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NEW YORK, NY March 14, 2005 —New York City parents and educators have long suspected that students with the greatest needs are being concentrated in the worst public high schools.

An investigation by WNYC News finds special education students and English Language Learners are, in fact, over-represented in the city’s most violent and failing schools. At the same time, special ed kids are missing out one of the city’s leading education reforms – the creation of new small schools. WNYC’s Beth Fertig has more.

Adlai Stevenson High School in the Bronx is one of the most violent high schools in New York City. When classes get out in the afternoon, police cars are already in place surrounding the block-long building. Tenth Grader Katherine Guance is used to seeing officers inside as well.

GUANCE: It feels like a precinct first of all, when you walk in there’s all the cops. And I think they’re trying to make the school safer because there’s a lot of fights, a lot of conflicts between the students.

The police presence at Stevenson isn’t the only thing that distinguishes it. Of the 2500 students there, almost 22 percent are classified as needing special education services. That’s nearly twice the citywide average for high schools. Special ed kids are those with learning disabilities, attention deficit disorders, or emotional issues. This longtime special education teacher at Stevenson declined to give her name.

TEACHER: The children that I service are in – major need of basic skills programs. Life skills programs. I’m talking about kids that are at or below the second grade level in reading and math.

Educators say a disruptive or low performing school may be the worst environment for a special ed student. Yet, an investigation by WNYC News found that in these schools, special ed kids and English Language learners actually make up a disproportionately large share of the students.

While special ed kids make up 12 percent of the high school population citywide, they make up 17 percent of students at violent schools. And they’re 18 percent at schools the state says are failing. The numbers are similar for English language learners.

Alberto Bursztyn, is an associate professor of education and school psychology at Brooklyn College. He says these high concentrations create a vicious cycle for students who are already vulnerable.

BURSZTYN: That student will not have access to good education because that student is one that would need additional attention, would need more structure, would need a more predictable kind of school environment.

Using freedom of information laws, WNYC obtained fall enrollment data for the 278 academic high schools that enroll more than a quarter of a million students. Our focus was on regular high schools that students would attend after 8th grade. So we left out specialized schools and programs such as those for kids who are over-age, have more severe disabilities, or are in jail.

School officials say our findings aren’t surprising. Eric Nadelstern is a Chief Academic Officer at the Education Department.

NADELSTERN: I think in large measure what your numbers reveal is that historically for a matter of decades, academic comprehensive zoned neighborhood high schools have attracted a higher percentage of special needs kids than other schools in the system.

The large neighborhood high schools tend to be the ones with the most problems. They’re also the schools with more space for special ed and language programs. One might conclude that it’s these kids who are driving down school performance. But that’s not the case, according to several experts we spoke to - including people at the department of education. Instead, they say the schools are simply failing to serve most students. So the city is creating alternatives.

One solution has been to replace many of these failing schools with smaller, more personal high schools. Sometimes in the same buildings. About 75 have opened in the past few years with the help of outside funding. Nadelstern is leading the effort to open these schools and says they’re providing new options that can be more successful.

NADELSTERN: The trend line we’re convinced is toward greater educational opportunity for students in greatest need of those opportunities.

But that hasn’t happened yet. WNYC’s analysis also found special education students are under-represented in the small new schools. In fact, they’re half as likely as other students to attend them. And they’re 50 percent more likely to attend violent and failing schools.

TEACHER: So what do you think? What’s wrong with that? KID: The comma. TEACHER: Good. There’s no comma between.

At the Brooklyn Academy of Science and the Environment, special education students go to classes with everyone else but get extra attention. The Academy is one of four small schools that have opened inside Prospect Heights High School – a large, low performing school scheduled to shut down. Ten percent of the students at the larger school are classified as special education – about the citywide average. Yet, at the smaller Academy inside their enrollment is just about 5 percent.

Academy Principal, Veronica Peterson, says those low numbers weren’t by choice.

PETERSON: I really wanted special education students.

But Peterson says admissions were driven largely by which schools the students applied to. She believes most parents didn’t know about her academy when it opened in 2003 with a hundred students. As a small school, she also didn’t have a dedicated special education teacher until last fall. Before then she shared one with the other schools in her building.

PETERSON: I did not have the funds to support the kind of structure that I have right this minute. The special ed teacher, the after school learning support center, all of the things that are in place right now it took conscious planning and sacrifice.

Now that her school has grown, she says, she’s taking more special ed students - including those who need more services. But the teachers union says the small schools should have been ready for those kids right from the start. Carmen Alvarez is vice president for special education at the United Federation of Teachers, which has pushed the Education Department to put more special ed teachers in small schools.

ALVAREZ: They knowingly have said we don’t hire special ed teachers. Specifically for the first year. You would never start up a new school without an English teacher or a math teacher. But they would start up a new school without a special education teacher and the related services that these young people may need.

Alvarez wonders if the Bloomberg administration is deliberately enrolling fewer special ed students because they might drive down test scores in an election year. But those who work with the schools dispute that. They note that most students who go to the small schools represent their surrounding communities, and haven’t traditionally been successful students. That’s why they see the new schools as fragile educational ecosystems. Eric Nadelstern of the Education Department says they need time to flourish.

NADELSTERN: There’s a critical mass of staff resources and students required to offer comprehensive services to either English language learners or special ed students.

As the schools grow, he says, with more teachers and resources, they’re supposed to take a larger proportion of special ed students by their third year. That has happened in some places. The New Explorers High School in the South Bronx opened three years ago and 20 percent of its students are classified as special education – far more than the citywide average. The principal says most of those kids are passing their classes.

For some, that success bolsters the argument that small schools can and should be doing more to help students with high needs. Jill Chaifetz is executive director of Advocates for Children.

CHAIFETZ: These aren’t kids who should be put somewhere else and dealt with at a later time. They’re kids just like every kid who needs to get an education and so you need to figure out – and by you meaning the school – how you’re going to serve them not later on but immediately.

But right now it’s clear that many of these students will have to wait. For WNYC I’m Beth Fertig.