SUNY Charter Authorizers

The background to this is that SUNY Charter shills who granted Success Academy's application for a school in Brooklyn's District 13 or 14 must now rule whether it is legal for Eva to change her mind and move it to more gentrified Cobble Hill where parents are rising in protest.

Before I go on I want to remind everyone that Pedro Noguera chairs the SUNY charter authorizing committee. He's probably ducking under a desk to avoid this hot cake.

This came across from Leonie:
Rossi of SUNY saying no issues in Success moving location of charter within Brooklyn. letter attached and here

https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B1_VhrOGX7IfYWVhYTI0MmUtZmEwMi00ODgwLWE5N2ItOTllMmJkOTc0YzU5

Then, amen, this came from Noah Gotbaum:

Let’s make sure that we are clear:  “SUNY” hasn’t Ok’d the move of Success Charter from Bed Stuy to Cobble Hill, a Vice President at the SUNY Charter Institute, whom the SUNY Trustees and the law recognize as “staff”, wrote a tortured opinion saying that he believes that Success is “not required” to get a charter amendment.  That SUNY CSI staff members -  whose explicit role is to promote charter schools, rather than to improve education in the state - have usurped the SUNY Trustees’ decision making, approval and oversight powers and turned them into nothing more than a rubber stamp, is an outrage.

Would suggest that rather than accepting Ralph Rossi and the SUNY CSI Charter Lobby as the law of the land, we instead ask/demand that Noguera, McCall and the other Trustees (as well as our legislators) come out of the closet and exercise their legal authority and responsibilities regarding charter schools in our communities.  Will they let stand CSI’s interpretation that a name change is material but a huge community/demographic change is not? (Noguera already said he would not).   Are the Trustees ok when they authorize charter schools explicitly to recruit, prioritize and educate ELL and “at risk” kids with the fewest educational options, and instead these schools end up ignoring those kids in order to cream skim the most involved parents and kids from our minority communities?  Or, as in the case of Upper West Success and now Success Academy Cobble Hill, when the SUNY authorized schools simply mock their charter guidelines and the law altogether, and instead proudly announce – with the DOE’s complicity - their new mission to provide middle class white communities with additional options and more “choice.”   

I live in hope that the SUNY Trustees – and the press – will investigate why the SUNY authorized Upper West Success Academy still hasn’t been able to fill almost 15% of its seats halfway into the new school year, or why the number of ELL’s test takers at all the Success Academy schools combined is fewer than the fingers on one of my hands, or why our co-located public schools have 10x the number of homeless students,  double the number of kids requiring free lunch, and an infinite number more of self contained special needs kids (Success Charter has zero).   What happened to claims in Success Charter’s applications touting increased options and prioritization of our most vulnerable kids, the world famous “transparent” and leveling lottery  system, the tens of thousands of applications and the “massive waiting lists” all driven by “huge demand” for “choice”?   

noah