читать дальшеWhen Lafayette High School in Brooklyn was ordered last year to begin shutting down, condemned as an educational failure, Steve Chung stood ready with a plan for what might come next. The city Education Department had decreed that Lafayette’s building, in Bensonhurst, would be converted into several new, small schools, and Mr. Chung envisioned one of them serving the neighborhood’s large population of Chinese immigrants.
Lafayette, after all, had about 650 students, a majority of them Chinese, who were entitled to bilingual or English as a Second Language classes. A consent order from a federal court, the outcome of a lawsuit claiming bias against Asian-Americans at the school, had put pressure on Lafayette to provide those services.
Several Lafayette administrators and teachers joined Mr. Chung, the president of a Chinese-American community association, in devising a proposal for a school specializing in international studies and submitting it to the department. At a public meeting, residents of the neighborhood lauded it. Meetings with department officials, he said, went amicably and productively.
Then, a few weeks ago, the department announced its plan for restructuring Lafayette, which now has about 2,100 students, beginning in September 2007. It would contain three new schools — one emphasizing sports management, another focusing on film and music, and a third offering “expeditionary learning” under the aegis of Outward Bound. None will offer bilingual instruction, at least at the outset.
“This is an absolutely unacceptable choice,” Mr. Chung said. “These three schools have nothing to do with our community. They’re forcing the immigrant students out of their own neighborhood. New York is an immigrant city, but I think the education policy is not for us.”
Several miles to the east, in East Flatbush, something remarkably similar was happening at Samuel J. Tilden High School, which serves roughly 2,400 students. Like Lafayette, Tilden will be dismantled beginning next fall, and replaced by a collection of small schools. Like Lafayette, Tilden has a large population of immigrant pupils, about 250, many from Haiti. That critical mass allowed Tilden to operate a bilingual program in Creole, and its students outperformed peers at comparable schools on various standardized tests.
The new version of Tilden, however, will have one high school run by Outward Bound and another, called the It Takes a Village Academy, that says it will “prepare students for college and meaningful careers while fostering an appreciation for diverse languages and cultures.”
At best, according to the department’s own projections, those schools will take in a total of 50 English-language learners, as students entitled to bilingual or E.S.L. classes are officially known, despite the heavy presence of Haitian and African immigrants in the surrounding neighborhood. Tilden’s current immigrant students will continue in the school until its complete shutdown.
“Education involves trade-offs; it always does,” said John Lawhead, who has taught English as a Second Language at Tilden for three years. “But those trade-offs, in breaking up the big high schools, should be discussed publicly so you know what’s being lost as well as what’s being gained.”
In the trade-off for the closing of Lafayette and Tilden, with the net loss of about 800 places in bilingual and E.S.L. classes, the Education Department has announced the opening of only one small school geared to immigrant pupils in the entire borough. And even now, less than two weeks before eighth graders throughout the city must submit their applications to high schools, the department has not revealed the location of that school, the Multicultural High School. For all any parent or child knows at this point, it could be anywhere from Bay Ridge to Brownsville.
The recent decisions about Lafayette and Tilden provide the latest flashpoints for months of friction between the Education Department and immigrant families and their advocates. It is a deeply paradoxical confrontation, because many immigrants express support for the trend toward small high schools. They approvingly cite the department’s own statistics, which show that students in small schools have better promotion and graduation rates than those in large schools.
Their complaint, though, is that those schools — with the notable exception of eight International Network schools that are aimed specifically at immigrant pupils — neither seek nor welcome students who need bilingual and E.S.L. classes. That accusation emerged last fall in a report by the New York Immigration Coalition and Advocates for Children. It is likely to re-emerge this Friday, when the City Council’s Education Committee holds public hearings on the small-schools policy.
Education Department officials dispute the accusation. According to their statistics, immigrants form a higher share of students in small high schools (12.9 percent) than in all high schools (11.2 percent). With the International Network schools removed, the department says, immigrant pupils are slightly underrepresented in small schools. The immigration coalition’s report concluded that the gap was substantially larger.
WE love the fact that the argument and criticism has moved from opposing small schools to asking us to build more and open more,” said Jemina R. Bernard, the chief operating officer for the Education Department’s office of new schools. But when it came to discussing the educational options for immigrant pupils, Ms. Bernard used a phrase — “slow and steady” — that few would associate with the department’s creation of 200 small schools in less than five years.
What slow and steady translates to, in practice, she acknowledged, is a rule that any new school gets a two-year waiver before it even tries to establish a bilingual or dual-language program. And even after two years, few small schools will ever reach the critical mass of students eligible for a bilingual or dual-language class with a certified teacher.
Rather, the immigrant pupils in most small schools receive E.S.L. instruction, which may be a brief session, as short as 15 or 30 minutes, for a small group, or some extra attention in the classroom from a teacher unlicensed in E.S.L. To try to remedy the situation, the department has recently begun offering grants to small schools to pay a full-time E.S.L. teacher.
As for the specific decisions about Lafayette, Ms. Bernard called the plan for an international studies school “an incredibly strong proposal.” She suggested it might be approved at a later time for a different site. The reconfigured Tilden, she said, has enough unused space to accommodate more than the two small schools scheduled to open next fall.
Meanwhile, uncertainty will continue for the thousands of immigrant pupils — not just in Brooklyn but throughout the city — wherever big high schools are being closed and small ones are opening without comparable services.
“It’s a very crazy way they’re doing this,” said Deycy Avitia, a specialist in education reform at the New York Immigration Coalition. “We’re talking about students and parents. We’re not talking about Monopoly pieces.”