Closing Maxwell High School Without a Plan

In posts over the past several weeks I have described how the DoE has stacked the deck against students in self-contained special education classes and the schools that serve them.

In terms of the schools, the DoE’s fancy high school Progress Reports are significantly biased against those that serve self-contained students. Making matters worse, when it chose what schools to close the DoE tossed out the results of the expensive and intensive Quality Reviews. The DoE did this even when reviewers found the schools were doing well for three years in a row, and they did it in spite of the fact that the reviews were supposed to play a key role in the DoE accountability standard.

In terms of the students, we know the DoE has not generally admitted self-contained students to the schools that replace the ones that are closing. These schools may serve IEP students with less severe disabilities (for example, students who need speech services or who can succeed in CTT classes), but they do not serve students with the more significant disabilities found in students in self-contained classes. Call it mismanagement, or call it a plan, the result has been to create two separate and unequal school systems within the regular public schools.

To understand how all this plays out, let’s look at just one school: W. H. Maxwell High School in Brooklyn.

First, Maxwell is geographically situated in District 19 in Brooklyn. In the current year, 20% of Maxwell’s population has IEP’s and half of that (11% of the total school population) is in self-contained classes. Consider:

• There are 11 other high schools in the district
• 8 were created by Joel Klein and Tweed, and all of them are small schools. These schools replaced Jefferson High School and Franklin K. Lane (which is still phasing out). The closed (and closing) schools both served self-contained populations.
• Of Klein’s 8 new schools in the district, 5 serve no self-contained students at all and the other three have a population that is 3% or less self-contained.
• Aside from Klein’s new schools, there are three other schools in the district. Of the three remaining schools that were not created by Klein, one serves no self-contained students.
• Of the two remaining schools one is Franklin K. Lane, which is phasing out. Lane has a population that is 5% self contained students.
• That leaves one school, Transit Tech. With Jefferson gone, Lane going, and now Maxwell following suit, Transit Tech is the only school in the district that has the capacity to serve a large number of self-contained students. It is a larger older school and it serves about 1600 students, 4.2% of whom are currently in self-contained. It does well on accountability.

Good luck, Transit Tech.

(Source: 2010 Sp Ed Delivery Reports at on DoE statistic pages for individual schools. Start at schools.nyc.gov)

Tagged: CTT, school closings, special education