What's it really like inside an overcrowded NY City high school?

June 17, 4:18 PMNY Education ExaminerLorri Giovinco-Harte

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Arthur Goldstein is a veteran ESL teacher who works at one of the city's highly performing high schools.  What is most interesting about the school is that it performs so well - not because of any reform efforts or support from the city, but rather in spite of the haphazard conditions that are constantly being placed on the school community.

Goldstein has written a guest post for Gotham Schools in which he describes what life is like teaching inside of a high performing high school where children are stuffed into overcrowded, temporary trailers and teachers attempt to teach despite high noise levels and other conditions which constantly impede student learning.

Goldstein's piece is poignant and brings a slightly tongue in look at the "miraculous" performance of the students and staff, despite conditions which would cause many to admit defeat and be labeled as "failing."  Here's a peek:

Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein are experts at wall-building. At A-rated Francis Lewis High School, we have 4450 kids in a building designed for 1800. Whenever anyone complains about overcrowding, more walls appear.

Most walls go up in the middle of classrooms. They magically transform one room into two. Unfortunately, with 34 kids in such a room. you get a haphazard pile of desks you have to climb over to sit in, and the only real beneficiaries are kids who’d otherwise have trouble copying their neighbors’ test papers. While this may improve test results, you also hear every word on the other side of the wall, which makes concentration quite a challenge. Some of these rooms have no ventilation, while others have windows that open directly to fragrant dumpsters.

Rugged individuals who hate walls can move out back the the full sized trailers. Sometimes they have heat, and sometimes they even have AC (but not always). Sometimes their bathrooms have soap, working faucets, functional water fountains, toilet paper, or paper towels (you can never predict which). In fact, some kids claim, wretched though our bathrooms are, they’re not as bad as student bathrooms in the main building. I find that hard to believe, though I’m a little afraid to go in and check. If it’s true,though, maybe we’re not so bad off as I thought. And there’s no denying they don’t build extra walls in the trailers.

Read the full post at Gotham Schools.