Bill de Blasio speaks to the graduates of the Boys and Girls High School in Brooklyn.AP
Mayor de Blasio vowed to “shake the foundations of New York City education” by showering 94 poorly performing public schools with taxpayer money to pay for an extra hour of daily instruction, special training for the teachers and extra social services for the kids.
Officially dubbed the “School Renewal Program,” de Blasio said he preferred a less-formal title when he announced the $150 million turnaround plan in November 2014.
“My name is simpler — it’s ‘No Bad Schools,’ ” he told a packed auditorium at East Harlem’s Coalition School for Social Change, one of those targeted for recovery.
Calling his vision a break from the past — when struggling schools were simply “written off” and shut down — de Blasio also said his hand-picked schools chancellor, Carmen Fariña, had already started evaluating administrators “to make sure our school leadership begins improving immediately.”
But that’s not quite how it turned out.
With a three-year deadline looming, progress has been spotty at best and the Department of Education has already given up on 17 schools. It plans to continue the program in September with 78 schools, including one that was created by merging two it shut.
Some supporters have started questioning the program, which critics blast as a costly sinkhole that’s entered a death spiral
Some supporters have started questioning the program, which critics blast as a costly sinkhole that’s entered a death spiral.
“Failed schools don’t reinvent themselves,” said Eric Nadelstern, a former deputy schools chancellor for instruction under Mayor Mike Bloomberg and currently a professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College. “Education will only get well if we reward success and penalize failure. The Renewal program does exactly the opposite.”
The annual cost of the program has risen to $186.5 million this school year, with total spending through the 2018-2019 year estimated at $754.2 million, according to the latest figures from the Independent Budget Office.
The Department of Education will not say where all the money goes. The Post has learned that $8.5 million is paid to 72 Office of Renewal Schools “directors” and “instructional coaches.” Since last school year, another $3.7 million went to “leadership coaches,” including many retired principals, each making $660 to $1,400 a day.
Meanwhile, DOE statistics show that:
Total enrollment at the 86 Renewal schools currently open has plummeted nearly 25 percent — from 49,391 to 37,146 — since the 2013-2014 school year, before the program began.
Average per-student spending at each Renewal school is $14,632 this school year, up nearly 35 percent from $10,847 in 2013-2014 — and more than twice the cost of educating students at the elite Stuyvesant and Brooklyn Tech high schools.
Only three Renewal schools met all their improvement goals last school year, while 61 showed declines in at least one category and 13 fell in three or more — even after the Renewal schools were given three years to hit targets for which other schools only got one.
In recent weeks, the Department of Education has mounted a public-relations blitz to boost the Renewal schools, releasing preliminary data showing their average four-year graduation rate rose to 58.5 percent last year — then revising that number up to 59.3 percent and saying the increase from 2015 was more than twice the citywide average.
At a Feb. 10 news conference trumpeting the 4.8-point jump, de Blasio claimed it “proves that real impact is being made through the Renewal School initiative.”
But his administration had to admit that the dropout rate at Renewal schools rose to 18.6 percent last year, even as the citywide rate declined to a record low of 8.5 percent.
City Hall also ignored the fact that declining enrollment means the Renewal high schools actually graduated 18 percent fewer students — or 750 kids — than they did in 2014, before the program began.
Even worse, DOE statistics show the rate of “college readiness” among Renewal grads — defined as meeting CUNY standards for avoiding remedial classes — was just 12.3 percent last year, one-third the citywide average of 37 percent.
And while the citywide college-readiness rate has risen steadily over the past three years, the Renewal schools saw a slight overall dip last year, when 10 showed declines from 2015 and one — Leadership Institute, which is slated for closure — sank to a dismal 2 percent.
In addition, nine Renewal high schools have seen their college-readiness rates fall since 2014, before the turnaround program began. “What this year’s data really shows is that the de Blasio administration is simply lowering standards to boost graduation rates,” said Jeremiah Kittredge of Families for Excellent Schools, a pro-charter group.
“While that may help the mayor’s approval rating, it does nothing for the thousands of students trapped in his failing Renewal Schools program who are graduating woefully unprepared for college.”
Chancellor Fariña also penned a Feb. 1 op-ed in the Daily News claiming that “Renewal Schools are seeing real progress” and pointing in part to higher scores on state tests and lower numbers of suspensions.
She failed to note that the 2016 state Common Core exams had fewer questions and no time limits, with state Education Commissioner Maryellen Elia cautioning, “It’s not an apples-to-apples comparison with previous years.”
‘At many of these schools, the bar was set so low, and some of them couldn’t get over the low bar’
Nor did Fariña mention that the drop in suspensions followed last year’s easing of disciplinary rules so that students in kindergarten to second grade can no longer be suspended and instead face unspecified, “positive” and “age-appropriate discipline techniques.”
A teacher at one Renewal high school, Richmond Hill, said teachers also faced pressure from administrators to limit suspensions of older kids to improve statistics.
“The kids run the schools,” the teacher said. “They know they can get away with pretty much whatever they want at this point. We’re in a position where we either allow chaos in the classroom or have administrators get pissed. It’s an unwritten rule now: Just let it go.”
A former state education official who helped oversee low-performing schools called the Renewal program a “colossal waste of money.”
“At many of these schools, the bar was set so low, and some of them couldn’t get over the low bar. How pathetic,” the ex-official said.
Two union leaders who initially supported the Renewal plan have since soured on it.
Ernest Logan of the Council of School Supervisors and Administrators was the first to break ranks. In January 2016, Logan wrote in his union’s newsletter that the DOE’s bureaucracy had turned the program into a “recipe for disaster” — then publicly denounced it at a November panel discussion, saying: “If I told you that we spent $14,000-plus a kid and you know what you only got is a 1 percent improvement, you’d run me out the country.”
United Federation of Teachers boss Michael Mulgrew said in January he was “clearly frustrated” by the lack of progress.
“Parents and teachers are leaving in droves. These schools are not being managed properly,” Mulgrew told NY1 News.
A retired educator familiar with the Renewal program blamed meddling by officials from the DOE’s seven Borough Field Support Centers, which Fariña established in 2015.
At the time, she claimed the 700-plus Support Center staffers would “ensure schools get the tailored supports they need,” including “teaching and learning, finance and human resources, operations, student services, special education and English language learners.”
But the source said, “These places are staffed by people who are not anywhere near experts in the field.
“In half the cases they were probably very good two-, three-, four-year teachers. But they’re not the people to be walking into a building telling [assistant principals] or principals what to do.”
The Class Size Matters advocacy group has also compiled data showing that about 40 percent of elementary and middle schools in the Renewal program — and nearly all of the high schools — have some classes with 30 or more students in them.
The group’s executive director, Leonie Haimson, called the situation “unconscionable” and noted how the DOE had repeatedly pledged to “focus class size reduction planning efforts on the School Renewal Program.”
“Because of the DOE’s refusal to reduce class size, the Renewal program is doomed to fail.”
DOE spokeswoman Toya Holness defended the program.“This is hard work, and there’s more to do, but students are making gains: graduation and attendance rates are up and chronic absenteeism, suspensions and serious incidents are down.”
Additional reporting by Selim Algar and Carl Campanile
Keep these in mind as you contemplate the direction of the American government over the past 50 years and especially since the Obama election.
The Goals of Communism
(as read into the congressional record January 10, 1963, from "The Naked Communist" by Cleon Skousen)
1. U.S. acceptance of coexistence as the only alternative to atomic war.
2. U.S. willingness to capitulate in preference to engaging in atomic war.
3. Develop the illusion that total disarmament of the United States would be a demonstration of moral strength.
4. Permit free trade between all nations regardless of Communist affiliation and regardless of whether or not items could be used for war.
5. Extension of long-term loans to Russia and Soviet satellites.
6. Provide American aid to all nations regardless of Communist domination.
7. Grant recognition of Red China. Admission of Red China to the U.N.
8. Set up East and West Germany as separate states in spite of Khrushchev's promise in 1955 to settle the German question by free elections under supervision of the U.N.
9. Prolong the conferences to ban atomic tests because the United States has agreed to suspend tests as long as negotiations are in progress.
10. Allow all Soviet satellites individual representation in the U.N.
11. Promote the U.N. as the only hope for mankind. If its charter is rewritten, demand that it be set up as a one-world government with its own independent armed forces. (Some Communist leaders believe the world can be taken over as easily by the U.N. as by Moscow. Sometimes these two centers compete with each other as they are now doing in the Congo.)
12. Resist any attempt to outlaw the Communist Party.
13. Do away with all loyalty oaths.
14. Continue giving Russia access to the U.S. Patent Office.
15. Capture one or both of the political parties in the United States.
16. Use technical decisions of the courts to weaken basic American institutions by claiming their activities violate civil rights.
17. Get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for socialism and current Communist propaganda. Soften the curriculum. Get control of teachers' associations. Put the party line in textbooks.
18. Gain control of all student newspapers.
19. Use student riots to foment public protests against programs or organizations which are under Communist attack.
20. Infiltrate the press. Get control of book-review assignments, editorial writing, policymaking positions.
21. Gain control of key positions in radio, TV, and motion pictures.
22. Continue discrediting American culture by degrading all forms of artistic expression. An American Communist cell was told to "eliminate all good sculpture from parks and buildings, substitute shapeless, awkward and meaningless forms."
23. Control art critics and directors of art museums. "Our plan is to promote ugliness, repulsive, meaningless art."
24. Eliminate all laws governing obscenity by calling them "censorship" and a violation of free speech and free press.
25. Break down cultural standards of morality by promoting pornography and obscenity in books, magazines, motion pictures, radio, and TV.
26. Present homosexuality, degeneracy and promiscuity as "normal, natural, healthy."
27. Infiltrate the churches and replace revealed religion with "social" religion. Discredit the Bible and emphasize the need for intellectual maturity which does not need a "religious crutch."
28. Eliminate prayer or any phase of religious expression in the schools on the ground that it violates the principle of "separation of church and state."
29. Discredit the American Constitution by calling it inadequate, old-fashioned, out of step with modern needs, a hindrance to cooperation between nations on a worldwide basis.
30. Discredit the American Founding Fathers. Present them as selfish aristocrats who had no concern for the "common man."
31. Belittle all forms of American culture and discourage the teaching of American history on the ground that it was only a minor part of the "big picture." Give more emphasis to Russian history since the Communists took over.
32. Support any socialist movement to give centralized control over any part of the culture--education, social agencies, welfare programs, mental health clinics, etc.
33. Eliminate all laws or procedures which interfere with the operation of the Communist apparatus.
34. Eliminate the House Committee on Un-American Activities.
35. Discredit and eventually dismantle the FBI.
36. Infiltrate and gain control of more unions.
37. Infiltrate and gain control of big business.
38. Transfer some of the powers of arrest from the police to social agencies. Treat all behavioral problems as psychiatric disorders which no one but psychiatrists can understand.
39. Dominate the psychiatric profession and use mental health laws as a means of gaining coercive control over those who oppose Communist goals.
40. Discredit the family as an institution. Encourage promiscuity and easy divorce.
41. Emphasize the need to raise children away from the negative influence of parents. Attribute prejudices, mental blocks and retarding of children to suppressive influence of parents.
42. Create the impression that violence and insurrection are legitimate aspects of the American tradition; that students and special-interest groups should rise up and use united force to solve economic, political or social problems.
43. Overthrow all colonial governments before native populations are ready for self-government.
44. Internationalize the Panama Canal.
45. Repeal the Connally reservation so the United States cannot prevent the World Court from seizing jurisdiction over nations and individuals alike.
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