Seung Ok nailed the charter school movement for what it is in this post on the GEM blog. Some excerpts:
charter schools in NYC are not so much a solution for closing the achievement gap but a deceptive horse and pony show for another more ambitious agenda - and that is to convince us to privatize the whole public school system. Imagine a city where the law limiting the number of charter schools was removed. All those years of pent up frustration by privileged parents spending thousands for private schools can be released with one great sigh of relief. We will start to see mostly white charter schools arise in neighborhoods like the Upper West Side. Let's not forget how expensive real estate is in NYC. A public school building is a million dollar gift.
And a unique and surprising thing will happen. All that private money funneling into black and Latino charter schools will dry up. The money that once surprisingly made its way to Harlem and Brooklyn, will support the charter schools that the millionaires' and billionaires' children attend. There is a finite amount of private money - and it's just a matter of practicality to ration it out if charter schools litter the educational landscape; the donors must prioritize their wads of money, and human nature being what it is - they will fund their own neighborhood's charter schools than not.
So the fight to defend public education against charter schools, is more than about space, teacher unions, or a lottery system; it is to stop the manipulation of Black and Latino communities as chess pieces in a game to benefit the elite classes in our society. While the struggling parents in impoverished areas are positioned to fight each other for the scraps of space and funding that has been allotted by our society, the privileged lay waiting in the sidelines until all the energy is sapped out - and the doorway to unregulated access to taxpayer money opens.
So, where will Black and Latino communities find themselves - a place much worse than they were before. Their successful public schools having been decimated - closed and phased out, their struggling schools left overcrowded, and their abandoned charter schools left under funded - all destroying the gains made in the past several decades of hard earned work by so many stakeholders.Nice work Seung - he wrote this back in Feb. 2010.
Saturday's NY Times also nailed Eva Moskowitz for what she is all about in the long run: using public money to set up schools for rich people so they don't have to spend on private schools. I wonder if she will run them as test prep factories like HSA schools in Harlem because if people think they will be getting a Dalton-like progressive education they will be wrong.
What's it all about, Eva? Setting up separate and unequal segregated schools like they did in the south when schools were ordered integrated - what we knew charter to be about all along.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/22/nyregion/22charter.html
On Upper West Side, Hurdles for Charter School
Yana Paskova for The New York Times
Eva S. Moskowitz, who runs a network of charter schools, at the Harlem Success Academy.
By FERNANDA SANTOS
Published: January 21, 2011
The guests sipped wine and nibbled sushi, guacamole and Gruyère — lawyers, bankers, preschool teachers, managers and consultants of various kinds, bound by the anxious decision they must confront in the months ahead: where their 4-year-olds will go to school in the fall.Downstairs, a flier by the doorman’s desk had greeted them with a provocative question: “Why should you have to spend college tuition on kindergarten?” Back upstairs, in the stylish apartment on West 99th Street, Eva S. Moskowitz, a former City Council member who runs a network of charter schools in Harlem and the Bronx, delivered a tantalizing sales talk.Yana Paskova for The New York Times
Eva S. Moskowitz with parents at the Harlem Success Academy. At right, people on the Upper West Side listening to her talk about a charter school for the area.
I know we are keeping people hopping - and our rally on Thursday just off to the side of Tweed is an important one - I'll go into it in more detail in another post - but if you can make this rally against Moskowitz on Tuesday (5pm) followed by the public hearing at 6pm you may see a biggie - with many West Side activists jumping in - I can't make it due to wife B-Day - shhhhhh!
Download and circulate widely
http://www.scribd.com/full/47438042?access_key=key-2cku4dm6gl9p5wg1q6g2
Jan. 25, 5PM: Rally to Stop Moskowitz/HSA Invasion on Upper West Side
Subject: We need your support- ASAP!!!!
Hello All-
I am writing to you to ask for your support. As some of you may know, my school, and many others have faced serious repercussions from being sited in a location desired by the Success Charter Network. In my school alone, community students have been coerced and forced out- through multi-million dollar marketing campaigns, Department of Education pressure, truncating of the school community through forcible erasure of Pre-Kindergarten classes as well as all middle school grades, as well as gentrification. We have been wrongly accused of being a failing school- despite much evidence to the contrary- including recognition of successful progress (in the top 10%) during the 2008-2009 school year. We have lost valuable classroom space, forcing our students to be placed in basement rooms and loss of our Art Studio. We have limited access to the cafeteria, auditorium, gymnasium, and school yard. Everything that we have known has been turned upside down. In the past year, Success Charter Network has gone after many other schools, claiming space as their own despite total lack of community support. In fact, to the contrary- all affected communities have unanimously fought against this co-location- only to have their voices ignored- the co-locations occurred regardless. We have had to add new skills to our repertoires and new hats to our job descriptions in order to hang on to what our students deserve and should have equal rights to. We have forged new coalitions and are determined to stop this from happening to any more school communities. While we still need help to maintain our own viability- we hope to be able to stop this from happening elsewhere. District 3 schools are still under fire as the Success Charter Network (servicing students from all five boroughs by lottery) is looking to expand into the Brandeis High School building- a building currently housing four small growing high schools and constantly threatening to forcibly come into others (PS 145, PS 165, Wadleigh, etc.).
Help us by signing our online petition and asking others to do the same. District 3 has good schools, and a strong community. We do not have enough space for the students who live in the community as evidenced by severe overcrowding and many school with Kindergarten wait-lists. We have a multimillion dollar federal grant that is supporting schools in the northern part of the district to make serious changes to become available to lesson the load of the southern portion. We need all the space we have in our current schools to accomodate our growing population and support our new, growing magnet schools.
Please sign on, and tell others....
http://www.change.org/petitions/view/stop_the_co-location_of_success_academy_charter_school_in_the_brandeis_high_school_building
Thank you!!!!
Location, location, location.
ReplyDeleteIn addition to siphoning off public dollars for private schools, it's also about taking over the public school infrastructure.
From NYCEdNews Listserve:
ReplyDeleteGreat post. But I don't believe the charter school promoters’ agenda is to convince us to privatize the whole public school system. Public schools must accept all children, including those with serious behavior issues. Charter schools might eventually -- given sufficiently large public subsidies-- accept and retain many more special ed and ELL kids that they do now. But the obligation to educate everyone is fundamentally at odds with the charter schools’ right to set their own rules: if that right means anything, it must mean the ability to exclude people who don't play by them. Hence, some part of the system must remain public, if only to accommodate the kids no charter school will keep-- although I wouldn't put it past our politicians to propose, and our mean-spirited electorate to agree, that we don't need to waste money trying to educate those kids.
Paola de Kock
I'd say we have the example of NoLa schools that illustrate Arne's principle of "Hurricane Katrina as ed reform" to back up Paola's point-
ReplyDeleteAccording to a May 2010 report by University of Minnesota Law School's Institute on Race & Poverty (IRP):
The study finds that the state-driven reorganization has created a “separate but unequal tiered system of schools” which sorts white students and a relatively small share of students of color into selective, high-performing schools, while steering the majority of low-income students of color to high-poverty, low-performing schools.
“In the new system, public schools operate under five distinct governance structures that serve different student populations: Orleans Parish School Board (OPSB) traditional public schools (which educate 7 percent of the city’s students); OPSB charter schools (20 percent); Recovery School District (RSD) traditional public schools (36 percent); RSD charter schools (34 percent); and Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE) charter schools (2 percent).”
“In 2009, 87 percent of all white students in the city attended an OPSB or BESE charter school, while only 18 percent of black students did so. In contrast, 75 percent of black students attended an RSD school (charter or traditional public) in 2009, compared to only 11 percent of white students.”
“Students of color were much more likely to attend a high‐poverty school than white students in these two sectors. For instance, in 2009, students of color in OPSB charter schools were nearly 12 times more likely to attend a high‐poverty OPSB school than white students.”
iisa Donlan
University of Minnesota Law School's Institute on Race & Poverty (IRP)
ReplyDeleteNew Orleans School Experiment Is Not Serving the Needs of All Students
05-20-2010
Baris Dawes
[May 19, 2010]—After Hurricane Katrina destroyed much of the public school infrastructure in New Orleans, Louisiana embarked on a massive effort to rebuild the entire New Orleans public school system, launching the nation’s most extensive charter school experiment. The goal was to provide a quality education to all New Orleans students, regardless of race, socioeconomic class, or where they live.
The University of Minnesota Law School's Institute on Race and Poverty (IRP) evaluated the success of the rebuilding efforts in a new study—The State of Public Schools In Post-Katrina New Orleans: The Challenge of Creating Equal Opportunity—which found that the rebuilt public school system fails to adequately provide equal educational opportunity to all New Orleans students.
The study finds that the state-driven reorganization has created a “separate but unequal tiered system of schools” which sorts white students and a relatively small share of students of color into selective, high-performing schools, while steering the majority of low-income students of color to high-poverty, low-performing schools.
The study also finds racial and economic segregation in the city and metropolitan area to be a continuing concern, still undermining the life chances and educational opportunities of low-income students and students of color. It documents that school choice in the form of charter schools does not by itself empower students of color to escape the negative consequences of segregation, especially when it leads them to racially-segregated, high-poverty, low-performing schools.
The IRP report details how the growing charter sector in New Orleans has undermined equality of opportunity in the city’s schools by directly selecting their students (through selective admission requirements in the case of Orleans Parish School Board- and Board of Elementary and Secondary Education-run charter sectors) and by skimming the most motivated students (through their enrollment strategies, discipline and expulsion practices, transportation policies, location decisions, and marketing and recruitment efforts in the case of Recovery School District-run charters). The report shows that school performance varies significantly across five sectors, and not so much by charter versus traditional schools, because schools in each sector have different abilities to select their students.
The report criticizes the single-strategy approach that exclusively relies on the expansion of the charter sector, recommending instead a multi-pronged strategy which expands school choice on a regional basis. It calls for a more balanced, regional approach to public education, including a renewed commitment to the city’s traditional public schools and enhanced choices for students in the form of regional magnet schools and new inter-district programs.
The study was commissioned by the Loyola Institute for Quality and Equity in Education in New Orleans. A copy of the report's executive summary can be found on the Institute's Web site, at (http://www.irpumn.org/).
The University of Minnesota Law School's Institute on Race & Poverty (IRP) investigates ways that policies and practices disproportionately affect people of color and the disadvantaged. The IRP works to ensure that people have equal access to opportunity, and to help areas to develop in ways that will promote access to opportunity and maintain regional stability. Please visit the Institute's Web site, at http://www.irpumn.org/
Lisa