It’s also providing a ringing indictment of the teachers unions that are fighting tooth and nail to keep the failure factories open.
When the city shutters large, bad schools and puts kids in smaller, specialized ones, graduation and college-readiness rates climb, and much of the racial-achievement gap vanishes.
Starting in 2002, Mayor Bloomberg closed 23 disastrous high schools. In their place, the city set up hundreds of “small schools of choice,” or SSCs.
These are specialized high schools with about 400 students each, where staff have closer contact with their charges.
The nonprofit research group MDRC studied thousands of students who applied to attend SSCs. Starting in 2005, it tracked kids who got into 105 SSCs and compared them with those who applied but wound up enrolled in traditional district schools.
The groups are basically identical; children of privilege they are not. About 93 percent are black and Hispanic, and most come from some of the poorest stretches of Brooklyn and The Bronx. Most read below their grade levels.
The upshot: Kids who went to SSCs have performedbrilliantly:
* Some 68 percent of students at SSCs graduated in four years — 8.6 points higher than their counterparts.
* Students at SSCs closed43 percentof the gap between whites and minorities.
*Far more students at the small schools passed their English Regents exams with “college-ready” scores of 75 or higher — 37.3 percent versus 30 percent.
The benefits accrued broadly: Black students, white students, boys, girls, poor kids and those far below grade level all did better when they attended SSCs.
These schools aren’t just smaller; they also create a culture of achievement by involving community partners like the Urban Assembly and the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, giving each a distinct focus.
With this success so evident, you’d expect to see the teachers unions lining up to support the model. Not exactly.
Instead, the unions file suit every time the Department of Education tries to close or restructure a failing school. They don’t like being accused of failure, or when teachers get shifted around from school to school. The MDRC study is powerful ammunition against them.
Remaining challenges, of course, are considerable. After all, just 37.3 percent of SSC kids showed college readiness in English, and 23.3 percent showed it in math.
But again, these students scored notably better than their pals in traditional schools.
Which means there’s hope.
And never mind union obstructionism.
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