Paul Robeson High School — soon to become P-Tech
Come this September Paul Robeson High School in Crown Heights will be no more. Slated for closure by the Department of Education (DOE), it will be replaced by a new public high school underwritten by tech giant IBM and other funders. To be known as Pathways in Technology Early College High School, or “P-Tech,” this first-of-its-kind alliance between Mayor Bloomberg’s DOE and a major multi-national corporation will be a new model for vocational education and public/private partnerships in the city’s school system. IBM will shape the curriculum for the school, provide funding for the infrastructure, and offer internship and mentoring programs for students.
P-Tech will also offer students the opportunity to take part in a four or six-year program at the school during which they can earn an associate degree in addition to a high school diploma. CUNY’s New York City College of Technology (City Tech) will partner with the school and offer the degrees at no cost to students.
Capital New York notes that the school plans to accommodate 600 students from grades 9 to 14 and will not screen prospective applicants, but will give preference to those who attend informational sessions. Although IBM likely has altruistic goals in attempting to improve science and technology education, CNY notes that Big Blue is also doing some basic calculations about its future workforce–
“The Fortune 50 company announced its plans last week shortly after the alarming release of a report from researchers at the Harvard Graduate School of Education noting that American educators are doing a dismal job of producing mid-skill workers to fill the kind of slots IBM has in abundance. In other words, no one is training future IBM employees.”
Whether its intentions are high-minded, self-serving, or a reasonable dose of both, it’s clear that IBM and school administrators will have their work cut out for them. In fact, twenty-five years ago Paul Robeson High School was itself a new experiment in technical education, created to replace yet another failing high school. Alexander Hamilton Vocational High School was deemed unsalvageable by the Board of Education and closed in 1984 because of poor attendance, high drop-out rates, and terrible test scores. In 1985 Paul Robeson High School was opened in the same building with new teachers, a new curriculum, and a new application process. But as the writers at The Brooklyn Ink recently reported, despite becoming a success story by the late 1990s and early 2000s, Paul Robeson High was negatively impacted by many of the educational reforms of the Bloomberg administration and took a turn for the worst. Their piece details the sad chain of events that led to Robeson High’s demise at a DOE hearing in early 2010.
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