I've been knocking people's hats off, or really, elbowing this one chick who stopped in the middle of the subway stairs to chat someone up at rush-hour and snarling at a couple of hot French dudes who tried to cut in front of me in the deli line. I'm not taking mess.

There's all manner of things to be upset about lately (Obama's approval rating [and overcaution], weather, birthday parties). Like this morning I saw one of several (spaced through the week for repeated pre-office weeping) reports on NY1 about the initiation of closing procedures at 20 New York public schools. Yesterday and today, the discussion turned to Paul Robeson High School in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, now officially scheduled for closing (meaning new enrollment will cease). In this segment from yesterday, you can get a notion of what a beautiful, old municipal building it is, as well as how much the interior, its halls and classrooms, appears to be like any other large, historic city school. It looks remarkably similar to my alma mater, Memphis Central.

I really really don't understand school closing. This defense, penned by a member of New York's BOE, makes the mandates no clearer. If the City intends to open new schools to replace the old ones, why/how will these new schools be better than revamped (new staff, security, etc.) versions of the old schools might be? Is this a matter of different zoning? Do the new schools simply exclude 'problem students,' those who are too far below reading level to graduate, those with difficult home lives--drug-addicted or incarcerated parents, young children of their own to care for--who struggle to graduate within the allotted four-year timeline used to judge schools' value/potency? Does the BOE consider the buildings haunted, cursed? Will they open the new schools in time to accommodate the present-day middle schoolers who were otherwise planning to matriculate at Robeson? If not, will there be a couple of years during which kids are attempting fruitlessly to enroll at already overflowing schools outside of their district?

This News article contains particularly bleak information about Robeson's variously insolvent student body.

The closing of schools, beyond its brutal resurfacing of cities, city blocks, city histories, seems to me to be a brutal attack on American young people, the most disadvantaged American young people. It's presented as a last ditch effort to restore good education to underserved areas, but clearly, through an accompanying clumsy bureaucratic process, a number of students (not to mention displaced teachers and administrators) will be (pun intended) left behind. Of course, these young people were "left behind" years ago, allowed to move unnoticed from grade to grade without promised knowledge imparted, without becoming literate or math-literate, history-literate. One could reach further back, expand the net, and note that students in closed schools live in our poorest neighborhoods, come from families rocked by deregulation (the resulting decline of the American working class), epidemic drug use and spikes in crime, seemingly unbreakable cycles begun decades before their birth, a cousin epidemic of parentlessness. The story of urban American school closings is essentially the story of the failed progressive agenda, the post-Johnson one step forward five steps back, the violence brought home from multiple fronts, the mess of having and not-having that grows wilder and wilder unchecked by any modicum of democratic-socialism (bank bailouts don't count). It's an out-and-out tragedy, a crime more like, an ultimate symptom of many-layered wrong-doing, a shirking of gravest responsibility, a shame shame shame.