Many of you know that WAGPOPS! (Williamsburg and Greenpoint Parents: Our Public Schools!) has been fighting Los Angeles based Citizens of the World Charter Schools for the past year and a half. The good news is that we have a sister organization, LAPOPS! (Los Angeles Parents: Our Public Schools!) in Los Angeles. We've also developed partnerships with parents who attend Citizens of the World Charter Schools (CWC) in Hollywood (CWCH) and Silverlake (CWCSL).
We've amassed some unbelievable information (with documentation) regarding the schools themselves and the impact on NY for their expansion.The LA schools are being asked to pay (retroactively as well) 1% of their per pupil funds for licensing, or the right to use the name "Citizens of the World," but here's the rub: CWC NY schools will be forced to pay 3% of their per pupil funds for the same right to use the name "Citizens of the World," and that % will climb higher in future years - up to 8%!!! This is NOT standard practice in NY Charters and is just for licensing. Management and services are separate fees and percentages.The licensing fee was only mentioned in a single sentence in the proposal to SUNY, and was not included in their submitted budgets, although it was mentioned in the SUNY recommendations to approve the charter. I'm not sure if SUNY or the Regents are aware of this. It's a pretty significant figure with millions of dollars funneled out of NY into CWC National.This is just the tip of the iceberg.CWC has been under-servicing ELLs in their LA schools, and have legal action pending against them from at least 3 families who's children with special needs almost died from negligence, one was found lying in a pool of her own vomit when she picked her child up form school (be sure to scroll to the end where the parents made the Board amend the minutes to include their testimony). The negligent teacher from CWC SL was promoted to principal of the soon to be opened CWC Mar Vista! You can't make this stuff up!“When I arrived at the school approx 20 minutes later I discovered my daughter lying face down on the office floor, passed out and covered in her own vomit. The two individuals in the office at the time had no idea this had happened as they were occupied with photocopying behind the front desk.”“The harsh reality of the situation is that if I was not in the front office my son would have died in the classroom.”“I have been verbally requesting an IEP since the start of school and until February 7, I was ignored. Since this initial meeting on February 7 nothing has been resolved. In fact, my son has not been at school since he is not safe here.”The parents in their LA schools (CWC Hollywood, CWC Silverlake, and the soon to open CWC Mar Vista) were forced to consolidate to a "sole member" LA Board with the "sole member" being "CWC National." This new National Board was made up of all the individuals from the scandal ridden Wonder of Reading (http://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/NBC4-Extra---Book- Wars-Episode-Two.html ), notably Kriste Dragon, the former head of Wonder of Reading who folded the organization and funneled $2M into Citizens of the World, placing herself on the Board. Dragon pulls the strings on all the Boards, and commands a salary of $240K while she lives in Atlanta. Meanwhile, at the CWC NY "Meet the Principals" events, CWC staff is telling parents that they have a governance structure that is different from the LA schools, even though CWC NY will also be a "sole member" Board with CWC National as the sole member. The CWC LA schools are financially unstable. They're using money fundraised from CWC Hollywood to support the sustenance and opening of other schools against parents wishes, and have repeatedly been told by their outside management network that they are running out of funds.Finally, on top of 40-50 students leaving CWC SL in the middle of the year next year, CWC SL will be losing all but one teacher. I've never heard of a teacher turnover rate like that, even at Success Academy!We got some recent press coverage for CWC spending their resources targeting mostly white, affluent famillies:andAny recommendations for next steps are much appreciated.Best,Brooke
Showing posts with label WAGPOPS. Show all posts
Showing posts with label WAGPOPS. Show all posts
Monday, May 6, 2013
WAGPOPS Has Partner in LAPOPS in Cross Country Battle Against Citizens of the World Charter
Eric Grannis (Eva's husband) should be strapped to a public school he is invading and have his liver eaten by buzzards (his heart has been gone a long time). The amazing Brooke Dunn has done it again and keeps doing it. See a previous item in Citizens of the World charter from Brooke at Norms Notes: Brooklyn Charter School Targets Rich, White Parent... as the Ed Deform so-called "civil rights issue of our times" support racist segregation policies while the major media is complicent - or just too busy trying to find out where parent activists are sending their kids to school.
Friday, September 14, 2012
Parent Brooke Parker Won't Back Down as Eva and Eric Keep Glomming Up School Buildings (Condos, Here We Come)
If the Moskowitz/Grannis education reformers have their way, we will have reformed ourselves into a brand new district, with public schools brimming with students with special needs, who don’t speak English, or who come from our most impoverished families—students the charter schools have kicked out because they won’t lift the schools’ test scores. By the time the charter schools open, 46% of our district’s kindergartener’s will be enrolled in them and none will be any better than the neighborhood schools they destroy....
The fine print was left out of COW’s Powerpoint presentations: the schools are privately managed and responsible to a Board of Trustees, not parents or educators. Parents are powerless in COW school governance. Forget about all the evidence that shows that teachers are effective after several years in the classroom, COW will hire teachers fresh out of Teach for America with only five weeks training. COW also wouldn’t lease their own buildings, but would “co-locate” or take up space inside at least one of our neighborhood public schools.
COW told parents that their charter schools will close if they don’t fulfill their promises. But they lied to them. Charter schools stay open for five years before their charter is reconsidered, regardless of whether they fulfill their promises. Charters don’t close from under-enrollment or under-performance or high teacher turnover or parent dissatisfaction. Charter schools close because of financial mismanagement, and even then, rarely. We know how well deregulation served our economy.
--- Brooke Parker, WAGPOPSThis piece by Brooke is so good I am salivating. No I haven't stopped writing about Chicago. But in the midst of Chicago news let me go local and make the connections to the strike which does have to do with charters. We know that there will be an enormous expansion of charters in Chicago as there is here. The CTU could never stop that so don't expect a massive victory to reverse the ed deform movement. At best they will hold the line on a few things and maybe pick up a few wins. Let's hope they get something on class size even if minimal
Bloomberg will open up 50 more charter before he leaves office and you will hear peep and poop from the UFT. In my follow-up post you'll read Karen Lewis' letter to parents about charters, a letter you will never see Michael Mulgrew or Randi Weingarten write.
Here Williansburg/Greenpoint parent activist Brooke Parker of WAGPOPS! lays out the local landscape of where the privatization charter movement is going. Our taxes end up paying for 2 separate and unequal school systems.
OP/ED The Demise of Public Education: Mr. and Mrs. Moskowitz* Push for More Charters in Williamburg
By Brooke Parker
Eva Moskowitz, CEO of Success Academy, who earns close to half a million dollars a year, is one of the highest profile figures in the charter school industry, touting charter schools as the solution to “waste in education.” There’s a lot of money to be made in charter schools when you add up the start-up financing grants, charter management fees, new market tax credits, no-bid contracts, and minimal oversight.
While charter schools receive slightly less per pupil from the city than public schools, the city’s Independent Budget Office concluded that when you factor in that they don’t pay for their use of space, utilities, janitorial services, or school safety agents, charter schools generally spend over $700 more per pupil in public funds each year, and that’s not including the substantial private money they receive. And all those public dollars are spent while charter schools, in general, don’t perform any better than public schools. So much for the idea that charter schools are less wasteful.
Success Academies have been widely criticized as punitive and militaristic, with a model that has not appealed to white middle class families in spite of the millions Moskowitz has spent marketing to them. Remember the posters splashed all over the Northside and the Bedford Avenue L train? They didn’t work. Moskowitz didn’t get the parents she was aiming for. Success Academy Williamsburg is up and running in JHS 50, in spite of significant community opposition, but its population is largely students of color, not the wealthier Williamsburg families the ads targeted.
So Moskowitz’s husband, lawyer Eric Grannis, on the board of an equally militarist Girls Prep charter school chain, is bringing in a new chain of charter schools just for Williamsburg’s newest population. It’s called Citizens of the World Charter Schools.
If the Moskowitz/Grannis education reformers have their way, we will have reformed ourselves into a brand new district, with public schools brimming with students with special needs, who don’t speak English, or who come from our most impoverished families—students the charter schools have kicked out because they won’t lift the schools’ test scores. By the time the charter schools open, 46% of our district’s kindergartener’s will be enrolled in them and none will be any better than the neighborhood schools they destroy.
In February of 2011, through a private neighborhood listserv, Grannis invited parents to a series of meetings promoting charter schools in Williamsburg. He claimed there “seemed to be parents who are not satisfied with their options and want other ones.” Grannis, who does not live in Williamsburg and has never set foot in any of the local schools, just wanted “to help out the neighborhood.” He wanted to give us more options, more choices, more charters, and he offered parents a way to get in on the ground floor in free, new schools created for their children, where they might be guaranteed admission. About three dozen parents attended five meetings held at the new condos and high end children’s stores. Few, if any, had children that were school aged yet.
Grannis arranged for his guests to be wowed by one charter school in particular, Citizens of the World (COW), a chain out of Los Angeles with only a single year under its belt, but with plans to expand nationally. Parents left the meetings sure that COW would offer something new, more child-centered and progressive than any of our neighborhood schools. None of the attendees understood that what COW claimed as proprietary to their school model had already been implemented in all of the neighborhood schools: COW did not invent differentiated instruction, balanced literacy, or project-based learning. And contrary to what COW would have parents believe, our neighborhood schools are replete with service learning projects, even winning trips to the White House for outstanding community service.
The fine print was left out of COW’s Powerpoint presentations: the schools are privately managed and responsible to a Board of Trustees, not parents or educators. Parents are powerless in COW school governance. Forget about all the evidence that shows that teachers are effective after several years in the classroom, COW will hire teachers fresh out of Teach for America with only five weeks training. COW also wouldn’t lease their own buildings, but would “co-locate” or take up space inside at least one of our neighborhood public schools. These co-located public schools will lose vital space that the city Department of Education does not count as “classrooms,” including music and art rooms, libraries, science and computer labs, and rooms designed for kids with special needs. All in the name of more choice.
Finally, COW will funnel hundreds of thousands of dollars from the public schools to their COW Management Organization, a much needed cash cow for a brand new charter school chain already facing financial problems in their flagship school in LA. No wonder COW kept their meetings secret, never met with any elected officials, and used unethical tactics, like having Spanish-speaking families sign pro-COW petitions that were written in English and, stranger still, having a real estate lawyer procure signatures for pro-COW petitions from new homeowners at their closings.
Parents were told that we need new schools to accommodate our quickly growing population. This is simply not true. While we do have more “middle-class” children now, it’s impossible for newcomers to imagine a time when all of our public schools were full, along with over a dozen (now closed) Catholic schools. In spite of the condos being built, the new baby stores, and the waiting lists for private nursery schools, our Bugaboo parents simply aren’t giving birth fast enough to replace our Latino, Polish, and Italian families. Sadly, white middle class people are only seeing white middle class babies. When funds follow children into schools, we simply can’t afford new elementary school options without deleteriously affecting our existing options.
Education reformers manufacture parent demand for charter schools by preying on overblown fears of urban schools, and then applying their enormous marketing funds to promote charter schools as a panacea. It’s a lot like the pharmaceutical industry manufacturing symptoms for an illness you didn’t know you had in order to sell you a pill that will cure it. Our neighborhood schools don’t have a defensive marketing budget. Can you imagine the public outrage if it were discovered that education dollars went to glossy mail outs and fancy dinners? And then there are schools like COW that flat out lie about our neighborhood options to increase demand for their product.
Reformers believe schools should open and close willy nilly at the whim of the market. If a group of people want to create a school based on a harebrained scheme putting five year olds in class sizes over 30, sitting in front of no-bid contract computer programs, assessing themselves with no-bid tests, then open one! And place that school inside a neighborhood public school to squeeze it of vital resources. Competition is always good and new is always better, right? COW told parents that their charter schools will close if they don’t fulfill their promises. But they lied to them. Charter schools stay open for five years before their charter is reconsidered, regardless of whether they fulfill their promises. Charters don’t close from under-enrollment or under-performance or high teacher turnover or parent dissatisfaction. Charter schools close because of financial mismanagement, and even then, rarely. We know how well deregulation served our economy.
If we allow greed to precede community, we’ll create an education apocalypse, not to mention the radical resegregation that occurs when schools like COW target white, middle class families while others target lower-income parents of color. Ours is a district which houses an exceptionally high population of children who don’t speak English, and no charter schools are targeting that population.
On the other side of this divide are local public school parents who know that our educational landscape has improved with engaged parents and new leadership open to new ideas. That’s how we got our dual language programs, greenhouse roofs, school bands, winning chess teams, and a range of impressive arts partnerships. There are proven strategies that create strong schools: small class size, experienced teachers, meaningful curriculum, strong and experienced leadership, diversity in the classroom, and engaged parents. Without outside corporate interference, our neighborhood public schools have been headed in that direction. We believe that’s worth fighting for.
So, marching forward, righteous public school parents gathered across the district, including those who attended the early Grannis meetings, and became WAGPOPS! (Williamsburg and Greenpoint Parents: Our Public Schools!). WAGPOPS! discovered that there was a group of parents across the country in Silver Lake, Los Angeles (a neighborhood described as similar in spirit to Williamsburg) fighting COW schools, too. And they collected some pretty damning information about COW, including financial scandals. We became bi-coastal. WAGPOPS! flooded the mailboxes of the SUNY Charter School Institute (the organization that authorizes charter schools), asking that they reject the COW proposals. WAGPOPS! wrote a community impact letter opposing COW and gained support from all of our elected officials, even those who initially agreed with lifting the charter school cap. WAGPOPS! stood for all of our neighborhood public schools and children: We want our kids in class together! No GMOs in our food, no corporations in our classrooms! Shop local, school local! Keep public money out of private hands and put it in the classroom!
In the Dr. Seuss version of this story, everyone would be moved, as we were when the tiny Whos were finally heard, because they spoke as one. And Grannis would have packed up his suitcase and left. But there’s real money involved. And we lost. The SUNY Board of Trustees, without a single member having knowledge of our district’s schools or even a background in public education, disregarded the opposition to COW and approved the schools. The only lesson we have to learn from COW—Citizens of the World—is about the erosion of democracy.
For a copy of the letter regarding Citizens of the World, see: http://www.scribd.com/doc/94382088/WAGPOPS-Letter-to-Suny-Opposing-Citizens-of-the-World-Charter-Schools
Joint the WAGPOPS! mailing list to find out about upcoming meetings at facebook.com/WilliamsburgGreenpointParents or e-mail williamsburggreenpointschools@gmail.com.
*aka Eva Moskowitz and Eric Grannis.
Saturday, May 26, 2012
WAGPOPS Brilliant Expose of Citizens of the World Charter Ponzi Scheme
Falsely inflated demand for charters exposed: The evidence that these two proposals put forth representing the demand for more elementary charter schools is preposterous.
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The opinions expressed on EdNotesOnline are solely those of Norm Scott and are not to be taken as official positions (though Unity Caucus/New Action slugs will try to paint them that way) of any of the groups or organizations Norm works with: ICE, GEM, MORE, Change the Stakes, NYCORE, FIRST Lego League NYC, Rockaway Theatre Co., Active Aging, The Wave, Aliens on Earth, etc.
The proposals point to the New York Charter School Center’s data of 4,000 children on waiting lists at various charter schools in District 14, using self-reported data gathered by survey from charter school operators. Additionally, the data is pooled -- without delineating the waiting list by each charter school, the grade level of the applicants, or where the applicants live, these numbers are meaningless.....
We believe that there is a place in public education for charter schools, but Citizens of the World is bastardizing the original intent of charter schools. We have a district wide model for school choice in place.
We are deeply concerned that our children will be fodder to what appears to be a ponzi scheme on the part of their developing CMO to use our New York City funds to pay backtheir debts in Los Angeles, opening more schools with more start up grants based on inflated projections, and enrolling more and more children in order to stay afloat with a financially unsustainable model.
We recognize that parents with children who are not yet school-age are unfamiliar with NYC DOE schools and are easily seduced by a campaign that maligns public schools generally. These parents have been led to believe that the glossy brochures, Power-Point presentations, and expensive marketing are offering something different, new, and special. Not only are the “dream schools” these parents have been sold already open (and under-enrolled) in our district, but our local elementary schools offer even more of what parents have expressed as desirable than these proposed charter schools.CWSNY1 and CWSNY2 are poor copies of our existing neighborhood schools.The CWSNY1 and CWSNY2 proposals are an insult, not just to our neighborhood public schools, but to the NYC DOE that developed mandates which these twoproposals pretend to be unique and proprietary to their individual schools. CWSNY1and CWSNY2 have nothing to do with providing “high-quality public school options for families,” and everything to do with politics.
Williamsburg and Greenpoint Parents for Our Public Schools (WAGPOPS) is a group based in District 14 that is doing great work. Eva Moskowitz' husband, Eric Grannis, wants in on the action. WAGPOPS is trying to stop him and wrote a 45 page document to SUNY, the authorizing agent. Really, though long, this is a must-read document. The kind of work the UFT should be doing -- if the leadership weren't on the wrong side of the fence (see the article in the NY Teacher about how wonderful co-locations can be.)
Here is the link http://www.scribd.com/gemnyc/d/94382088-WAGPOPS-Letter-to-Suny-Opposing-Citizens-of-the-World-Charter-Schools and I'm embedding it below for the lazy ones.WAGPOPS Letter to Suny Opposing Citizens of the World Charter Schools================
The opinions expressed on EdNotesOnline are solely those of Norm Scott and are not to be taken as official positions (though Unity Caucus/New Action slugs will try to paint them that way) of any of the groups or organizations Norm works with: ICE, GEM, MORE, Change the Stakes, NYCORE, FIRST Lego League NYC, Rockaway Theatre Co., Active Aging, The Wave, Aliens on Earth, etc.
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