If you have been following the news in the last month we now have another candidate for my "bad principals" posts. He is Leadership Academy Principal Steve Dorcely, with his only teaching experience as a substitute teacher before becoming an administrator. He runs one of the failing Bloomberg small schools at the Carnarsie campus. The school is called the "Urban Action Academy" with only 299students, a 60% graduation rate and only a minuscule 5% "college and career readiness"score. That metric is a 12.0 score and makes it a real diploma mill with little educational achievement (according to me a metric of 3 to 1 or less is required for a school to produce academically proficient students). Only two high schools in Queens have worse statistics than the "Urban Action Academy".
The Principal and one of his assistant principals have been accused of Regents cheating by staff and failed to seriously investigate a cyber hacking incident against one of the school's teachers. Instead the DOE's Office of Special Investigations will now do the investigation, when the Canarsie campus head of security notified his superior of the incomplete investigation by Mr. Dorcely of the cyber hacking incident. Interestingly, Principal Dorcely claims he now is doing the investigation himself and miraculously has now identified the two students who were involved in the cyber incident he previously claimed he was unable to identify.. Will the DOE allow this principal's self-serving phony investigation to continue? Past experience would seem to confirm that the DOE will hope the media attention will fade and its back to business as usual at the failing school.
As part of the accusations at the school, the Assistant Principal was to have alleged to have told teachers the following statement:
Teachers who try to stop students from cheating are discriminatingagainst them and should “back off”.
I guess the Urban Action Academy is just another academic fraud factory that graduates academically unprepared students. Is this what Chancellor Carmen Farina wants running our public schools?