Students from Christopher Columbus High School and Global Enterprise Academy marched to protest the scheduled closing of their schools The boos cascaded over the auditorium as a city education official read out the case against Christopher Columbus High School, one of the last remaining large high schools in the Bronx.
Columbus has had “long history of sustained academic failure” and “chronically poor performance and low demand,” Santiago Taveras, a deputy chancellor, told the standing-room crowd. As a result, he said, it should be closed.
But the frustrated teachers, soft-spoken students and former football players who stood up at the hearing said otherwise. They described a school that had served some students well, despite the difficult circumstances faced by many. They told of a school that, even after the city identified it as struggling, continued to receive ever-growing proportions of the city’s most demanding students — the very students that needed the most help.
“And now that they have found a home here, and have been welcomed with open arms to our family, you want to take that away from them, too,” said Jaime Allen, a special education teacher.
Closing schools for poor performance, especially large high schools, has been one of the most controversial hallmarks of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s control of the school system. And it is taking on a new urgency, both in New York and around the country, with the Obama administration putting a premium on “school turnaround” policies in its nationwide competition, called Race to the Top, for billions of dollars in federal education grants. Read more..
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