Shut and open case

School closures — the great bugaboo of the United Federation of Teachers and New York’s Democratic political establishment — have been a historic benefit to tens of thousands of the city’s high school students. The city must continue to shutter failure factories.

As Gov. Cuomo said last month, “There is going to have to be a death penalty for failing schools.”

The wisdom of putting the worst schools out of their misery leaps from the pages of a study into the results of the Bloomberg administration’s most aggressive program of starting schools from scratch — with new administration, staff and curriculum designed in collaboration with experts and community leaders.

In 2002, the Department of Education targeted 31 large failing high schools. All of them bore familiar names, deep ties as local institutions and records of horrendous performance. Chancellor Dennis Walcott recalled the nightmares that these places were in a recent speech whose facts seem impossible to comprehend a little more than a decade later.

Here are a few of the long-accepted graduation rates: Morris High School in the Bronx, 31%; Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn, 32%; Samuel J. Tilden High School in Brooklyn, 43%. All were beset by disorder and violence.

“At Adlai Stevenson High School in the Bronx, gang fights in the late 1990s were so common that teachers regularly pulled down iron gates from the hallway ceilings to contain rioting,” Walcott recalled.

With student bodies running into the thousands — and entrenched personnel — the 31 worst high schools defied reform. Over a period of several years, the department shut them down and opened more than 200 much smaller schools, all founded by organizations that competed for the right to run them, designed them with community input, won administrative flexibility and formed relationships with the United Federation of Teachers.

MDRC, an education research group, has now determined the outcome. Researchers compared the high school careers of students who applied to the 200 schools and were admitted with the careers of students who applied and wound up at a broad range of other schools.

While high school graduation rates rose generally, they rose highest for those in the new small schools. The four-year graduation rate climbed to an average of 70.4% — almost 10 percentage points higher than high schools at large. More of their graduates won Regents diplomas than in other schools, and more of their graduates scored at least 75 on the English Regents, the level deemed necessary to succeed in college.

Despite such demonstrated success, Democratic mayoral candidate Bill de Blasio is among those who call for a moratorium on school closures. He argues that the Bloomberg administration moved too far, too fast in moving on a wider range of closings. Whatever incidental anecdotes he may cite to support his point, to halt closures is to halt one of the most effective tools of raising student achievement. The idea serves only the interests of the UFT, now in de Blasio’s corner.

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