Mayor de Blasio just won’t admit the truth about New York’s schools — and the city’s kids are paying the price.
Wednesday night, he defended his decision to keep sending kids to schools that can’t teach. The Bloomberg approach of shutting them, he said, had failed. He asked why his predecessor didn’t just “invest” in those schools instead, as he’s doing.
“Simply shutting down schools obviously didn’t work,” Hizzoner insisted. “It left kids in the lurch in all those transition years, and a lot of the schools that replaced [the shuttered schools] were not necessarily better.”
The evidence shows just the opposite.
Last month, a rigorous study by NYU’s Research Alliance for New York City Schools found the Bloomberg shutdowns didn’t hurt kids at all during the transition — and did wonders for future students, raising graduation rates up to 15 percentage points.
That echoed findings by the research group MDRC last fall and by the journal Education Researcher last spring.
De Blasio did vow Wednesday — for the first time — to shut rotten schools that have no hope of improving, even before his three-year deadline. (Nice of him, huh?)
But don’t believe it. His allegiance is to the teachers union; his goal, protecting staff from consequences by keeping schools open, no matter the cost to kids.
For de Blasio, no school will ever be beyond hope. If it is, he’ll just deny it, as he did about Boys and Girls HS Wednesday.
That school’s been hopeless for years. Last year, its college- and career-readiness rate was just 10 percent. The mayor claimed it’s doing “much, much better.” Huh? Some 555 kids, almost 60 percent, have fled over the past two years — 263 last year alone.
Meanwhile, his bottom-of-the-barrel “Renewal” schools made virtually no progress over the past year: Only 7 percent of third- through eighth-graders passed state tests this year, compared to 6 percent last year.
Many of the schools actually got worse.
The kids trapped in them continue to miss out on vital years of learning — and the mayor keeps sending new children into these failure mills.
How does de Blasio sleep at night?