For the first few months of a year I traveled to several different schools as an ATR. Then I got hired for the year in a school. It's large, it's far from where I live, and the students I have are repeaters. Last Friday report cards were given out and the predictable whining about grades ensued. The AP's office had a line of students complaining about their grades. This understandably did not go over well with the teachers. "Never shows up, when he does he chews gum in the back, and is mortally offended by a 65," said one teacher. I had one student who complained about the 65 I gave him. I looked at his report card, and pointed out to him that while I might have given him a very low grade, 5 other teachers outright failed him. "Yeah but I don't GO to those classes," he said. "I go to yours. I even did one of your homeworks."
So I was a little annoyed, the way teachers usually are when their authority is questioned. But I wasn't THAT annoyed, because to me, kids complaining about a 65 is a sign that I'm not teaching in a Really Difficult School. You see, my first job in the DOE was teaching at a Truly Difficult School. The school was a small alternative high school whose students were overaged, undercredited, and expelled from Lehman High School (closing), Dewitt Clinton High School (also closing), Samuel Gompers High School (phased out), and other prestigious institutions of learning. So ... imagine the worst students of those school. Imagine doing so poorly that you were expelled from those schools. That was the student population of this Very Difficult School.
The first thing about this school: it said it had ___ students on roster, but in actuality, you only saw maybe 10 students per class on a good day. Daily attendance was sometimes 40% or lower. They weren't the same 10 students either. As a result teachers really couldn't teach the traditional way, with lessons lined up in sequence. Most teachers had a pile of review books in the back of the room or made packets. For the first two years I thought teaching was putting together thick packets and telling the students who did show up to work on those packets. When I left the school after two years I had no idea how to teach. No idea how to put together a lesson, how to manage a class, how to even keep a proper gradebook. Teachers at the school didn't bother keeping traditional gradebooks -- it seemed pointless.
Open school night was the biggest joke of all. I remember one year we were told to make student progress sheets for every student on the roster to show to parents. Teachers dressed up, we decorated the bulletin boards. Then we waited. I had exactly one parent show up. One. Another open school night had a mother who told me her daughter wasn't going to school because she was working as a stripper. She seemed unfazed by this.
You couldn't really threaten the students with failing the class, because they generally didn't care. "I'm 18, I have till I'm 21," was a common refrain. The second one was "my baby's sick." "I'm pregnant." "I got arrested." "Oh ... uh, I can't talk about it." But it was hard to feel anything but bad for them. I saw one girl walking once outside of school with her mother and her little brother. Her mother's face had lesions all over and she looked like a ghost -- she had AIDS. Another student walked into a McDonald's one day and was shot. The teachers paid for the funeral -- he had no family.
It's by any measure a low performing school. Horrible graduation rates, credit accumulation rates, standardized test scores, low performing by any measure. But it's been that way for years. It serves a very high-needs, difficult population and I can't even imagine that population going elsewhere. Many of them by the time they got to this school were on their fourth of fifth high school. They're really the kind of population Tweed would like to pretend doesn't exist -- students who fell through every crack. So maybe if they close the school, they won't exist anymore. They certainly aren't going to help the Tweed's "College Preparedness" levels.
The school didn't really get on the radar of the DOE until a charter school decided it wanted to share some space in the building. Charter schools are Mayor Mike's babies, and Tweed quickly told this Very Difficult School that it would have to move to one side of the building, while the charter school occupied some other classrooms. They would share the gym and auditorium. This move hasn't gone over well -- there have been fights between the students of the two different schools. The charter school wants to expand, the Very Difficult School lost funding because of a drop in enrollment. You know the rest of the story.
So the game of musical chairs continues, and it's Children Last, as usual.
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