If you’re looking for proof that teachers unions don’t care about the interests of schoolchildren, you can find it in the impoverished Bronx neighborhood of Soundview. A school building on Beach Avenue has been shuttered for almost a decade, and the United Federation of Teachers is suing to keep it closed.
On Aug. 22, a new charter high school, Vertex Academies, will begin classes here. In the local school district, only 7% of students who enter ninth grade are ready for college four years later. For black students, the figure is 4%. The new school promises to deliver “a high-quality education to 150 minority students from low-income backgrounds” in its first year, says founding principal Joyanet Mangual.
Vertex will use the premises of the defunct Blessed Sacrament School, where Sonia Sotomayor was valedictorian in 1968. When the school shut down in 2013, the justice declared herself “heartbroken.” Her mother had scrimped and saved to send her there: “She watched what happened to my cousins in public school, and worried if we went there, we might not get out,” Justice Sotomayor told the New York Times.