How the city failed our students
City Department of Education executives tasked with improving the poorest-performing schools are grossly incompetent. As a result, a marginalized and very vulnerable group of impoverished minority students in the Bronx face eviction from their neighborhood school.
That’s the inescapable conclusion if one really scrutinizes how the DOE handled, or mishandled, Junior High School 145, which they now propose closing for its poor student performance on state tests.
We are veteran teachers at JHS 145, which was one of 94 struggling schools identified for a turnaround via Mayor de Blasio’s high-stakes, $150 million-a-year School Renewal Program. In November 2014, the mayor and Education Department heralded the program as a shining example of innovation that would provide the resources, training and services necessary to serve kids.
JHS 145, once known as the Arturo Toscanini School, is in one of the poorest congressional districts in the entire country, and gang violence is rampant.
There are approximately 300 students. At least 20% are living in homeless shelters or temporary housing; 21% have learning disabilities, and 18% have gone extended periods of their lives without any education at all.
Of the 300 or so students, more than 130 are just beginning to learn the language. But the department has admittedly failed to provide adequate English as a Second Language instruction.
“All students in the program are suffering because they are entering so far behind and we don’t have enough ESL teachers,” according to the Education Department’s 2016-17 Renewal School Comprehensive Education plan for JHS 145.
And that’s only one of many examples of how the DOE, and by extension the mayor, has failed these kids.
The city has failed to provide students with teachers who are certified in the subjects they are teaching. Nearly 14% of teachers at the school last year were teaching subjects in which they were not trained. In the all-important subject of math, “several teachers lacked the content knowledge necessary to effectively teach the course that they were assigned,” according to the Education Department document.
While the school tried to bring the teachers up to speed, “the gap in content knowledge proved too expansive to close within one year.”
The city has failed to provide students with access to a computer lab. The school was forced to dismantle the computer lab it previously had and convert it into a regular classroom because of a space shortage after the Education Department gave 17 classrooms to a charter school two years ago.
The city has failed to provide students with their own science lab. As a result, they do not receive instruction on the scientific instruments that they ultimately are tested on. The first time they will actually see the instruments will be the day of the test, when they go to a lab located in another school in the same building.
The city failed to provide students with textbooks that go along with the English and math curriculums used by teachers for the entire 2015-16 school year. Teachers had to download and photocopy materials, and most of the math modules didn’t include translation into the languages spoken by English-language learners.
The city has failed to provide steady leadership at JHS 145. There have been three different principals and five different assistant principals over the last five years. There hasn’t been an assistant principal since this school year started.
Yet after all these failures, students who very much need stability — remember, one in five are homeless and an equal percentage are special-needs kids — will be evicted from their neighborhood school, and will have to apply to other schools. The teachers will have to apply for jobs elsewhere.
Meanwhile, those who really failed the students, and staff, will pretend they’ve done some good but it won’t be remotely true.