Parents Sue SUNY Over Charter Authorization

We are suing SUNY Charter School authorizers and the NYC DOE! The deadline to sign on to the lawsuit is SUNDAY! Please email williamsburggreenpointschools@gmail.com to get a copy of the Retainer form.

Here's the info:

WAGPOPS! parents are officially launching a lawsuit against the NYC DOE and SUNY regarding their approval of Citizens of the World Charter Schools for District 14 (Williamsburg, Greenpoint, parts of Bushwick and Bed Stuy). WAGPOPS! (Williamsburg and Greenpoint Parents: Our Public Schools!) is a grassroots of parents and community members across the district coming together to support our neighborhood public schools. WAGPOPS! believes in pressing the State Department of Education and the NYC DOE to support reforms that work for all of our schools, like small class size, funding arts, sports and after-school programs, expanding early childhood education, promoting policies that encourage parent engagement in our schools, and ending high stakes testing (at the bare minimum allowing parents to Opt Out with out punishing schools and teachers).

We believe that SUNY and the NYC DOE neglected the law when they disregarded evidence of the negative impact on our district when they approved Citizens of the World Charter Schools. The creation of new schools, including charter schools, is a part of city planning, and the impact on a district of any new school must be considered very seriously. District 14 elementary schools are profoundly under-enrolled (for example, PS110 must enroll 8 more students by 10/31 or give back $50K). Given the target demographics in Citizens of the World proposals, the presence of these schools, in particular, will reverse the trend towards de-segregating our neighborhood elementary schools and ensure that our segregated elementary schools remain segregated.

Please consider signing on to our lawsuit. Our neighborhood schools need all of our support. And see if you can get others to sign on too.

We need parents to fill out this retainer and fax it to: 646-349-2986 (Fax)

The DEADLINE IS SUNDAY!!!!

This lawsuit is designed to stop the Citizens of the World Charter Schools from opening in D14

PLEASE GET MORE PEOPLE TO SIGN ON TO THE LAWSUIT!!! We're aiming for the hundreds.

If you don't have access to a fax, PLEASE let me know so that I can get the retainer(s) from you.

Here's some information. WAGPOPS! is available to answer any question you may have as well.

- EACH parent fills out their own retainer (mothers and fathers can sign one separately)
- Only parents living in D14 can sign on. You CAN sign on if your child is not yet in school, is homeschooled, is in private school, or is in school out of district, as long as you live in D14.
- OR if you don't live in D14, but have a child in school in D14, you can sign on.
- PLEASE print your name and information clearly
- There is no charge for this suit. The lawyers are working for us pro bono. a They will be hosting a fundraiser separately. but there is no obligation to participate.

ALSO, the next WAGPOPS! (Williamsburg and Greenpoint Parents: Our Public Schools! meeting is on Monday, November 5th at 6:00pm in EST at Beacon Leadership Center at MS50 (183 South 3rd Street between Driggs and Roebling).

You can find out more about WAGPOPS! , "like" us at: http://www.facebook.com/WilliamsburgGreenpointParents

Here's a copy of the OpEd that gives background to these schools: http://thewgnews.com/2012/09/the-demise-of-public-education-mr-mrs-moskowitz-push-more-charters-on-williamburg/

THANKS SO MUCH!

Eva Gets Her Vig

Eva Moskowitz, who runs Harlem Success Academy, will get extra $650 per-student fee. Committee Chairman Joseph Belluck said a vote was not needed because SUNY trustees had recently authorized the staff of its Charter Schools Institute to approve any management fee increases for charter schools.  --- Daily News

Charter school fees get pricier
Moskowitz gets $650-per-pupil fee
By Glenn Blain AND Juan Gonzalez / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Monday, June 25, 2012, 10:17 PM

Eva Moskowitz, who runs Harlem Success Academy, will get extra $650 per-student fee.

STATE UNIVERSITY of New York officials on Monday granted a hefty fee increase to the charter school company run by former City Councilwoman Eva Moskowitz.

The SUNY Board’s Charter Schools Committee decided — without a vote — to allow Harlem Success Academy Charter Schools to increase its per-pupil fee from $1,350 to $2,000 to run charter schools in Harlem, the Bronx and Brooklyn.

Committee Chairman Joseph Belluck said a vote was not needed because SUNY trustees had recently authorized the staff of its Charter Schools Institute to approve any management fee increases for charter schools.

The fee increase will not cost taxpayers additional money, but rather give Moskowitz’s company a larger share of the state dollars already headed to the schools.

Cynthia Proctor, a spokeswoman for the Charter Schools Institute, said the request was approved after a “rigorous” review determined it would not harm the fiscal health of the schools.

Moskowitz has argued her network was running a financial “shortfall” and needed the fee increase to maintain its high level of service.

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/charter-school-fees-pricier-article-1.1102239#ixzz1yroE4aXP

Please sign and share far and wide!!

"NYS Governor Andrew Cuomo; SUNY Board of Trustees, NYS Board of Regents: Stop catering to Charter Schools and harming public school children.."

<https://www.change.org/petitions/nys-governor-andrew-cuomo-suny-board-of-trustees-nys-board-of-regents-stop-catering-to-charter-schools-and-harming-public-school-children>

Here are some pics I took. Video later.

The youngest protestor - Williamsburg/Greenpoint Parents for Public Ed

Success gets to meet privately with most of committee after meeting - video later

Citizen Charter supporter slugs

More slugs

Crimes and Misdemeanors: SUNY Board Expected to Give Eva Moskowitz Her 50% Increase in Vigorish in Vote Today

Vigorish, or simply the vig, also known as juice, the cut or the take, is the amount charged by a bookmaker, or bookie, for his services. In the United States it also means the interest on a shark's loan. The term is Yiddish slang originating from the Russian word for winnings, выигрыш vyigrysh.^[1] Bookmakers use this practice to make money on their wagers regardless of the outcome. -- Wikkipedia

[Success Academy Charter] spent"...more than $3.4 million spent on marketing and drumming up huge numbers of application forms - in just one year."

"On its annual tax forms, (Success) has continually reported huge year-end surpluses for both itself and its individual schools. Those combined surpluses currently stand at more $23.5 million" ------Juan Gonzalez, Daily News

In case you missed my fictional blog from yesterday, Eva Moskowitz Deals With Armageddon, what you read below is NOT fiction.


It's all about children/students/scholars first, except when it comes to getting your vig. I'm going to try to make the press conference. My theory is that the more they take the more people will get riled up. So let the criminals at the SUNY charter board allow Eva to get her 15%. Note the last item in Juan Gonzalez' column today:

As for the Success Academy's "extraordinary level of student achievement," that will be the subject of a future column.

Yeah, yeah, yeah!
Ravitch is also blogging about this: How Charter Schools Get a Bad Reputation

*MEDIA ADVISORY FOR MONDAY JUNE 25*

PARENTS, ADVOCATES TO PROTEST SUNY PLAN TO GIVE EVA MOSKOWITZ MILLIONS IN EXTRA FEES, EXPAND HER AND HER HUSBAND’S CHARTER NETWORKS

Urge SUNY and Governor Cuomo to Put the Millions She Wants Into Public Schools to Benefit ALL Kids

WHO: Parents, Community Members, Elected Officials, Activists from New York Communities for Change, Parents Leaders for Upper East Side Schools (PLUS)

WHAT: Rally and press conference outside SUNY’s Midtown building prior to rubber stamp SUNY vote that will give Moskowitz a 50% increase in management fees to cover her charter school network’s claimed annual “deficit” – even though the same network shows a surplus of $24 million and growing.

WHERE: SUNY College of Optometry. 33 W. 42nd St., between 5th and 6th avenues.

WHEN: 1 p.m. for rally and press conference. SUNY Board vote scheduled for 2 p.m.

WHY:  The additional millions in tax dollars Eva Moskowitz will get from raising her management fees will be siphoned directly from students and classroom budgets.  The increased fees will continue instead to pay Moskowitz and her team Wall Street level salaries, to pad her growing endowment/surplus, and to pay lobbyists and marketing consultants millions to denigrate our public schools as “failures” in order to construct demand and generate enough applications needed to feed the Success Charter corporation.  These tax dollars could be constructively used instead to provide real choice for all parents by investing in our public schools and ensuring that the 96% of students in those public schools have the same resources that Success Academies and most charters already have, i.e. smart boards in every room, useable science labs, renovated and accessible bathrooms, updated text books, adequate funding for special needs students, and smaller class sizes. 
 

Join parents today at press conference, protest against SUNY's vote to raise Eva's fees and use funds instead for our public schools. 33 w 42nd Press conference at 1; vote at 2. 

noah

noah e gotbaum

twitter: @noahegotbaum

Juan Gonzales in the Daily News

6.25.2012

Even in public education, the rich keep getting richer.
 
That's the message the trustees of the State University of New York will send Monday when they vote to approve a huge 50% increase in the per-pupil management fee of one of the city's wealthiest, biggest-spending and most controversial charter school operators.

The Success Academy Charter Schools Inc., run by former City Councilwoman Eva Moskowitz, applied in April for an increase from $1,350 to $2,000 in the annual per student payment it receives from the state to run 10 of its charter schools.

SUNY postponed the vote following a public outcry over the agency's failure to disclose any details beforehand.

Not until Friday morning did the agency finally release some documents to justify the increase.

Among them is a May 22 letter from Moskowitz that claims her network has been heavily subsidizing "shortfalls" in its management costs for years through outside donations and grants.

Those high costs have been a result, Moskowitz said, of a "quality and intensity of services that is far higher than nearly any other (charter operator) in New York City," yet she has continued to augment her services despite insufficient fees from the schools.

But with the "deficit ... increasing every year," Moskowitz says, "the current situation is simply unsustainable." In 2010-11 alone, she states, her network's "shortfall" reached $4.7 million.

This will all come as a huge surprise to anyone who has bothered to examine Success Academy's financial reports or who has witnessed firsthand its almost limitless spending .
The Success Network, in fact, is a fund-raising colossus, having received $28 million from dozens of foundations and wealthy investors the past six years, and millions more in state and federal grants.

On its annual tax forms, it has continually reported huge year-end surpluses for both itself and its individual schools. Those combined surpluses currently stand at more $23.5 million.
Hardly the picture of financial woe.

Last year alone, the network spent an astounding $883,119 on "student recruitment" - much of it for glossy flyers mailed to hundreds of thousands of parents; bus stop and Internet ads and an army of paid recruiters to go door-to-door soliciting student applications.
Even other charter schools rarely spend more than a few thousand dollars on student recruitment.

Meanwhile, Moskowitz's network spent another $1.3 million on what it described as "network events and community outreach."

It paid $243,150 to SKD Knickerbocker, a high-powered public relations firm, to supplement its own in-house press people, and another $129,000 to a Washington consulting firm founded by President Obama's chief strategist David Axelrod.

But that wasn't all that Success Academy spent on marketing itself.

The network's first seven schools incurred an additional $912,000 "student recruitment" expenditure last year, most of it going to big advertising and branding companies.

That's comes to more than $3.4 million spent on marketing and drumming up huge numbers of application forms - in just one year.

It is perhaps the most intense campaign to sell a group of charter schools in the history of education.

"Our results prove we are spending resources effectively," Moskowitz said. "With fewer taxpayer dollars than district schools, we have an extraordinary level of student achievement, which is why we have 13,000 applicants this year."

Which, of course, ignores the fact there is no need to spend so many millions of dollars to recruit 10 times more applicants than you can possibly handle.

As for the Success Academy's "extraordinary level of student achievement," that will be the subject of a future column.

For now, despite efforts from parent groups led by New York Communities for Change, SUNY's bureaucrats seems poised to give Moskowitz exactly what she wants - a big fee increase to overcome her "unsustainable shortfall."

Author:

Juan Gonzalez

SUNY/Noguera Cave to Eva: Overturn Reco of Subcommitte

I've updated this constantly so I am reposting.
NOTE, Jan. 26, 12:30AM --- see special historical note on Noguera below

I'll be at feb 9 and march 1 puppets for educational policy meetings!  Would LOVE more brochures. I spent $50 printing out the old black and white GEM flyer and circulating around Williamsburg.  I'd like to use the nicer color ones to sneak into the condo developments where success has done their ad blitz and slip them under doors...  Parent activist in Willamsburg, activated by Eva invasion

I guess the only good news for today is that inside the Bedford L, someone spray painted "don't let corporations privatize education" in huge letters over a giant success ad: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10150628474739180&l=caee1f7b48

I've told you Eva is the best organizer we have. GEM movie as antidote to charter invasion beginning to go viral in the neighborhood --- screening at PS 84 at 6PM Thurs. Jan. 26 -- I'll be there.

I'm consolidating reports coming on re Eva invasion of Williamsburg (with more to come later). By the way, her husband is doing his own charter invasion of the area -- but details another time. Also details of last night's Success info meeting at a resident's home in Greenpoint at a location far away from MS 50 later.

The original hearing was on Jan. 17 at MS 50 with a massive outpouring of opposition to the Success invasion from the community. Eva is so sure of herself she no longer brings her shock troops from Harlem, which I think is also a strategy to keep them from identifying with the feelings of the local communities.

Here is a video of that meeting made by GEM's Darren Marelli with some historical background.



Here is the direct link:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_wMV5-Zm4o&list=UUh8pphdD7ocfQ7sED6OBL3g&index=1&feature=plcp


But Tweed screwed up something on the EIS and now another meeting will be scheduled the week of Feb. 12.


SUNY Charter authorizing meeting this morning at 8:30AM:
Today was the SUNY charter authorizing committee chaired by Pedro Noguera who likes to play both sides of the field.

Here is our first report at around 10AM: SUNY subcommitte votes to table Success co-loco in Cobble Hill and Wllmsbg.

A bunch of parents from District 14 were there. The committee went into Exec session. Hard to believe Noguera won't cave to Eva. At last night's Success info session Jenny Sedlis Eva's 2nd in command said there was no Plan B to occupying MS 50. 

Below is one quick report from Cynthia:

The education subcommittee of trustees is advising the SUNY trustees to table the approval of co-locations for success in cobble hill AND Williamsburg, on the basis of the strength, and material facts provided by opposition from communities of Williamsburg and cobble hill. This means that the success co-locations could be blocked at the SUNY level.

I was amazed--they actually agreed to advise the trustees to table the co-locations, on the strength of community opposition from cobble hill and Williamsburg.  Some guy named o'brien was the standout. (but he didn't have voting power on the subcommittee?). Noguera was decent about the whole thing--insisted that Millman and Luis Garden Acosta get to speak, etc

C

Well as I reported, too good to be true. These newly active parents are getting quite a lesson in "democracy." I reported at around 1PM.

Ahhhh, we predicted this in last post. Going against recos of own committee. Look for increasing outrage and blowback at SUNY as a charter authorizing agent. And by the way when the UFT charters come up  at SUNY we should call for them to be shut down. I don't want my union in the charter business.

Here is Leonie's report:

http://pointers.audiovideoweb.com/stcasx/va92winlive2386/play.asx

after discussions w/ legal staff in executive session of the board of trustees,

Noguera says the location of the charters are not in our purview, and we will remove the table from the co-locations

Motion to remove the table. Voted yes.

We will be sharing public feedback w/ Dept of Education.

Noguera: we need leadership elsewhere in the state.  (passing the buck)  But we are not charged with figuring out space and location.  We will  adjourn.

Leonie Haimson

Leonie followed up with:

Some people are confused about the meaning of what I wrote about the SUNY board deliberations.  I am not an attorney but what seems to have occurred is this:

Despite considerable opposition from some of the committee members about these co-locations, or at least their expressed desire to delay their decision, after Noguera came back from private “executive sessions” he said he had had discussions w/ counsel and the board, and removed the tabling of the decision about whether to allow the co-location to go forward.

In other words, these co-locations can go forward and neither the committee nor the board will try to stop them.

Noguera claimed that the committee had no authority to stop the co-locations, (though Rossi, the SUNY Institute counsel, had appeared to say during the committee meeting earlier that the committee could propose to the full board to disapprove the co-locations, and the full board had that authority.  Actually the committee doesn’t have the authority to approve anything without the full board, including authorizing charters…it just makes recommendations to the full board, so why this is any different I have no idea.)

Noguera then ended by saying it is not in their purview as to approve or disapprove locations for charters and bumped it up to the State.

Perhaps Jim or another attorney can better explain.  We should definitely ask for a transcript.

Look for the new alliances built between parents to have a snowball impact.

ED Note:
Gutless Noguera. Sure screw the Southside.
Isn't community impact in their purview? Resign Noguera. I'd rather see an open ed deformer than a wolf in sheep's clothing.

SPECIAL NOTE FROM THE PAST:  dropped in by email:

from a friend who knew Pedro at UC Berkeley  "When Noguera was student body President at Cal during the South Africa divestment movement, his MO was to oppose and undermine direct actions and then take credit for them when they were successful. He was completely unprincipled, really someone who could not be trusted.

At that time he was an unacknowledged supporter of the League of Revolutionary Struggle, the most insidious M-L sect I have ever come across. LRS' line was a combination of "nationalist"-style identity politics and shut-up-and-vote-for-the-

Democrats reformism, expressed with a thin overlay of irrelevant Maoist terminology. Noguera managed to dupe Todd Gitlin into writing some grossly ill-informed articles in The Nation giving credit for the movement to LRS-controled ethnic student groups. That was a pretty impressive feat of shysterism, since Gitlin was obviously not naive about such matters and also would have completely opposed LRS' line if he had even known about it.
 

Pedro was still doing the same kind of stuff when we were back in Berkeley in the mid-90s during the uproar over CCRI, the affirmative action ban. I would bet he has outgrown LRS-style politics, but it doesn't sound as if he has come across any principles. Stay away from him if you can."