By Anna Gustafson
City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein said his sentiment that the status quo in public education must be challenged in order to create a more equitable playing field for minority students draws strong support throughout the city, but the specific plans to achieve this have drawn fierce criticism — including from those listening to his speech at York College last week.
Klein spoke Friday at the executive leadership breakfast at York in Jamaica, an area where residents have been irate over his plan to close Jamaica High School, Beach Channel HS in Rockaway Park and the Business, Computer Applications & Entrepreneurship Magnet HS in Cambria Heights.
“Education can transform everyone’s lives, and everyone agrees with these aspirations but not on the ways to get there,” Klein said. “Making tough decisions to challenge the status quo is controversial, but if we don’t do that, I guarantee you we will get the same results.”
For the schools chancellor, the way to decrease the achievement gap between rich and poor students and minority and white individuals has been to close institutions with low graduation rates and open smaller schools in their place.
This has drawn fire from community members in Queens, particularly in light of the city Department of Education’s proposal to close the three schools in Queens, where parents said Klein and the DOE have not heeded their input on the plans.
Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Joan B. Lobis last month blocked the closing of the three Queens institutions, as well as 16 other schools slated for closure. In her ruling the judge said the agency violated state law by keeping parents and school activists in the dark in the weeks leading up to the Jan. 27 decision.
“I want to ask you if enough schools have not reached the criteria set for graduation, is it a failure of the schools or the failure of you, the mayor, or the Department of Education for not supplying resources and guidance to allow the education of all children and not a select few?” the Rev. Charles Norris, pastor of the Bethesda Missionary Baptist Church in Hollis, asked Klein.
The chancellor responded by spelling out the philosophy he has used to close 91 schools and open 335 in the city since 2003.
“Can you turn around a school with persistently low performance, or is it better to create different options?” Klein said. “Through smaller schools, we’ve gotten much better results .… Students at Far Rockaway had abysmal graduation rates. Now they have much higher graduation rates.”
The city shuttered Far Rockaway HS in 2007 and replaced it with four smaller schools.
Should the court’s decision be overturned and the DOE allowed to close the 19 schools, Leroy Gadsden, president of the Jamaica branch of the NAACP, asked what the city planned to do with the large population of English language learners and special education students at Jamaica HS. Klein said the students could attend programs specifically created for these students.
Klein spoke of the need to revamp the country’s educational system, saying it has especially failed minority and poor students.
“Fifty-five years after Brown v. Board of Education, let’s not kid ourselves, we don’t give people an equal education,” Klein said. “Today in America, the high school graduation rate is 70 percent. Thirty percent of students don’t make it, and overwhelmingly they are children of color, those who grew up in poverty. Of those who graduate, half are not prepared for college. We’re not preparinge two-thirds of our kids. That’s a losing formula in a global economy.”
Reach reporter Anna Gustafson by e-mail at agustafson@cnglocal.com or by phone at 718-260-4574.
