Again, we gotta know why, after treating schools as dumping grounds for the students no one else wants, the Department of Education closes them--in effect, blaming the victims. Next fall, five failing high schools, including three in Brooklyn—Lafayette, South Shore, and Samuel J. Tilden; two in Manhattan—Urban Peace Academy and School for the Physical City--will get the ax.
Although the schools’ principals graduated from Mayor Bloomberg’s much-touted, privately-funded and grandiose-sounding principal training program, The New York City Leadership Academy, the schools are beyond rescue. Collectively, the targeted high schools have a graduation rate in the fortieth percentile. Tilden has a 43.5 percent rate and Lafayette has 44.4 percent. (Percentage-wise, that’s a lot higher than Recharger’s dating success in college when, after asking out 456 girls, he scored a single, five-minute cup of coffee with a scissors-wielding lesbian).
Starting with the freshmen class, the five doomed schools will close a grade at a time, taking three years to complete the process. Smaller high schools with no more than 500 students will replace them.
According to city educrats—generally speaking, the least creative people on earth-- “schools to be closed had notably low four-year graduation rates, did a particularly poor job helping students who were already behind as incoming freshmen, and proved exceedingly unpopular with prospective students.”
Duh.
South Shore, for example, is the last choice for eighth-grade applicants.
-- Tatyana Gimelshteyn