Looking back on school closure vote, officials question rationale
More than a month after the citywide school board voted to close 19 schools, City Council and Comptroller John Liu are reexamining the criteria that city officials used to declare the schools failures.
Liu, who campaigned for comptroller on the promise of auditing the Department of Education’s data, announced today that his office is beginning an investigation of the DOE’s progress reports — the annual report cards that assign each school a letter grade, largely based on students’ test scores. Later this afternoon, the City Council’s education committee held a hearing where members accused department officials of targeting large, struggling high schools without considering what would become of their current students. Department officials defended the schools they chose to close, citing the schools’ abysmal graduation rate.
“This is not a random list,” said Deputy Chancellor for Strategy and Innovation, John White. “These are the lowest performers even considered among a set of schools where students are not achieving at acceptable levels.”
After a month in which nearly every weeknight was occupied by a school closing hearing, many council members remain unconvinced that the department’s choices were reasonable.
“The DOE failed to follow its own criteria in selecting some schools for closure,” said Councilman Robert