Physical Wreck
By ERIN EINHORN
New York Daily News
January 14th, 2007
School reformers in the 1990s were giddy with the promise of places like the School for the Physical City - an experiment in learning where students used city streets, bridges and architecture to study math, science, history and art.
Back then, the Murray Hill school was so celebrated that a top city education official described its small-school, family-like atmosphere - and such features as a rock climbing wall and a helicopter pilot program - as an "epiphany."
Fast forward to December 2006, as parents gathered in the school's now ragtag gym to respond to news that the 13-year-old school is one of five that city Education Department officials plan to close when current students graduate in 2010.
"I think this school is horrible!" fumed Carmen Cordovez, whose son Jeremy is a sophomore. "This is the worst school anybody could go to," she said, as other parents cried and students shook their heads.
Graduation rates have sunk below 50%. Violence at the school sparked the murder of a student last year, and applications are so low that many students are at the school only because they have no other choice.
"This school should have been closed already," said ninth-grader Gabriella Oliveira, 14.
At a time when city educrats are buoyantly embracing small, theme-based academies as the answer to problems plaguing large, urban high schools, the story of Physical City is a cautionary tale.
"It really goes to show how fragile these schools are," said Diane Ravitch, an education historian at New York University. "So many of these schools are dependent on one person with a big idea who brings people together, but they don't survive when that person leaves."
Physical City was the brain child of innovative, charismatic educator Mark Weiss, who brought in the Cooper Union Infrastructure Institute and Outward Bound as partners. When Weiss left in 2000, people familiar with the school say it started to fade. The partners say the new principal didn't return their calls. Soon, many teachers moved on.
It's a lesson not lost on the school officials who've created more than 200 small, theme-based high schools since 2002. "We have tried to learn from the Physical Cities of the world," said Garth Harries of the city's Office of New Schools.
Though there are many successes from the first big wave of small schools in the 1990s, including some of the city's top schools, Physical City is not the only failure. East Harlem's Urban Peace Academy is also slated to close.
Also on the Education Department's hit list are three large Brooklyn high schools: Lafayette in Bensonhurst, South Shore in Canarsie and Samuel J. Tilden in East Flatbush.
What's different today, Harries said, is that small schools are no longer isolated, experimental institutions whose schedules and budgets were once so different from other schools that they couldn't benefit from citywide resources.
Today, Harries' office exists almost entirely to address the needs of those schools, he said, and more school leaders have been trained to take over when a founder like Weiss departs.
Outward Bound is more significantly invested in the five schools it's part of today, said New York City Outward Bound Director Richard Stopol.
"One of the lessons we take from what happened with Physical City is that if we really are going to be the kind of partner we envisioned, we need to be involved in not only selecting the founding principal but anyone who succeeds him or her," Stopol said.
Supporters are confident that most of today's new schools will enjoy long-term success, but some who were disappointed by the early round are now skeptical.
"When you're starting so many schools at one time, you have very few people who are experienced with this kind of school," said Deborah Meier, an NYU professor who has watched as a school she founded, Central Park East Secondary School, has fallen on hard times. "The small school idea is a good one, but if we expect too much of it, it'll be another fad that comes and goes. People will rediscover the virtues of big schools."
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