Replacing Smith Career & Tech H.S. with...what???

Bloomberg/Klein continue their loot/pillage/burn approach to school reform with the planned closing of the city's oldest and well-established trade and technical school. According to today's NYT, the DOE will close Alfred E. Smith Career and Technical Education High School, a 78-year-old vocational school in the South Bronx and replace it with another charter school with no record of success, this one run by indicted embezzler Richard Izquierdo Arroyo.

But the school the Department of Education plans to put in place of the program, the 18-month-old New York City Charter High School for Architecture, Engineering and Construction Industries, has had its own issues. Its founder is facing federal charges that he embezzled from a nonprofit company. Thirty percent of the students left after the first year, as did most of the teachers. And despite its name, it has no experience running hands-on vocational programs.