Charter School Parent Scripts Trash Joel Klein Management

One of the consistent themes at last night's PEP from many parents at Harlem Success and PAVE calling for choice was how BloomKlein managed public schools had failed their children, their other relatives and goodness knows who else. It is pretty funny to watch. One HSA parent, an entrepreneur/businesswoman told us about her awful zoned school when she was a kid growing up in Harlem, a school with a horrible principal. She moved back to Harlem and said the same principal was still there 20 years later. There were lots of signs saying "Don't reward failure." Did anyone see Moskowitz' emails to Klein trashing his management of the schools and calling for the kinds of changes that would improve schools for all kids, not just lottery winners?

Another theme was the talk about the number of people on the wait lists. So how come HSA has to send out glossy recruiting brochure after glossy recruiting brochure if there are so many people on the wait list? It's known as building false demand.

This has been on the sidebar of Ed Notes for a few weeks:

Upper West Side Parent Comment on HSA Mailings

Last school year, at a D3 CEC meeting, outraged parents brought with them the HSA mailing that featured photos of a peeling, worn public school door and a shiny, freshly painted charter school door; the text asked where the recipients would rather send their kids. I feel like that was the first HSA mailing that many of us received & it was so outrageous that I think I saved one. John White was at the meeting and didn't have much to say about HSA's 'message,' but when asked why public schools didn't get funds and assistance to do the same glossy PR, he promised the K-2 school under discussion that they would receive comparable DOE help marketing themselves (...that has, to my knowledge, not materialized). At a subsequent meeting, when the mailings kept coming, parents asked what list they were on and who exactly had access to their children's info. The CEC said that mailings were done by a service which printed labels with names of public school parent s/children in the zip codes the sender selected. We were told that the actual names and addresses never went to HSA but were affixed to the mailers by the mail house.

I have been receiving these mailings (in duplicate!) for two years in your friend's same zip code; I always send them back marked return/remove from mailing list, which of course never works. The latest came today: "Around here, every child is college material."