The Real Deal on Morris High School & Bloomberg’s Failed Education Policies

As Bloomberg is giving his State of the City address today at Morris HS...

Claim: Bloomberg likes to contrast the graduation rate at the old Morris HS to graduation rates at the high schools currently housed in the building, as evidence of the success of his education policies. 

Reality: The types of students enrolled at the old and new Morris campus are very different.  Of the students enrolled in the four schools currently housed in the Morris building, only 1.7% are in self-contained special education classes– revealing their higher level of need, compared to 14% of students enrolled in the old Morris HS in 2001-02.[1]  Also, dividing up the building has caused its own problems; for example, according to a teacher at one of these schools, there is no longer any librarian and the library is completely unutilized: “Lots of books with no one tending to them or using them.” 

Claim: In response to criticism that students at phase-out schools suffer a loss of resources and services, Deputy Chancellor Suransky has said that graduation rates actually improved at Morris HS in its final year: “… it was a school that used to take 700 kids into the ninth grade every year and graduate 70 four years later. And as it was phased out, in the second year of the phase out it graduated 120 kids …In the third year it graduated over 200 and in its last year it graduated 300.”[2]

Reality: According to state figures, only 121 students in the last class at Morris HS graduated and only 3% of them attended college.[3]  Meanwhile, the student discharge rate soared to 55%, compared to 33% of the prior class, a pattern repeated in many of the phase-out schools.[4]  Of the 21 schools closed by this administration between 2003 and 2009, 37% of the students in their final classes graduated on average, 20% dropped out, 33% were discharged, and 10% were still enrolled when the schools closed their doors. [5]

Claim:   Bloomberg’s educational policies are helping more students leave school college- and career-ready.

Reality: The schools now housed in the Morris building have college readiness rates ranging from 0% (High School for Violin and Dance) and 2.9% (Bronx International High School), to 4.8% (School for Excellence) and 5.7% (Morris Academy for Collaborative Studies.)[6]

After a decade of school closures and other free-market policies, only 21% of NYC high school students overall and only 13% of Black and Latino HS students are college ready after four years. [7] 79% of NYC students entering community colleges need remediation, and the percent of high school graduates who require triple remediation in math, reading and writing has increased 47% since 2005.[8] 

Claim: The Mayor’s educational policies are equitable and fair.

Reality:  Most of the schools closed in recent years and those proposed for closure this year enroll higher than average concentrations of English language learners, students who entered the schools overage, and/ or students with disabilities.[9]  In fact, Mayor Bloomberg’s school closing policy is a shell game that displaces high-needs students from one school to another, without addressing their educational needs.

Claim: The new schools started during the Bloomberg administration are uniformly more successful.

Reality: More than half of the middle and high schools that DOE proposes closing this year were started during his administration. Many of the new schools have small percentages of the highest-needs students. However, when the new schools serve comparable populations of students in self-contained special education, their students tend to succeed at the same rate as the high schools that preceded Bloomberg.[10]

Claim: Under Bloomberg, student learning has increased and the achievement gap has narrowed.

Reality: As measured by scores on national exams, NYC is second to last in student progress compared to ten other cities since 2003, when Bloomberg’s policies were first put in place. And the achievement gap has not narrowed significantly between any racial or ethnic group.[11]

For nearly a decade, Bloomberg has had complete authority over our educational system.  Yet of last year’s eighth graders, who entered Kindergarten when he first took office in 2002, only 35% read and write at grade level. [12]

Truly, these are Bloomberg’s kids and Bloomberg’s responsibility.

NYC can’t afford any more of Bloomberg’s failed education policies.

Prepared by the Coalition for Educational Justice and Class Size Matters, January 2012.

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[1] NYC DOE School Progress Reports 2010-2011 & NYS School Report Cards 2001-2002.

[2] GothamSchools, “Chief DOE deputy to parents and teachers: Check our work,” March 15, 2011.

[3] NYSED, Office of Research and Information Systems, “NYS High School Graduates & Their NYS Public College Participation and Persistence, 2004-5.” June 24, 2010.

[4] Jennifer L. Jennings & Leonie Haimson, “High School Discharges Revisited: Trends in NYC’s Discharge Rates,”

April 2009.

[5] Urban Youth Collaborative, “No Closer to College: NYC High School Students Call for Real School Transformation, Not School Closings,” April 2011.  The denominator for discharge rates is the total reported cohort plus the number of discharges. Discharges are taken out of the official DOE reported cohorts on which graduation, still enrolled and dropout rates are based. Each of these outcomes was based on revised cohort figures which included discharges.

[6] NYC DOE School Progress Reports, 2010-2011.

[7] NY Times, “College-Readiness Low Among State Graduates, Data Show,” June 14, 2011. NYC Black and Latino percentage calculated from NYC DOE. Graduation Results. School Level Regents-Based Math/ELA Aspirational Performance Measure 2010. 

[8] NY Times, “In College, Working Hard to Learn High School Material,” October 23, 2011.

[9] Parthenon Group, “NYC DOE “Beat the Odds” Update,”  March 6, 2008;  GothamSchools, “Internal report stokes questions about city’s closure strategy,” January 26, 2011;  NYC Independent Budget Office, “Schools Proposed for Closing Compared With Other City Schools,” January 2011; NY Times, “State Approves School Closings, but Puts City on Notice,” July 22, 2011; Jackie Bennett, “Closing Schools: DOE Spins Itself an Alternate Universe of Facts,” Edwize, December 14, 2011.

[10] Jackie Bennett, “Closing Schools, DOE Spins Itself an Alternate Universe of Facts,” Edwize, December 14, 2011; Jackie Bennett, “Meet the New Schools, Same as the Old Schools,” November 21, 2011.

[11] Class Size Matters, “NYC second to last among cities in student progress on the NAEPs since 2003,” January 9, 2011.

[12] NYC DOE, NYC 2011 Mathematics & English Language Arts Citywide Test Results Grades 3-8, Aug. 2011.

Those glorious Snyder school buildings, too many lost, sold or sitting empty

Morris High School in the Br

Mayor Bloomberg’s invitation to his State of the City speech features a photo of the glorious Morris High School building in the Bronx where his address will be given.   Morris High School was designed by the NYC Superintendent of schools, Charles B.J. Snyder, at the turn of the century.  

According to the architectural historian Jean Arrington, Snyder designed and built an astonishing 344 school buildings and 64 additions over about thirty years; a record that puts Bloomberg’s repeated claims of having the most ambitious record of school construction to shame.  

The Wikipedia entry about Snyder says: “Snyder saw school buildings as civic monuments for a better society. He was concerned with health and safety issues in public schools and focused on fire protection, ventilation, lighting, and classroom size.”

Of the Snyder buildings, according to Arrington, about 280 (or two thirds) till stand, and 235 still function as schools. The other 45 are now apartments, condos, senior citizen housing, shelters, artist complexes, health facilities, one hotel, and one church.  Five have sat empty for 20 to 40 years, though one of those has just reopened - PS 90 in Harlem - as mostly high-end condos. The School Construction Authority (SCA) has just demolished one of Snyder's earliest schools in Brooklyn – as it evidently had structural problems, to make room for a larger building.

The former PS 64 in the East Village

Among the Snyder buildings that have been sitting empty for years, at least two have provoked intense controversies: the former PS 64, just east of Tompkins Square in the East Village, which was run by a community group named Charas and renamed  El Bohio Cultural and Community Center, serving as a home for housing activists, artists, theater groups, a bicycle repair shop and more.  It was sold during the Giuliani administration to a developer who, without permission, stripped it of many of its architectural features, despite the fact that the building had been landmarked. More recently, it has been the site of Occupy Wall St. type protests (article, video.)

The former PS 109 in East Harlem

Another Snyder building is the former PS 109, on E. 99 Street in East Harlem, which neighborhood residents and preservationists prevented from being torn down in the 1990’s, and has its own website, devoted to restoring it as a school. Community activist Gwen Goodwin is still leading a battle for the building to be returned to its original use as a school, though several years ago it was sold for one dollar by the Department of Education and is apparently in the process of being converted to artist housing. 

PS 109 was the topic of conversation at the last Panel for Educational Policy meeting , when Patrick Sullivan pointed out how it could be used to provide space for the  Esperanza Preparatory Academy on 109 St., a dual language school that has been given the green light to expand within the space of  the TAG school, the only gifted school in Manhattan that is truly diverse, and whose school is already so overcrowded that its kids eat lunch at 10 AM.  In response, Walcott claimed (falsely) that PS 109's building had been sold before Bloomberg was elected – but it was actually in the city’s capital plan for schools to be repaired and renovated as late as May 2003.

Why it was sold is still not clear. To have such beautiful and spacious school buildings sitting empty – or sold for a dollar – seems criminal, while just ten blocks away, children in one overcrowded school are being pushed aside for the expansion of another school, and at a time when one quarter of all elementary schools had waiting lists for Kindergarten last spring, and nearly half a million NYC children are sitting in buildings that are 100% utilized or more. -- Leonie Haimson


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I find a certain amount of irony in the invitation.  It's great to see the picture showing the Morris H.S. building seemingly restored to its former glory and the text making brief reference to its history and to the fact that it is a Snyder school. 

However, Charles B. J. Snyder designed and built more than 300 schools for the NYC public school system from approximately 1890 to 1923, and although Morris was one of his crowning achievements, most were magnificent structures, inside and out, and well worth preserving.  Other internal features of Snyder schools include art rooms, shops, gyms, etc., features he always insisted in putting in -- in a break with the previous school construction of the era. 

What has happened, however, under the watch of several administrations in City Hall and at the Board of Ed./DOE since the 1950's, is that a sickeningly large number of them have been demolished, sold off or allowed to deteriorate so that only a minority of them are still functioning as NYC public schools.   

Take Harlem for example.  (I have this from a Snyder walk I was on which went through Harlem and was led by the wonderful architectural historian/Snyder specialist Jean Arrington).  He built 16 schools in Harlem, including the currently-besieged (by DOE) Wadleigh, then known as Girls' H.S.  Of those 16, eight are still standing, and only three of those are currently serving as public schools.  One other is a senior residence (that's OK), one an adult education center (that's OK), one is now just a shell, one is being converted into private housing (luxury, no doubt) and another has already been converted into condos, with the architectural details lovingly restored and proudly highlighted in the marketing materials for the building. 

Now imagine if even half of the 13 lost Snyder school buildings in Harlem had not passed out of the public school system.  At the very least it's safe to say that with all that additional capacity, when the DOE wanted to shove a charter school into a public school these days it wouldn't result in children losing their libraries, art rooms or gym and cafeteria time. 

The blame, if it were being assessed, would have to go, as I wrote above, to several administrations for not choosing to preserve these gems within the system, and for deciding to defer maintenance.  (My aunt, who was born in 1914, went to Morris, which means she graduated in 1931-32, I'm guessing.  She once told me that she was jealous because my mother, 6 years younger, went to the newly-opened James Monroe H.S. instead.  That would have been about 1934-5.  So if Morris could seem less desirable to a school kid by thirty years after it opened, it indicates that upkeep needed to begin quickly and to be done regularly, and I guess it wasn't.)  As a result, many New Yorkers have been the losers over the decades. 

Somehow I don't imagine that anyone in City Hall was expecting this kind of reaction to the attractive invitation which they sent out for the State of the City.  -- Richard Barr