But then he writes, “Closing one school, let alone forty-nine, is never a popular thing to do, and I took some serious flak for it. But in this case we had to. Yes, it potentially stressed the rest of the school system. But these concerns were overridden by the fact that these schools were consistently failing, and the students who attended them were trapped in that failure, with no prospect for improvement.” With this, he goes further than can be truly justified, and one wonders what the Big Bangah would think about the people in the sort of economically marginalized neighborhoods he inhabited losing their schools.