NYC-Feature Story

Is Your School Pushing You Out?

By New Youth Connections with reporting by Rumonat Akinlolu

The only thing Roger H. learned on his first day of 9th grade in 2004 was that his high school didn’t want him around. Administrators at Boys and Girls High School in Brooklyn wouldn’t let the 16-year-old enroll in any classes; they told him they were transferring him to a program for disruptive students. When his mom objected, they reluctantly allowed Roger to come to school—but only for three hours a day. With his new schedule, he soon realized he was never going to graduate.

Although he didn’t know it at the time, Roger was among thousands of students effectively pushed out of their high schools all around the city. Through a variety of strategies, some principals and guidance counselors find ways to force students with the lowest grades and worst behavior out of their schools.

However, in a series of class action lawsuits, Roger and many other students pushed back. With the help of Advocates for Children of New York (AFC), a nonprofit organization, a handful of teens at Boys and Girls, Bushwick, Franklin K. Lane, and Martin Luther King, Jr. high schools sued the city’s Department of Education (DoE). In the process, they exposed the widespread—and illegal—practices of schools desperate to improve their test scores and graduation rates by any means possible. (New Youth Connections learned about this and other cases by reading court briefs and talking to staff at AFC; Roger did not respond to requests for comment.)

A Numbers Game

Mayor Michael Bloomberg has been in charge of New York City’s public school system since 2002, when he successfully lobbied to have the city’s Board of Ed replaced with a Department of Education controlled by the mayor. He promised to reform the city’s education system, in part by tracking the performance of schools and teachers.

Since then, schools with bad test scores, lots of dropouts, or too many failing or “over-age” students (kids who may take five, six, or seven years to graduate) are likely to be shut down. There’s a lot to be said for such accountability, but Rebecca Shore, an AFC lawyer, said it can present its own hazards.

When a school is bogged down by struggling students, “they feel like their reputation is on the line,” Shore said.

“If a student is not doing well on all of the standardized testing and it doesn’t look like the student is going to graduate, all of that goes to the school’s rating. So the school has a somewhat frightening incentive to push these students out,” she said.

Asked about the pressure schools face, DoE spokesperson Marge Feinberg said in an e-mail that the department gives schools the “training and tools they need to help students succeed.” But that success, in the end, is up to schools themselves. “In the last eight years, the DoE has given principals more power over their budgets and personnel, and in exchange we require more accountability and improved student performance,” she said.

It seems that, for at least some schools, it was exactly that pressure to boost performance that motivated illegal action.

The Complaints Begin

In 2002, AFC began receiving complaints that many schools were, in fact, trying to push out the difficult-to-educate kids in an attempt to boost test scores and graduation rates. When lawyers investigated, they discovered that it was usually the kids needing the most support who were given the cold shoulder: immigrant students who were still struggling to learn a new language, as well as students with learning disabilities or special education needs. Students with behavior problems were also targeted.

Of course, schools cannot legally kick kids out for bad grades alone. So, rather than attempting to boost academic support for low-performing students, several high schools found creative ways to get the “bad” students off their rosters.

Set Up to Fail

At Boys and Girls High School, Roger, along with hundreds of his classmates, was put in the school’s “Attendance Academic Intervention Program,” which was nicknamed the “Auditorium Program.” According to AFC’s eventual legal complaint, the so-called “intervention” required students to hang out in the auditorium working on handouts for only a few hours each day before being sent home.

They received no textbooks and no credits for being in the program, and they weren’t allowed to take any regular classes. They were, essentially, set up to fail. As they fell further and further behind, many of the kids in the auditorium program simply stopped coming to school.

Other kids were turned away on the first day of school. For example, school administrators at Franklin K. Lane High School in Brooklyn told 16-year-old Gabriel R., an immigrant who was still learning English and had poor attendance, that he was no longer welcome there.

According to legal documents, Gabriel had been absent for three weeks in June, and when he returned to school in the fall, they refused to let him register for classes. School administrators told him to give up on his desire for a real diploma and enter a GED program instead.

Encouraged to Disappear

Similarly, the principal at Martin Luther King High School told a pregnant 15-year-old student with a poor academic and attendance record that “this is no place for pregnant people.” (She managed to transfer to an alternative school for teen moms.) Elsewhere, guidance counselors and principals pressured struggling students to transfer to one of the city’s “second chance” or “alternative” schools. Some tried to convince students that the other schools would be a better fit.

Another tactic was to tell students who had repeated grades they were “too old” or didn’t have enough credits to continue their education. That was the message given to a teen at Bushwick High who cut class regularly but who was on the swim team, yearbook staff, and dance committee, and was a mentor to abused children. He said school administrators and a 311 operator insisted he had too few credits and was too old to continue with school. But New York State law allows students up to 21 years old to attend high school.

Several schools apparently ignored that law because they knew their “over-age” students weren’t going to get their caps and gowns in four quick years. Schools didn’t want the hassle of supporting failing students, or the black mark of a low four-year graduation rate. Other students were pushed out for being troublemakers.

Pushing Back

When AFC investigated, they found that confusing school records made it difficult to tell who had been forced out and who had left of their own accord. But it was clear that students were disappearing from the rosters at an alarming rate.

They found that, in the 2000-2001 school year alone, more than 55,000 students left their high schools for various reasons. Some of those may have moved out of the city, transferred to private school, or dropped out willingly, but still, the number was staggering. “To give a sense of how large these numbers are, the entire graduating class of 2001 totaled 33,520 students,” an AFC report stated. That meant more kids were leaving the New York City school system than actually graduating.

Coupled with the complaints to AFC, and a big increase in teens enrolling in GED programs, it seemed clear that thousands of kids had been pushed out of the classroom. With data on their side, AFC filed several lawsuits on behalf of all the students who were pushed out. The DoE admitted in its answer to AFC’s legal complaint that Boys and Girls High School had students receiving less than five and a half hours of instruction, and that they placed students in the auditorium program.

Problem Solved?

Eventually, the city’s Department of Education settled each lawsuit out of court. It admitted no wrongdoing, but the schools named in the lawsuits agreed to let the excluded students return to school. The city also sent letters out informing hundreds of students of their right to stay in school until age 21. Feinberg, the DoE spokesperson, added that all students are given information packets that explain their rights in writing, and parents who believe their children are being pushed out can file complaints by calling 311.

In Roger’s old school, administrators agreed to additional changes. They got rid of the “auditorium program,” started a literacy program open to all students, and offered tutoring to current students. In addition, the DoE is paying for private tutoring, GED programs, and career services for students who were pushed out. (Asked whether any school officials have been fired or disciplined as a result of the numerous pushout allegations, Feinberg responded by telling NYC about a new online tool that allows parents to track the academic progress of their children.)

The settlement may be too little, too late for many. Shore estimates that between 2002 and 2008, 500 students were pushed out of Boys and Girls High School alone, but only about 60 of them are actually taking advantage of free tutoring.

And today, six years after Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein vowed to stop the widespread practice, it seems that some students are still being pushed out. “We are still hearing about it,” Shore said. “The complaints are still coming in.”

If you feel you’re being illegally pushed out of school:

• Ask for help: If you are having trouble in school with homework or tests, talk to your teachers and principal about getting help. You may have the right to free tutoring, counseling, or other services.

• Know your rights: In New York, students are allowed to attend high school until they turn 21.

• Find an advocate: Contact an organization that deals with students’ or children’s rights, like Advocates for Children (advocatesforchildren.org), and ask for help.

• Fight back: Tell your guidance counselor, principal, or other school administrator that you want to stay in school and have a right to do so. If they don’t listen, call the DoE’s office of enrollment and tell them what’s going on.

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