Noah Gotbaum: Bloomberg Pro-Charter Land Mines

Carmen should extend the public school application deadline, reinstate local school sign up, ensure that parents are guaranteed their local zoned school and kill this for next year. An on-line option is good, but it should just be an additional option, not a backdoor, 4th term way to install "choice" systems and charters. As important, Carmen should affirmatively kill the sweatheart deal which Joel Klein set up for Eva Moskowitz, and end charter schools' access to our kids' private info via Vanguard. Immediately.... Noah Gotbaum

The de Blasio administration on education is being made to look like a babe in the woods. Many of us involved in the weeds of the charter struggle full well have known what was going on - with the 2 pushed October PEP charter co-loco giveaways and the pre-k and kindergarten online scam forced registration for kids entering school for the first time. By taking away in-school registration designed to help the charters, they conspired to give charters a first crack at kids. Now it's Kindergarten Connect on-line registration for school that allows the DOE to turn over private data to charters.

We've written about the PAVE charter pre-k scam. 

See:

• This is new….The PAVE Pre-K contract is listed as ...
• May 31, 2013
• Yesterday we reported on the outrage of PAVE charter being handed 400 grand by Tweed to help them steal pre-k kids from the local public schools in Red Hook, which have had their requests to expand their own pre-k ...
• PAVE Charter Pre-School ScamJun 24, 2013 Yesterday we reported on the outrage of PAVE charter being handed 400 grand by Tweed to help them steal pre-k kids from the local public schools in Red Hook, which have had their requests to expand their own pre-k .
• NYCDOE Charter Hits Keep Coming on PAVE ...May 06, 2013 You see charters aren't supposed to have Pre-K. But if pre-k kids go to a great public school like PS 15 they won't want to leave to go to semi-dysfunctional PAVE. So PAVE is trying the oft-used ploy used by Eva's Success ...
• DOE Allows Charter Schools to Set Up Stealth Pre-K programs to ... May 30, 2013

Need I say, "where is the UFT?"

Noah Gotbaum from Community Education Council 3 comments:

Columbia Spectator calls out issues with the ideologically-driven new elementary enrollment system, Kindergarten Connect. Set up, haphazardly, in the final weeks of Bloomberg regime to take effect in first two weeks of deBlasio administration - with enormous repercussions going forward. Already paying dividends for the charters as they got their desperately wanted direct link to the public school applications.

The charters also now have, for the first time, immediate access to private information of every prospective K student since the K-connect system and contractor, Vanguard, collects the information centrally and turns around and immediately sells it for the charter schools direct mail marketing services. And now Vanguard has more than just names, addresses and grades; it is able to sell the charters the use of detailed, real time information about our kids personal traits and parent preference information, all of which K-Connect accumulates and Vanguard administers.

Little wonder then that charter applications are up and the lobby is crowing http://www.nyccharterschools.org/content/nearly-30000-applications-flood-online-portal. And applications will continue to rise since another feature of K-Connect was to truncate the public school timetable to close on February 14 - a full month sooner than last year. This will shut out many more public schools applicants who are now even easier pickings for charters, since they now have an extra 2 months prior to the formal charter applicaiton April deadline to use the K-Connect private data and recruit K parents out of the the public schools.

This K-connect boobytrap set up by Bloomberg, further serves to undermine de Blasio's Universal Pre-K plans by giving the charters phony ammunition of enormous demand which they then use to claim that they and not Universal Pre-K, should be funded. K-connect also undermines deBlasio's Community schools initiative by servering the enrollment and automatic placement connections
between entering K parents and their local community school, instead moving the process exclusively on-line or in "Borough Offices."

Carmen should extend the public school application deadline, reinstate local school sign up, ensure that parents are guaranteed their local zoned school and kill this for next year. An on-line option is good, but it should just be an additional option, not a backdoor, 4th term way to install "choice" systems and charters. As important, Carmen should affirmatively kill the sweatheart deal which Joel Klein set up for Eva Moskowitz, and end charter schools' access to our kids' private info via Vanguard. Immediately.

noah

noah eliot gotbaum
noah@gotbaum.com
twitter: @noahegotbaum