on her grade level exam. All the publicity about the dumbing down of the Math tests hadn't reached her. Worse, as someone who graduated from a school where such exams were considered meaningless, she had lost sight of her own academic values. The pressure had been so high for her child to pass that the relief which came when she did clouded her judgement. She talked about Bloomberg "holding teachers to task." Meanwhile she'd had to get her child lots of tutoring in addition to that provided by the school. For what? Just to get her to pass an exam we'd've both agreed was inferior under different circumstances. But, all the fighting she had to do to get her child services, the over-crowding of her class -- all that disappeared when she was given the magic "pass" on the grade exam. I guess we do live by the standards we set, and our Mayor has seen to it that these are lower than we would have stood for before he came into office.
My friend's kid won't ever need a school like Brooklyn Comprehensive because she will just get her tutoring for as long as she needs, and when she recovers from the temporary euphoria, she'll go back to fighting the school for services, etc. It's the kid sitting next to her child whose parents are uninvolved or who glides by barely passing these exams who is in more trouble. What happens to him/her when the tides change again and the tests are strengthened or eliminated in favor of real accomplishment?
Perhaps one of the teachers from our school will have been shuffled into his/her school by accident of fate. I doubt it, though.
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