Prometheus 6

This is what happens when you take schools away instead of fixing them.

Failings of One Brooklyn High School May Threaten a Neighbor’s Success
By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN

Set just a few subway stops apart in blue-collar Brooklyn, drawing from a similar pool of new immigrants and American-born blacks, two high schools spent the past decade careering toward opposite destinies. The question now is whether the failure of one will destroy the success of the other.

Since the late 1990s, Lafayette High School in the Bath Beach neighborhood graduated fewer than half its students, posted dismal scores on standardized tests and, in the view of federal civil rights officials, “deliberately ignored” a series of bias attacks against Chinese-American students, including a valedictorian.

The principal appointed in 2005 to improve the school shut down its program for gifted students and, in front of the assembled faculty, likened Lafayette to a Nazi death camp. Finally, at the end of 2006, the Department of Education announced that it would close Lafayette and transform it into five mini-schools.

Meanwhile, just to the south on the border of Coney Island, John Dewey High School, with its progressive style of curriculum, was sending top students to Ivy League universities. It paid teachers extra to serve beyond their normal classroom hours in tutoring and study “resource centers.”

Such efforts culminated last fall when the Department of Education gave Dewey a B in the first round of school report cards. U.S. News & World Report, in its ranking of American high schools, awarded Dewey a silver medal, putting it in the top 505 nationally. The designation particularly reflected Dewey’s success in educating low-income and minority students.

Over the years, the disparity between Lafayette and Dewey has led hundreds of New York’s teenagers to vote with their feet. As they scorned Lafayette, with the school filling barely half its seats, they thronged to Dewey, which, according to the Department of Education’s own statistics, by 2004 had swollen to about 3,400 students, 130 percent of capacity.

All of which brings us to the complicated present and to that question about failure and success. With only three of the five mini-schools at Lafayette now open, department officials say, enrollment in the Lafayette building has declined to 720, from 1,320 last year. New admissions from the Lafayette area to Dewey, especially of ninth graders, have risen by one-third over the same period, but overall enrollment has declined since 2004, bringing the school to about 118 percent of capacity, they say. (The total number of Lafayette-zoned students in Dewey, though, has remained stable.)

Faculty members, students and administrators at Dewey say that the students coming from Lafayette are academically deficient, although Education Department statistics show that the current crop of ninth graders performed essentially similarly to previous cohorts on the citywide reading test. Still, the perception at Dewey is that Lafayette students did not choose Dewey for its quality, but landed there by default because they did not qualify for any of the Lafayette building’s mini-schools. With the overcrowding, Dewey students and staff members say, in many periods of the day there are several hundred students with no assigned room, often roaming the halls. A round of budget cuts this year sharply reduced staffing of the “resource centers.”

“When I was first here, we had no discipline problems,” said Chung Chan, a social studies teacher for the past 11 years, who recently won a national award from Williams College. “But since Lafayette began to close down, we’ve had an influx of students who are unprepared. It’s destroying our entire school.”

James Harmon, another veteran in the social studies department, echoed Mr. Chan’s words. “We’re left with all the kids nobody else would take,” he said. “The kids who are running amok are the kids with 1’s on the reading test.”

Mr. Harmon was referring to the lowest possible mark on the standardized reading test taken by eighth graders, and Dewey has indeed increased the number of its remedial classes over the past two years.

The nadir for Dewey came in March, when a student — not newly admitted from Lafayette — was spotted by classmates and a teacher handling a gun and the building was put under police lockdown for several hours. Though the weapon was never located and no charges were ever brought against the student, a heightened sense of disruption continues.

“During my calculus class, there are constantly people who open the door, come into the room, say some nonsense and leave,” said Elizabeth Piligromova, 17, a senior who has been admitted to Harvard. “There are more police here than I’ve ever seen in my life. It feels like a jail. It doesn’t feel like a school.”

The Department of Education says that in the long run, an improved Lafayette will relieve the pressures on Dewey, that a revamping of Lafayette is the solution to Dewey’s woes.

“What will make the biggest difference for Dewey is having a successful academic environment at Lafayette,” said Garth Harries, chief executive for portfolio development at the Education Department. Earlier in the same telephone interview, he made a similar point: “It would have been irresponsible not to close Lafayette. It’s absolutely important that Lafayette become an attractive place to go to school, which is why we closed it.”

ON the subject of Dewey’s overcrowding, Mr. Harries called it “absolutely a priority to bring enrollment down.” But he also laid the blame with Dewey’s administrators for not assigning all students to a specific room every period.

“There are many schools that are over capacity, and more over capacity than Dewey, and they can program their students so everyone has a place to be,” he said. “I would be surprised that a school that has just 118 percent utilization has that many students unprogrammed. It’s the responsibility of the school.”

Barry Fried, Dewey’s principal, said he already has the school library and resource centers filled with otherwise unassigned students. He has put Dewey’s ninth graders on staggered schedules, starting and ending slightly later than the rest of the student body. The warm spring weather has provided a temporary respite, because students can pass their free periods on Dewey’s campus rather than in its hallways.

And though department officials predict a positive resolution to Dewey’s current stresses, the degree of cynicism within the school cannot be underestimated. Having seen education officials already announce closings of so many other Brooklyn high schools — Wingate, Tilden, South Shore, Canarsie, Prospect Heights, Jefferson — they fear that Dewey is being set up to fail in order to justify its shutdown.

Mr. Harries said such a scheme is “absolutely not the case.” But in this difficult year at Dewey, conspiracy theories thrive.