Cuomo must stop punishing schools that serve high-needs students.

Over the weekend, Reginald Richardson, who writes an Education Watch column for the Bed-Stuy Patch online news site, addressed last week's school closing announcements, noting that the 19 schools listed to be closed deal with high-needs students.

"One of the things we became sensitive to is that there are large percentages of high-needs students in many of our suburban districts," he said.

Their distribution formula is almost obscene in the way that it favors wealthy districts at the expense of high-needs students.

Generally, there's a strong correlation between this ratio and the peer index - schools with more high-needs students have lower ratios.