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Notes on a Trip to a High School in New York City
Bill adds a P. S. to this very distressing account: To those who deal with these realities very day, I send my admiration.
by Bill Schechter
I grew up in New York City and graduated from its (non-exam) public schools. For 35-years, I worked as a history teacher at a progressive, upper middle-class high school in a Boston suburb. These two poles anchor my educational history.
Last Tuesday, I traveled down to the city to watch one of my former students teach at Chelsea High School (formerly Chelsea Vocational High School) in SOHO. The visit was a shock that managed to deepen my already very deep sense of the folly of punitive high stakes testing.
The school is in a state of advanced physical dilapidation. I felt like I was walking through the pages of Kozol’s Death At An Early Age--the 50-year old school building that my school district demolished was a palace by comparison)–- or had gotten dropped into the Third World. Chelsea High received an "F" from the NYC Board of Ed, and the teachers there have been given the message that these kids have to drilled to pass those tests so the powers-that-be will finally be appeased.
The student body has been thoroughly re-segregated and has become, in bureaucratic parlance, "100% minority." There is one group of AP students who seem to have it together and are headed to college, if all goes well. They credit their families for their success. They are the exception. Probably 80% of the student body will not have colleges to apply to… or anxieties about "getting in+--or waiting lists to contend with. The two classes I attended have between 30 and 33 students registered. On any given day, only about half even bother to attend. On sunny days, fewer still. If they all decided to come to class, some would have to stand because the classrooms do not have enough chairs. There is no gym, and only two teams (basketball and handball), because that space has been given over to classrooms. Teachers cannot use the copy machine in school. There is little available paper in classrooms, because the paper supply has to be saved for the end-of-year Regents exams.
Textbooks cannot be taken home. For most students, no homework is assigned because do so would just increase a sense of student failure, as it was explained to me. The school has a special art program, but has hardly any art supplies. The lessons my former student was heroically trying to teach involved a drill about three Global Studies concepts fairly remote–-in more than one sense–to the students in her charge: Glasnost, Perestroika, and Democratization. The teachers have been instructed not to cause incidents by trying to stop students from texting or listening to IPods in class. No one was deterred from using personal electronic devices merely because a stranger was observing their class.
The kids were very nice, good-natured, and floated in and out of attention–in one class more out than in. (With some teachers, I am told, the kids are not as good-natured and have been known to hurl books. In fact, a room is reserved at the school so students can be arrested in private). The mandated curriculum was not exactly drawing most kids in. Certainly, the challenges are large. But if I saw the future, believe me it isn’t working.
As I left the building, I was struck by this contradiction: the very politicians–-Bloomberg's City Hall office is less that a half-mile away–-who are demanding these kids jump daily through monotonous hoops in the name of "high standards" are themselves unwilling to fight for the social investments that might guarantee students (at least) decent, well-equipped schools. Where is the bargain here?
What I saw had little to do with teachers unions and much more to do with chronic societal neglect.
My visit to Chelsea High–in a not very chic section of SOHO–underscored a frequent theme in CARE postings: that successful students and schools require a social foundation much stronger and broader than that provided by a single school building.
Traveling from Lincoln-Sudbury, in Sudbury, Massachusetts, to Chelsea High in NYC, I felt certain that I must have crossed an invisible international boundary somewhere.
— Bill Schechter
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2008-05-16
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