As predicted, the PEP (Panel of Eight Mayoral Puppets plus borough appointees) voted to approve ten school closings and several co-locations and expansions of Success Academy Charters into public school space.
See video of the Caped Real Reformers (parents and teachers ) singing "What a Wonderful World it would be" and students at Metropolitan Corporate Academy, one of the schools being closed, perform, ""DOE don't care about us" at last night's PEP meeting. More video of the evening's events at NY1, including Chancellor Cathie Black's annoyed response to the vociferous crowd.
Some lyrics:
They don’t know how to teach history, they don’t know how to teach biology, They don’t know much about science books, they don’t know much about the cuts we took, but they do know how to close down schools, we’re fighting back you know that we’re not fools, What wonderful schools they could be.
They know a lot about charter schools, and that they think that merit pay is cool, ..Parents, teachers, students know there’s more They know there’s more than just test scores What wonderful schools these could be.
My comments last night:
Choice is not real choice if someone else’s child is being squeezed out into hallways, closets or basement rooms. Choice is not real choice if someone else’s child is being forced into larger classes or you are closing their school, against their will. Every time you close or co-locate a school you are creating more overcrowding and more disruption of someone else’s education. Every time you close or co-locate a school, you are undermining choices for all parents and their children, and imposing your own will on a community. Clearly the people whose lives are most affected oppose these proposed closing and co-locations. I urge you to listen to their choices, and to vote against these proposals.
The Community Board, the Community Education Council, the elected officials and parents all stand united against the co-location of Upper West Success charter in the Brandeis HS building.
Teachers and parents from other public schools that share space with Harlem Success Academies, the other charter schools in this chain run by Eva Moskowitz, explain how their kids have lost preK, art and music, as well as space for special services, with their children pushed into rooms in the basement.
I'm signing right up for this one. Ed Notes will take 2 – tables, Whitney. The check is in the mail. Leonie said:
Just like they’re gambling w/ kids lives; only $2,500 for a seat; only $20,000 for a table.
From: Whitney Tilson <wtilson@t2partnersllc.com> Date: October 19, 2010 1:54:14 PM EDT To: undisclosed-recipients:; Subject:Success Charter Network Poker Tournament in NYC tomorrow night
I hope you’ll join me tomorrow night at the 4th Annual Charity Poker Tournament in NYC to benefit the Success Charter Network, which was founded by my friends Eva Moskowitz, John Petry and Joel Greenblatt. I've been a supporter since Day 1 and I think that they are building one of the best school networks in the country.
I've attended this event for the last four years and I am certain that in addition to being an incredibly worthy cause, it will be a lot fun and there will be great networking among New York’s top investors.
It’s at the W Hotel on 49th and Lex. Cocktails start at 6:30pm and the Texas Hold’em Tournament starts at 7:30pm.
It’s almost sold out (there are only 7 seats left for poker and 15 for cocktails), so if you’d like to come, please register at: www.scnschools.org/events/poker10
I hope to see you there!
AFTER BURN New developments on the upper west side since yesterday's blog -
Pedro Noguera, who all too any view as one of the good guys, voted to grant the charter to HSA.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
O'DONNELL URGES REJECTION OF SUCCESS ACADEMY CHARTER APPLICATION
DEMANDS TRANSPARENCY IN CHARTER SCHOOL REVIEW PROCESS
October 19, 2010 – Today, in a letter to the Executive Director of the SUNY Charter Schools Institute, Assembly Member Daniel O'Donnell strongly condemned a new charter school application and called for its immediate rejection.
The application, submitted by the Success Academy charter school network, requests approval of a new charter school to be sited on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in Community School District 3. However, it does not specify a proposed location within District 3.
In his letter, O'Donnell noted, "New York State Education Law §2853(3) states that in New York City 'all charters authorized…shall be obligated to comply with the department's health, safety and sanitary requirements applicable to facilities to the same extent as non-charter public schools in such city school district.'"
O'Donnell continued, "Clearly, it is impossible to ensure that these requirements are satisfied if siting information is not included in the charter application. Requiring that applicants supply location details would ameliorate a currently unacceptable situation: that after charter approval, parents in the existing school community and those of potential charter enrollees currently have no mechanism at the State level to address negative impacts on children's safety, sanitation, or health."
O'Donnell also stressed the issue of space in the District's schools, discussing the severe overcrowding experienced by Community School District 3 for the last several years and the fact that many of the children who live in District 3 are presently on waiting lists for their zoned schools. He added, “Families who make up the community in which any proposed charter school would be located deserve an opportunity to be part of the conversation.”
O'Donnell concluded by calling upon the SUNY Charter Schools Institute to reject the application until specific school siting information is included, transparency is improved, and community input is increased.
resolution and memo signed by Noguera to approve success academy etc. and summary of community comments
Leonie: Interestingly, they do not mention the CSM comments that I submitted days ago on either of these schools.
Resolution: Approval of Proposal to Establish the Bronx Success Academy Charter School 3 (Bronx) (PDF) (TXT)Bronx Success Academy Summary of Findings & Recommendations (PDF) (TXT)Resolution: Approval of Proposal to Establish the Success Academy Charter School (Manhattan) (PDF) (TXT)Manhattan Success Academy Summary of Findings & Recommendations (PDF) (TXT)Summary of Community Comments (PDF) (TXT)Resolution: Programs at the Southampton Campus of the Stony Brook University (PDF) (TXT)
"What’s particularly disgusting is the way she is using DOE’s own negligence to build enough seats as a way to recruit parents." - Leonie Haimson
"About 92% of the third- and fourth-graders who attend Harlem Success Academy I passed the state math and English tests, making it the top-performing nonselective school in District 3 this year, according to a Harlem Success spokeswoman, Jenny Sedlis.- The Wall Street Journal
Please Join Assemblyman Danny O'Donnell, Council Member Gale Brewer, Other Elected Officials, Community and School Representatives, and District 3 Parents at a Press Conference Today, 10/19 at 3:45 pm at PS 145 (150 West 105th between Amsterdam and Columbus) to Reject the Success Charter Network's "Upper West Success" Application and Instead Improve the Prospects of All of Our District 3 Schools
Currently, the SUNY Board of Trustees is considering an application submitted by Success Charter Networks for a new K-8 school to be co-located within a district school building within Community School District 3. Apparently, however, the legislated charter approval process and its public input component do not apply to Eva Moscowitz and her Success Charter Network Schools. While the SUNY Board of Trustees vote on her latest Success Charter network application has yet to take place (it is planned for tomorrow, 10/20), and no building location has been specified within her pending 1000+ page charter application, Ms. Moscowitz has picked out a public school building of her choice and already begun advertising her new "Upper West Success" school at bus stops on the Upper West Side and on a website.
Firstly, elementary school overcrowding has become endemic to District 3 and there is no room for the co-location of Success Charter school without increasing this already dire situation. Overcrowding predominates in the Southern portion of the district and given the level of new development in Harlem, such overcrowding is moving uptown. Unfortunately, SCA and DOE projections have continually underestimated this enrollment growth - and overestimated existing capacity - leading to increased overcrowding.
Yet even if we use the SCA's own projections for 2012 showing a capacity of 4,043 middle school and elementary school seats and projected enrollment of 3,745 students in Harlem, the 298 available seats the DOE show will not suffice for the proposed new school planned by Harlem Success. And these numbers assume that all the students in the new HSA school would come from District 3, which - unlike the strict in-district policy being imposed by the DOE on all of our D3 elementary and middle schools - is not even the case for Harlem Success who will be drawing students from a number of districts.
Steve Brill wrote a pro-charter article in the NY Times Magazine , comparing the results at PS 149 and HarlemSuccessAcademy, the charter school that shares its building. Brill implied that they served the same sort of students. These were his exact words: "Same building. Same community. Sometimes even the same parents."
Last week, Brill responded to online questions at EdWeek; one concerned the claims he made in his NY Times article:
Mr Brill, given the importance of these issues and the crisis in funding for public education today, I was troubled by the unbalanced nature of your recent NYT Magazine cover story. Specifically, Where was balanced discussion of conflicting research on the diversity of the charter school movement, showing that many charter schools - even in new york - underperform district schools; that charter schools enroll significantly smaller proportions of ELL and SPED students than district schools; and that some charter schools do counsel out students, in which cases declining cohorts of students correlate powerfully with increasing test scores? Where was serious discussion from experts on both sides of the education reform divide of the inadequacy of standardized testing as a metric for evaluating student and teacher performance? ....
This is how Brill responded:
The way i stepped through that debate was 1) to acknowledge clearly that not all charters schools are good for kids (didn't you see that statement?); and 2) to use a building that had two schools in it -- one a charter, one a traditional public school -- and compare expenses and results side by side. I labored over this, and think the comparison is valid FOR THOSE TWO schools. And taxpayers pay nothing extra for the school choice that these two schools provide, so i don't understand you statement that the government is using "valuable funding as a stick to spur undemocratic reforms." Choice is usually thought of as being pretty democratic. As for empirical evidence, one thing is clear, we keep spending more money than all other countries with worse results. And the charter i spent time examining spends less with better results.
First of all, nowhere in his article or the above is it mentioned that Eva Moskowitz raises millions of dollars for her schools. According to this spreadsheet, she raised $2.4 million for her four charters in 2009, and pays herself a very hefty salary.
Secondly, it is clear that Steve Brill still hasn't learned a thing.
Numerous blogs have shown since the publication of his article that these two schools have widely different student populations.
Apparently, Brill is impervious to correction, with PS 149 serving many more poor students, five times the percent of LEP students, twice as many seriously disabled students, and ten times the number of homeless.
Taking a closer look at the state report cards, I also examined the data relating to teachers and staff:
TEACHER CHARACTERISTICS
2008-9
PS 149
HarlemSuccessAcademy
teacher turnover (2007-8)
22%
50%
total no. of teachers
41
27
% no valid certificate
10%
15%
% teaching out of certification
29%
15%
% <3yrs.exp.
20%
30%
% classes by teachers w/out appr. certificate
27%
18%
total no. of other professional staff
7
26
What’s so interesting about this? HSA had twice the teacher attrition than PS 149 in 2007-8 (the latest available data); with fully half of all teachers turning over that year.
This is not the sign of a good working (or learning) environment. Apparently as a result of this high level of attrition, 30% of HSA teachers had less than 3 years experience in 2008-9– compared to 20% at PS 149.
I’m not all that interested in the comparative figures as regards teacher certification; as there is little convincing research to show that this matters. But the comparative data on “other professional staff” is quite striking: HSA had 27 teachers and 26 other “professional staff” in 2008-9.
Compare that with 41 teachers at PS 149, with only 7 other professional staff. I don't know who all these other “professionals” are, whether they are administrators, fundraisers, PR flacks, or people who actually provide instruction or services to kids; but so little proportional investment in classroom teachers seems to me an indication of poor educational priorities.
The Sunday Times magazine has posted a blatant piece of propaganda, in the form of one of the most inaccurate and biased articles I have ever seen. It is written by Steve Brill, who did an unfair piece for the New Yorker on the rubber rooms. It seems as though one can make a pretty decent career now in hack journalism, as long as you attack the UFT.
The article blames all our educational problems on the union (as usual); doesn’t mention any of the controversial charter co-locations that are squeezing space from our regular public schools; doesn’t mention any of the myriad charter school financial scandals, or their abuse of student and parent rights; omits any reference to the ongoing (and inexcusable) opposition of the charter school industry to audits, and manages to leave out the fact that it is the hedge fund operators who with their millions of dollars in campaign contributions are driving these policies.
Apart for the sole exception Michael Mulgrew, Brill somehow got around to interviewing only members of the pro-privatization crowd.
Most blatantly inaccurate is Brill's claim that the students at PS 149 are the same as the students at the co-located Harlem Success Academy:
P.S. 149 is rated by the city as doing comparatively well in terms of student achievement and has improved since Mayor Michael Bloomberg took over the city’s schools in 2002 and appointed Joel Klein as chancellor. Nonetheless, its students are performing significantly behind the charter kids on the other side of the wall. To take one representative example, 51 percent of the third-grade students in the public school last year were reading at grade level, 49 percent were reading below grade level and none were reading above. In the charter, 72 percent were at grade level, 5 percent were reading below level and 23 percent were reading above level. In math, the charter third graders tied for top performing school in the state, surpassing such high-end public school districts as Scarsdale.
Same building. Same community. Sometimes even the same parents.
Here Brill is parroting Eva Moskowitz, who in the far better NY Magazine article claimed that the children in the other nearby schools “are the same kids we have.”
Really? Twenty percent of the kids at PS 149 are special education students; and 40 percent of these are in self-contained classes, the most severely disabled. Eighty one percent are poor enough to receive free lunch, and 13 percent are English Language Learners. In 2008 (the latest available data) more than 10 percent were homeless.
Compare this with the charter school. Instead of 81% free lunch, 49% of the students at Harlem Success Academy are poor --a difference of 32 percentage points. (CORRECTION: though the data on this are inconsistent, the state report card says that there were 67% free lunch students at PS 149; still a difference of nearly twenty percentage points.)
There are only 2 percent English Language Learners at the charter school; compared to 13 percent at PS 149 --more than six times as many.
HSA claims to have 16.9 percent special education students, compared to 20 percent at PS 149, and even then, few if any of the HSA students are the most severely disabled.
I can't find data on how many students at HSA are homeless, but according to Diane Ravitch, only about 100 of the 50,000 homeless kids in NYC public schools are enrolled in charters.
(UPDATE: I found this overall figure confirmed in this InsideSchools analysis ; as well as a chart showing that HSA had only three homeless students in the 2008-9 school year, less than one percent -- compared to PS 149's 10 percent.)
The Times article also ignores the rampant counseling out of high needs students out at the HSA schools; so common as to be widely reported in the press, including in the New York Magazine article, which included the following statement from a HSA teacher;
At her school alone, the Harlem Success teacher says, at least half a dozen lower-grade children who were eligible for IEPs have been withdrawn this school year. If this account were to reflect a pattern, Moskowitz’s network would be effectively winnowing students before third grade, the year state testing begins. “The easiest and fastest way to improve your test scores,” observes a DoE principal in Brooklyn, “is to get higher-performing students into your school.” And to get the lower-performing students out.
This far superior New York magazine article received over 240 comments, many of them from former teachers and parents at HSA, writing about the overwhelming predominance of test prep and the large number of students pushed out or counseled out of the school.
The fact that Steven Brill and his editors at the Times didn’t attempt to provide any accurate data or a less biased depiction of this issue is not just shocking; it represents journalistic malpractice.
The rapid expansion of charter schools is leading to our public schools becoming more concentrated with high needs students, while taking away valuable funds and space from our public school system, at a time when already their budgets have been slashed to the bone.
Do we need more privatization and more profit making off our students? Should the guys who brought our financial system to the ground also be allowed to undermine our public education system ?
Be sure to check out Juan Gonzalez’s Friday's column where he revealed the smoking gun of emails, showing how Eva Moskowitz asked Klein to close two neighborhood zoned elementary schools in Harlem, PS 194 and PS 241, so that her charter schools could take their place.
Less than two months later, Klein announced plans to phase out those schools and use the space for two Harlem Success academies on the pretext that both schools were "failing"; yet both of them got "A's" at the end of the year.
Don’t forget to read all the emails on the News website – full of fascinating nuggets about the battles for space; also discussed are Bill Clinton, Al Sharpton and how Eva persuaded Klein to change DOE policy in order to provide her with the addresses of parents through mailing houses so she could saturate them with her mailings and recruiting efforts.
As she writes Klein at one point, "the decisions that have to be made are are political. Deciding on merits of quality of school and space allocations per pupil is in our system political."
Absolutely. And in every case, his decisions were politically based.
The emails also show how Moskowitz even now trying to engineer her schools' expansion into preK and get double the state funding for it – even though state law officially disallows charters to provide preK. Meanwhile, the DOE has cut back on preK in several Harlem public schools to give the space for charters!
FYI, anyone can FOIL the emails themselves sent between charter school operators and the DOE. It would be instructive to read them all. I imagine much of Klein’s time is taken up by agreeing to the aggressive demands of these privatizers. READ them for yourself.
Below see an excerpt from Democracy Now, where Juan Gonzalez talks about how he fought DOE for eight months to obtain these emails:
