Some Schools Grow and Suffer as System Favors the Small
By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN, NY TIMES, November 10, 2004

SENSELESS as the decision would ultimately seem, Lisandra Noboa actually chose to attend Washington Irving High School. That was back in the spring of 2001, when she was 13 years old and already intent on a career in fashion design. Lisandra had heard that Washington Irving offered a specialized program in the field, and that opportunity was worth the 45-minute subway trip from her home in the Kingsbridge section of the Bronx to the school just off Union Square in Lower Manhattan.

For a time her plan worked. Norma Kamali donated fabrics to Irving's fashion classes. Lisandra got a summer internship assisting designers at Lanawear. As a senior this year, she has begun preparing a portfolio of her work to apply to the Fashion Institute of Technology.

Something else has happened, though, during Lisandra's three years and two months at Washington Irving. The school, already several hundred students above its traditional capacity of 2,300 when she entered as a freshman, has swollen to more than 3,000. Many of those incoming students appear to be reluctant, even hostile transfers from other high schools that are being scaled back or shut down to accommodate new mini-schools.

Each morning Lisandra waits 20 minutes or more to pass through security into Irving. If the delay makes her late for the 8:20 start of first period, she must wait in the auditorium, losing out on an earth science course she needs for graduation credit. Even when she gets to class on time, the room is invariably packed, and she must trawl down the hall looking for an unclaimed desk and chair to haul from another room. Her art class, in which she is developing her portfolio, has run out of paint, pencils and erasers.

"It's changed drastically," Lisandra, who is 17, said of Irving. "You're always distracted. People running through the halls. Running from security. Disrespecting the teachers. When you're put into a school against your choice, I guess you don't care."

Last year, a teacher named Gregg Lundahl was summoned to a classroom where two girls had been fighting. By the time he arrived, the loser had already been taken bloody to the nurse. The winner stood holding a chunk of hair, yanked from her adversary's head. The battle, the teacher learned, had concerned the rights to a vacant chair.

What both Lisandra and Mr. Lundahl experienced was the result of a profound structural change in public education in New York City. In creating scores of new, smaller high schools, sometimes from the husks of older, conventional ones seen as failures, the Department of Education dispersed thousands of unexceptional or troubled students. Some of the remaining old-style high schools, like Washington Irving, have served as the catch basin of social engineering's detritus.

Department of Education officials dispute the perception and even the relevant numbers. Michele Cahill, senior counselor for educational policy, said that Irving's official capacity now is 2,772. Only 2,871 students have shown up at the school on any day this fall, she continued, and fewer than 2,300 were there yesterday. "We've worked hard with the principal on getting this enrollment," she added.

Still, Ms. Cahill acknowledged that traditional high schools like Irving had absorbed "students from the over-the-counter process who weren't already admitted to screened or specialized schools." Her account of a school within its enrollment limits simply does not square with the detailed descriptions offered by several Irving students and Mr. Lundahl or with documents attesting to oversized classes.

Which seems like a case of playing with fire. Washington Irving was a disproportionately violent place for years before Joel I. Klein became chancellor. Some of its students committed slashings, robberies, an attempted rape, and even hurled a stool out the window, hitting a pregnant woman on the street below.

Mr. Klein and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg deserve the credit for identifying Washington Irving last year as one of 12 "impact schools" in the city - that is, one of the dozen most violent - and stepping up security. By the account of students like Lisandra as well as Mr. Lundahl, the chapter leader of the teachers' union at the school, Washington Irving has grown calmer and safer since then.

Yet the question persists of why the mayor and the chancellor would allow more and more and more students to pour into a demonstrably volatile school. The answer, so far as one can discern a single answer, lies in the Department of Education's preference for new, small, niche high schools.

Two or three years ago, Mr. Lundahl said, Washington Irving began receiving an influx of unexpected students from Martin Luther King High School on the Upper West Side. More recently, Irving has been getting students from Seward Park High School on the Lower East Side.

The net result is that Irving has grown from 2,636 students in the fall of 2000 to 3,085 now. Seward Park, meanwhile, has fallen in enrollment from 2,100 students three years ago to 1,200 now in the building, as it has been broken apart into several mini-schools and a remnant of continuing juniors and seniors. Between fall 2000 and fall 2004, King went from 2,300 to 1,660, a vast majority of them in specialized mini-schools and programs.

THE subsequent overcrowding at Washington Irving means too few books, too few seats, and only 30 minutes a year for each student with a guidance counselor. Some pupils went two months without being assigned to required classes, Mr. Lundahl said. By late last week, the school still had several math classes of 41 when the official limit is 34, a special education class of 28 instead of 15, gym classes of 63 and 67 instead of 50.

Across the entire public school system in New York, the United Federation of Teachers brought union grievances this year for more than 11,000 cases of oversize classes; last year, the number was 8,700. While many of the cases have been resolved, the larger issue remains: The small-school movement in New York is creating a stark divide between winners and losers.

"If you don't have a special skill, if you don't have an obvious academic talent, if you don't fit into a mini-school's niche," Mr. Lundahl said, "then you go to high school nowhere in particular. And nowhere in particular is schools like Washington Irving. We're just stacking them in. If you want to make a high school fail, this is a self-fulfilling prophecy."

Email: sgfreedman@nytimes.com