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For Immediate Release:
March 11, 2007
Contact: Frank Sobrino
O: (212) 669-4193; C: (646) 250-4322
School
Construction Plan Assumes High Dropout Rate
The City’s plan for building
new public high schools falls tens of thousands of seats short
of the capacity needed to meet the Department of Education’s
70 percent graduation rate goal, according to an analysis released
today by Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum.
Gotbaum found that the approximately
26,000 new high school seats slated to be created under the City’s
five-year school capital program is only about half of the new
capacity needed to meet the graduation target by the 2009-10 school
year.
“If you say you’re raising
graduation rates, then make room for these students,” Gotbaum
said. “Otherwise, you’re planning for failure. A 70
percent graduation rate is a reasonable goal. Let’s give
our schools the resources they need to succeed.”
The current five-year school capital
program calls for the creation of some 26,000 new high school
seats in an effort to begin eliminating some of the trailers and
“mini-buildings” that often occupy a school’s
outdoor recreation space. The construction program is based on
the assumption that only 46 percent of ninth-graders will make
it to 12th grade citywide: 36 percent in the Bronx, 42 percent
in Brooklyn, 50 percent in Manhattan, 51 percent in Queens and
64 percent in Staten Island.
Gotbaum found that if DOE is to meet
its goal of a four-year graduation rate of 70 percent, which it
outlined in its Secondary Reform Plan issued last year, 10,835
new seats will have to be created in the Bronx, 5,719 in Brooklyn
and 15,783 in Queens.
“We at the Northwest Bronx Community
and Clergy Coalition have been fighting to build high schools
at the Kingsbridge Armory for 11 years,” said Ronn Jordan,
vice president of the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition.
“This report shows that more schools are exactly what we
need. Chronic overcrowding isn’t just a Bronx tale, it’s
a citywide crisis. How will our students graduate from high school
when the high schools don’t exist?”
“There is a huge gap in the
possible trajectories of young lives between a 36 percent projected
survival rate and a 70 percent graduation rate,” said Kavitha
Mediratta, Principal Associate, Community Involvement Program
of the Annenberg Institute for School Reform. “If that gap
is not filled by the provision of new high school seats, and real
spaces in which to learn, thousands of our high school students
will pay a terrible price.”
“Let’s not
assume our children will fail and let’s instead plan for
success,” Gotbaum said. “Let’s get students
out of unacceptably large classes and make-shift classrooms and
ensure they have access to science labs, libraries and gymnasiums.
It’s unconscionable that in the greatest city in the world
we have hundreds of schools without auditoriums or libraries because
these spaces have to be used as classrooms.”
* * *
Planning
for Failure: How the Department of Education's Capital Plan Undermines
its Own Goals for Increasing Graduation Rates (March 2007)
(PDF)
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