Wednesday, March 10, 2010

NY1 Ad for Harlem Success Academy this morning!

From Steve Koss to NYCEDNEWS:

Wow, I am simply stunned! At 9:20 am on Wednesday, March 10, I watched a 15-20 second, voiced-over TV ad on NY1 for Eva Moskowitz's Harlem Success Academy.

I have never seen a TV ad for ANY school in NYC, public or private or charter. These people not only have no shame, they seem to have so much money they don't even know what to do with it. It's not only wasteful and (in my opinion) immoral to be buying TV advertising for elementary schools, it's just plain weird.

Why would a school that proudly proclaims its admissions even-handedness by lottery, which they and their supporters persistently insist is hugely oversubscribed, need to spend money on TV advertising? To get even more applications, so they can be even more oversubscribed and turn even more parents and children away? Or is that part of their "we need more charter schools" strategy? If so, who's really paying for this TV time? Couldn't whoever is behind this find a more socially useful way to use their money to benefit needy schools and children around NYC?

I am just sad and disgusted to see things come to this. Surprised the ad didn't feature Joel Klein as a talking head, doing a Slap Chop gig for Ms. Eva.

Geez, is it just me?

Steve Koss

Related: See today's NY Times piece on how Harlem public schools have to compete. But there's a fly in the ointment which I'll write about later.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

They run ads probably because they know about all of the ill-informed smears and misinformation being propagated by sites like this and others.

Anonymous said...

So many opponents of charter schools have never bothered to set foot inside of one. They take what they hear about charters from the old-school education crowd and then spread it around.

When was this golden age of public education that so many seem to long for?

Anonymous said...

Allow me to sidestep my usual Norm bashing to address the dim wit above.

Imbecile, let's see you make an argument that any money spent on a HSA commercial wouldn't have been better spent directly in the class room, let alone Eva using it to find her own space.

ed notes online said...

Don't you guys claim to have waiting lists? So why the ads? Better spend it by giving Eva another hundred grand. Or is that also a mistruth?

Wait til you see the video I have from today's forum on what former charter school parents have to say. Whammo!