CENTERPIECE
Schools Closing, Schools Opening:
Some Lessons For Us All?
By James
Merriman
On February 6, I attended a meeting of the District Leadership
Team for Community School District 4 at I.S. 45 in East Harlem. The meeting was called to announce the schools that would be going
into space vacated by schools that DoE was closing down.
A District Leadership Team, as I understand it, is a group of
leaders and/or interest groups within a CSD—CBOs, a union rep., reps from the local and state legislators, etc. The DLTs
were created as a way for Tweed to receive input on community needs, and one assumes as well, to get buy in from them on controversial decisions on
school placements.
The meeting I attended was envisioned as a small, sedate affair
in the school library with the team seated around tables. But given the meeting’s purpose, it inevitably attracted parents, teachers, concerned
citizens and activists, who, as they flooded the room, forced the meeting to be moved to the school auditorium. It did not take
long for the evening to go awry.
Upon introducing the first and main school to replace the
elementary school that was closing, the audience quickly caught on that while the meeting was framed as a conversation, DoE had already made its
choices as to what school would go where. DoE’s attempts to frame the meeting as part of the larger process of receiving community input
(which was also true) were in vain. Within minutes, audience members were standing up and denouncing the process as a sham; within
the hour, Council Member Melissa Mark Viverito had stormed into the meeting and read the DoE representative the riot act. This got people to their
feet.
After that, and after endless confusion about the fact that
children who were zoned for the old school would be zoned for the new school (but would not be given equal preference for admission to the charter
school that would share the space), the meeting slowly petered out. Two and half hours after it began, it mercifully ended.
The meeting seemed important to me, but I have been puzzled
about what lessons to take from it.
On the one hand, some of the loudest voices in the room were
teachers at the school that was being closed down. Their stake and (it must be said) their self-interest were obvious. In the same vein, there were
doubtless others who in one way or another depended on the school for their daily bread. To point this fact out is not to be
dismissive of their concerns; surely they are no less heartfelt.[1] But it does put them in a necessary context.
On the other hand, there were also people there who were
genuinely frightened that their child would have no place to go or that the school would not be welcoming to them (a misplaced fear given that the
law requires DoE to guarantee them a place in their zoned school, but a fear nonetheless). And allied with fear was this: the simple feeling that
downtown wasn’t just dictating to them what was good for them—but experimenting with their children. Permeating the
air, too, was a sense that if DoE had tried to do something similar in, let’s say, TriBeca or the Upper East Side, they would have had their
heads handed to them. Finally, one had to take into account that many of the long-term residents of East Harlem are on the unhappy
end of gentrification, with Mitchell-Lama housing disappearing at an ever increasing pace. For the conspiracy minded, the change in schools and change
in housing seemed all of one piece. All of these emotions and strands joined together in that room to the point that I couldn’t help but think
of John Ruskin’s observation about laissez faire capitalism: “It is very pretty, indeed, seen from above; not at all
so pretty, seen from below.”
For all the genuine anger and anxiety that I saw that night,
(and that district reform has engendered generally), the one lesson, however, that I could not take away was that DoE should place a moratorium on
its historic efforts to close failing schools and open up space to better ones—including high-quality charter schools. I was not alone. While
the head of the Community Education Council (CEC) for District 4 was vehement in his criticisms of DoE on almost every other point, when it came to
the question of whether the school in question was failing, he agreed with DoE one hundred percent, and took the teachers on, toe-to-toe, saying it
was indisputable that the school had been an utter failure. One teacher cried and left, but throughout the auditorium, heads
nodded.
The other lesson that would be hard to draw is that parents
shouldn’t be given the choice of schools including high-quality charter schools. For while many parents do fear the
uncertainty that school reform and choice bring, many other parents have an equal and even more vehement fear of the certainty that
their child will fail if trapped in a system that either gives them no choice or a series of bad ones.
We know these parents: they are the parents that apply to
charter schools in the thousands when a school may only have one hundred available seats. Against this backdrop, backing down even
one bit is not an option.
Perhaps then, the lessons are these. First,
we must remember the responsibility that comes with being part of a movement that has promised to improve student achievement. As
such, we should care, and do what we can to ensure, that every school that is given the privilege of occupying public space actually makes good on
its promise to perform significantly better than the failing school it is replacing. If all we end up offering parents
in the end are interesting lessons in policy reform generally, and accountability, autonomy and choice theory specifically, we
will have toiled in vain—and caused a lot of upheaval in the process.
It follows, too, that where any school’s failure to
deliver is clear and over time, we should be willing to support the hard decisions that authorizers of charter schools and the district will have to
make.
The second lesson is that we must constantly remind ourselves
how fraught it is for parents and a community to be told what is good for them and their children. That we may actually know, or
at least think we know, is not enough. Charter schools and their supporters must acknowledge that part of our work is performing
the slow and often tedious task of talking to parents and community leaders about what we are trying to do, and being utterly honest and transparent
with them about our successes and our failures. This work never ends, but it is intrinsic to charter schools’ long term success. If we do
anything less, we will have fulfilled in our own field George Bernard Shaw’s lamentably accurate observation of every other: that every
profession is a conspiracy against the laity.
The fact is that many, many charter schools (and new schools)
know these lessons already and are living them. They stick single-mindedly on the one hand to the values and goals around which
their schools revolve and which makes them successful, while patiently explaining what they are doing to the parents and students who are their
clients and reason for being. They are also unabashed champions of quality and results and support authorizers for making tough decisions.
All of us can learn from the best of those schools and emulate
both their success in their work and their thoughtfulness in going about it.
*
* *
On another matter, we would be remiss if we did not laud
publicly the tremendous step forward that DoE has taken by providing access to charter schools of mailing lists of parents with school aged children,
which can be sorted in a variety of ways. These lists are a tremendous boon to charter schools in their recruiting
efforts. Equally, they make choice more real for parents who now will be able to find out about schools in their neighborhood that
have open seats.
Not only did DoE provide access, it came up with a
bureaucratically friendly and cost-efficient means to deal with the privacy issues surrounding parent names and addresses—a thorny problem
that might have stymied the program in an administration not directed towards serving its constituents. The Chancellor and the
staff who implemented this deserve not just one, but two gold stars. Harlem Success, which pushed hard to get DoE’s attention on this, also
deserves great credit.
[1] As Murray Kempton once noted of then
Chancellor Frank Macchiarola when he courageously took on the notoriously corrupt bus drivers’ union, it is unrealistic to
expect someone to yield to your good arguments when you have your hand on his wallet.
