Update on Charter Co-Locos Lawsuit - UFT attacked by Murdoch Press on charters - Where's the response?

UPDATE at July 14, 5 PM:  The Judge ruled that the Temporary Restraining Order would continue so that Success Academy is barred from renovating the spaces in Waterside and Sheepshead Bay until he rules on the application for preliminary injunctions in both lawsuits, which he intends to do as soon as possible.... The DOE immediately argued that these cases should be dismissed, based on their view that the issue should have gone to the Commissioner first instead of to Court, and if not, they should be granted another 45 days to research and argue the other claims made in the lawsuit.  

The Judge seemed surprised, but seemed to ignore that request, and immediately dove into the more substantive questions: namely, whether the Educational Impact Statements should have mentioned the potential impact of these proposals on class size, and more specifically, whether DOE should have analyzed how the loss of rooms at the existing schools might prevent them from lowering class size, especially considering the new class size law passed last spring by the Legislature and signed into law by the Governor this fall.

The city's defense seemed to be primarily based on two narrow issues: that the state law that requires EIS's does not explicitly mention class size, and again, that any legal challenge should have been filed with the Commissioner first, as matters such as class size are so complex that they require education expertise.  ....Leonie Haimson: https://nycpublicschoolparents.blogspot.com/2023/07/hearings-today-on-lawsuits-o-block.html

Retirees rally, July 6

There was no UFT presence in court other then a lawyer from Stroock, the UFT law firm. The other lawyer, Laura Barbieri from Advocates for Justice, has worked with Leonie for years. So clearly the UFT is involved but they are trying to stay low-key. No attempt to engage the members in showing resistance, like having people outside. UFT leaders fight a tepid battle against charters, other than a very few. Very, very, very few. Compare to the big crowd of mostly retirees rallying across the street from the courthouse on July 6 to greet the emerging Marianne Pizzitola and the team of lawyers the day before they won a temporary restraining order on the Medicare issue. The lawyers made the poing that showing up influences the court.  Mulgrew is no Marianne.

An astute observer stated to me recently about UFT lack of response to attacks from the right on their charter policy - 

Makes little sense since the NYP & WSJ will blast them anyway, so why not try to get more objective press there?

My response is - what actually makes sense about the UFT/Unity semi-brain trust nowadays? They try to slide instead of proudly owning an anti-charter policy. In essence, they leave the field open to right wing propaganda. But I imagine a response from them would be to show how they don't really oppose charters instead of SCREW 'EM.

Monday, July 17, 2023

I posted the press release Leonie sent out Friday morning: Block co-location of 2 Success Academy charter schools - July 14 - 2 lawsuits, challenging DOE co-location and re-location proposals - With our Favorite Judge

A teacher at the Sheepshead Bay HS Campus, which is deeply affected by the co-loco issue, asked me who was behind the court case opposing charter co-locos and, of course, Leonie Haimson of Class Size Matters had a strong hand in it. Not much sign of UFT involvement - except for the clue that one of the lawyers was from Stroock, the law firm used by the UFT (and where Randi came from).

As a school building under threat from an Eva invasion, why weren't the teachers in the affected schools mobilized or even notified? Because the UFT tries to fight charter from under the covers for fear of being accused of being anti-charter by the right wing and even the liberal media. Duhhhhh! They'd attack the UFT even if they did nothing. I have links to the Rupert Murdoch press attacks below.

The UFT and charter schools has an ugly history, going back to the Al Shanker creation of the very idea of charters. I myself saw the charter option as attractive in the late 90s as a teacher empowerment tool to get out from under DOE bureaucracy and dictatorship supervisors - I even urged Randi to provide UFT support for members who wanted to start a charter school - naturally they would be a UFT school - and if she listened to me the landscape might not look the same. Teachers would choose the supervisors - a revolutionary concept but one that has been used in Europe and elsewhere.

What happens when teachers run the school

I've always maintained that a teaching staff should chose the principal, not the DOE.

But Randi had a different idea -  have the UFT itself open charters - which they did and they did not do very well --- the UFT is just another bureaucracy, after all. My plan would have teachers, not the union or a corporate entity, running schools. Randi put me on a committee to plan a charter school with CCNY but that fell through. Then I realized -- the UFT leadership is as afraid of empowering teachers as the DOE and the corporate world is. Once I was clued in that teacher power was a dream, I turned against charters.

Now, the UFT does oppose charters in some ways but weakly. They support charters if they meet certain conditions. 

Support for charters is a fundamental contradiction to support for public schools.

The UFT does not focus an attack on the idea of charters as a drain on public funds and the creation of a dual system that ultimately harms all students. Or call for the conversion of charters back to public schools.

The UFT does openly fight lifting the cap on NYC charters, so some credit there. Note this headline from Jan. 2023: He took a position on NY State charter authorizing bodies.

NY teachers union wants changes to charter schools:https://spectrumlocalnews.com/nys/central-ny/politics/2023/01/30/united-federation-of-teachers-wants-changes-to-ny-charter-schools

Yeah, I want changes. I want the ed scam of the century - think Bit-Coins - gone.

Success Charter Abuse story spreads: How a New York City charter school uses public shame to get results

I love the "end justifies the means" headline from Business Insider. Eva brags about the outcomes - which everyone seems to accept as legit - I don't. Just like I don't accept the claims there is enormous demand on the part of parents to have their kids in this kind of environment.

One red flag is how Success beat out every other charter - many with the same advantages - by miles - something the chart below doesn't show. This has led competitor Democracy Prep's Seth Andrews to call for Eva to back fill her classes after kids drop out.

We know that most of the parents at Success are coming in with higher levels based on the very nature of the lottery system -- people aware enough to apply -- people have bought into the "public schools suck" argument - you know - those public schools with those union - and way more experienced teachers than Success. Funny how parents opt for a lower level teaching staff because they are sold a bill of goods. And then put up with a socially restricted system devoid of accountability. Eventually they began to catch on and year after year our school fell in district rankings.

I know every trick in  the book to get high scores - I learned them from my principal, who was a joke to other principals in my district - an early version of  Eva. Principals in lower poverty areas of the district used to sidle up to me and ask how she was doing it as my school showed so much higher scores than the others who weren't pulling the same tricks. And they rose so quickly after she took over. Miracles.

One trick she used and Eva does today: Hold loads of kids back in kindergarten or first grade so for the next 5 years they would be a year older when they took the test in their grade. One of the outcomes in Eva's schools now is that parents who do not think it fair to hold their kids back, especially if it is a 2nd time  -- and often it isn't - pull their kids from the school -- thus Eva "loses" the bottom scorers.

How a New York City charter school uses public shame to get results

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/success-academy-students-being-put-in-the-red-zone-2015-4#ixzz3XHTQZAGs

The Secret to Eva Moskowitz’s ‘Success’

Another curious fact about Success Academy is the attrition of both students and teachers. For schools that are widely acclaimed, this is surprising indeed. Why do so many students and teachers leave?... What we can learn from Success Academy is that it is possible to winnow out the most intractable students and be left with the best and most compliant ones by selective attrition. But that is no model for public education....The Nation

MORE people spoke at Monday night's charter school hearings - and I particularly pointed out that this was the plan from Day 1 - to use Success as a battering ram to undermine and ultimately destroy the public school system and the unionized teachers. And it has been working, due in part to the lack of resistance (other than backstage) by the UFT. If the UFT wanted to close down the Brooklyn Bridge with a mass demonstration it could do so - there is enough anti-Eva sentiment amongst UFT members.

This article appeared in the October 13, 2014 edition of The Nation.

 

Eva Moskowitz (Photo courtesy of House Committee on Education and the Workforce Democrats, CC 2.0)

This article is adapted from the author’s blog, DianeRavitch.net.

 

The media have long been in search of a ”miracle” school, a school that can succeed in turning poor children of color into academic superstars. Of course, there already are poor children of color who are academic superstars, but they’re the exception, not the rule (the same is true for poor white children). The defining characteristic of low test scores is poverty, not color. The titans of our society are especially interested in the pursuit of miracle schools because finding them would relieve those with high incomes of any obligation to alleviate the poverty that interferes with academic achievement.

 

Today we have that very school—or chain of schools—in New York City: Success Academy. It was declared a success almost from the day it opened, back in 2006, as Harlem Success Academy. Founded by former City Councilwoman Eva Moskowitz and backed by a team of Wall Street financiers, Success Academy schools have delivered spectacular results on state tests. While everyone else lagged behind on the new Common Core tests, Moskowitz’s schools did well.

 

Success Academy schools have been consistently delivering high test performances for several years. And that record has not gone unnoticed. Madeleine Sackler, daughter of Connecticut multimillionaire Jonathan Sackler, made a film about Moskowitz and her charter schools in 2010 called The Lottery, which portrayed them as miraculous institutions holding the key to families’ hopes and dreams. The much-hyped documentary Waiting for Superman also featured Moskowitz’s celebrated lottery. Just recently, The New York Times Magazine published a fawning article about her, seeming to position Moskowitz as a future mayoral candidate.

 

What are the secrets of Eva’s success? To begin with, there’s the lottery itself. As the Times reported in 2010, Moskowitz spent as much as $325,000 to market her charter schools in Harlem, while the neighborhood public schools could afford no more than $500 to advertise their offerings. The goal of Moskowitz’s marketing was to build her brand and generate excitement about the lottery. This gave her schools an aura of prestige, with the lucky winners clutching their tickets. But the very fact of a lottery is a screening device, since the least functional families—i.e., those who are homeless—are too busy trying to survive to enter it.

Moskowitz often says that she enrolls exactly the same types of children as the public schools, but this is not true. Success Academy has very few of the students with the most severe disabilities (in some of its schools, the number is zero). In Harlem’s public elementary schools, by contrast, the average proportion of such children is 14.1 percent. Also, Success Academy has half as many English-language learners as the neighboring public schools. Whether this is the result of a screening process at the outset or because these children have been “counseled out” is unclear; what is undeniable is that Success Academy has significantly fewer of the children with the highest needs.

Another curious fact about Success Academy is the attrition of both students and teachers. For schools that are widely acclaimed, this is surprising indeed. Why do so many students and teachers leave?

The only Success Academy school that offers grades three through eight (the testing grades) tested 116 third graders but only thirty-two eighth graders. Three other Success Academy schools have expanded to sixth grade. One tested 121 third graders but only fifty-five sixth graders; another, 106 third graders but only sixty-eight sixth graders; and the last, eighty-three third graders but only fifty-four sixth graders. Why the shrinking student body? When students leave these schools (for whatever reason), they are not replaced by other incoming students. In public schools, students also leave, but they are usually replaced by new students. Of the thirty-two eighth graders to finish at Success Academy, twenty-seven took the competitive exam to enter one of New York City’s prestigious specialized high schools. Despite their excellent scores on the state test, not one of these students gained admission to a specialized school like Stuyvesant or Bronx Science.

Teacher attrition at the Success Academy charter schools has also been unusually high. Journalist Helen Zelon wrote in the magazine City Limits that in Harlem Success Academies 1 through 4, “more than half of all teachers left the schools ahead of the 2013–14 school year. In one school, three out of four teachers departed.” On a website called Glassdoor, many former teachers expressed their candid views about the “oppressive” work climate at Success Academy schools.

Also, as the result of “co-locating” a charter school in a public-school building, the educational climate comes to feel very separate and unequal. The Success Academy children get spiffy new facilities and the latest technology, while typically the host public school loses space, such as its computer room, music room, art room, science lab or even its library. In PS 149, a school for special-needs children lost all of these things and will lose even more space now that Success Academy’s request to expand has been granted. Last spring, following a public battle between Moskowitz and New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, the State Legislature required the city to give charter schools whatever space they requested and to pay their rent if they needed private space as well.

So even though Moskowitz can raise millions of dollars in a single night; and even though she is paid more than $500,000 a year to supervise her schools; and even though Success Academy has a private board well populated by hedge-fund managers, Moskowitz’s charter schools do not have to pay rent to use public space.

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The fundamental question is this: Are charter schools like Success Academy a model for public education? The answer is: they are not. If public schools were able to exclude, one way or another, English-language learners and students with severe disabilities, the schools would have higher scores. But they cannot do this because, with the exception of a small number of exam schools, public schools are required to accept all students, regardless of their language skills, learning disabilities or test scores. If public schools could refuse to accept new enrollees after a certain grade, they could “build a culture,” as Success Academy’s fans say it does. But public schools must take all enrollees, even those who show up mid-year.

What we can learn from Success Academy is that it is possible to winnow out the most intractable students and be left with the best and most compliant ones by selective attrition. But that is no model for public education.

 

Inside Colocation - Success Academy Charter Misuse of Space Exposed

...some of Success’ classrooms have remained empty for entire years, not a single classroom in the building’s public schools has been “underutilized” in the eleven years I’ve been in this building. .. Inside Colocation blog

This teacher blogs sporadically but when he/she does it is worth reminding everyone of the perfidy of the Eva Moskowitz's operation. Here are the June and August posts. Note the maps and the fragmentation of the public schools in order to keep Eva's space intact - and "clean" from contamination by public school teachers and students. What is the future of this school building looking ahead? Total occupation by Success, with the public schools moved or eliminated.

Inside Colocation

The public school where I've been teaching for over ten years has been "colocated" by a Success Academy charter school. Most people don't know what a colocation looks like, or how it impacts the existing school community. I've been maintaining this blog since Success first moved in to document the process. 

Entering the third year of co-location, you can see that International has lost space and is spread widely throughout the building, evidencing many grueling classroom moves. Global has also lost considerable space, while Success now occupies space on two floors. While some of Success’ classrooms have remained empty for entire years, not a single classroom in the building’s public schools has been “underutilized” in the eleven years I’ve been in this building.

Aug. 16 2014

As of Thursday, the final day of the school year, our school lost five more classrooms to the charter school, despite our ever-increasing enrollment of students. Teachers packed up their classrooms in boxes. They have fingers crossed that everything makes it to their new rooms ok, as many supplies were lost on the previous move. Renovations were scheduled to begin first thing Friday morning, and I’m sure as of this moment, they are already well underway. These rooms, which have served our school for over a decade, will be utterly transformed by September, using a combination of taxpayer and corporate funds.

Video: 12 Days to Being Tossed Out By Eva Moskowitz Success Charter

Interview with former Success Charter parent exposes shady tactics.

Great work by GEM's Darren Marelli.

An interview with New York City Parent Karen Sprowal.  Ms. Sprowal tells the story of her kindergarten son's 12 days at Success Academy Charter School. Ms. Sprowal describes how her son was pushed out of the charter school and eventually embraced by a neighborhood public school, PS 75.


https://vimeo.com/88615316



Interview with former Success Academy Charter School parent from Grassroots Education Movement.

Another Blogger Slams Eva's Success Academy Charter Scam

Owen Davis at The Commonal follows up on Gary Rubinstein's analysis of the Eva Moskowitz charter scam which we reported on the other day: Rubinstein: Success Academy Scores Based on High Attrition Plus Other Factors.

Davis takes Gary's work a bit further:

It’s true that Success owes its success to more than just general student attrition. But Rubinstein only examined the overall numbers. When you look at specific student demographics, even more troubling patterns emerge. I’ve been dissecting the student data of prominent NYC charters since Democracy Prep and I sparred over its unmistakable pattern of steadily losing students with disabilities and students learning English. (They promised a “debunking” of my post. I’ll assume it’s still forthcoming.)
At Success, the pattern is similar, if not more stark. Not only do its classes contain disproportionately few students with disabilities and English language learners (ELLs), but their numbers almost invariably decrease with each passing year. This should have no uncertain effect on test scores.

 I actually get hot thinking about a slam at the arrogant Democracy Prep crowd which for some reason annoy me even more than Eva's crew. (I admit to having had some great discussions with some Success parents and officials -- we have been sparring for so many years.) Democracy Prep recently pushed out a program for GED students.

But how much fun is it to see Eva jump so far ahead that there will be intense scrutiny? Even her usual trolls have toned it down.

Owen concludes with:

What’s sad about this is how unsurprising it’s become. High-achieving charters, with no exceptions that I’ve found, enroll fewer needy students, witness substantial attrition of these students, or both. These patterns could reflect some implicit policy, or they could result from the extraordinary behavioral demands charters impose on students. The proximate cause doesn’t matter so much when it comes to test scores, though. Scores resting on high-needs student attrition shouldn’t withstand even the mildest scrutiny, yet they garner unreserved praise from the likes of Mayor Bloomberg and the Post. 
It’s just an added irony that one of Moskowitz’s Success expansions literally pushed at-risk students out of an existing school.
I need not dwell on how disturbing all this is. Any notion of success should be predicated on serving the neediest students right alongside those who make “no excuses.” Anything less is reprehensible.

Read it all, with charts:
http://commonal.tumblr.com/post/58209601458/harlem-success-academy-charter-and-attrition