Funding equity is an important issue in education for one simple reason: it is a matter of educational justice for students. Unfortunately, in the world of educational politics, it is easy to lose sight of that bottom line. The politics of division that Chancellor Klein has pursued on the charter school front has claimed as part of its collateral damage rational, fact-based evaluation of charter school funding: as of late, there has been a great deal more heat than light in such discussions.
For many years, the only serious scholarly study of the subject was a 2004 paper, Charter School Funding in New York, authored by Jonathan Gyurko, now of the UFT, and Robin Jacobowitz of NYU. The websites of the New York City Charter School Center and the New York Charter School Association linked to this detailed evaluation of the complicated funding formula, and Charter School Center CEO Merriman commended it in a New York Timesinterview. Last year, during the bitter debates that accompanied the funding freezes of district and charter schools, Gyurko updated that analysison Edwize here and here. He concluded that “with the recent shift of ‘categorical funds’ into state ‘foundation aid’ and the placement of many City charter schools in Board of Education facilities,” the “modest funding gaps” that existed in 2004 had been considerably reduced, leaving “little to no operating disparities.” More »
Poor James Merriman. As CEO of the New York City Charter School Center, the charter management organization here in the Big Apple, Merriman woke up to some bad news Monday morning. His main publicist, Thomas Carroll of the Brighter Choice chain of charter schools, had a little credibility issue. Ever since the UFT issued its Separate and Unequal report which demonstrated that New York charter schools were not serving their share of high needs students, Carroll had been given carte blanche access to the op-ed pages of the Daily News and the Post by the tabloid powers-that-be to claim otherwise. [See here, here, and here.] But now the authorizer of Carroll’s charter schools, the SUNY Charter School Institute, was issuing a scathing report that one of Carroll’s own charter schools had an illegal policy of denying admissions to students with special needs, with the goal of inflating the school’s standardized test scores.
What to do? While the common practice of charter management is to attack the bona fides of the bearers of bad news, such an approach would not work in the case of the Charter School Institute, an institution held in high regard in the New York charter world. So on the principle that the best defense is an offense, Merriman decided to attack — who else? — the UFT, and what he calls our “present obsession with precise demographic balancing between charter schools and district schools.” That is an Aesopian rendition of our view that all public schools — charter and district — should serve all students in their communities, and especially students with the greatest needs. More »
Shortly after the start of the new year, a group of elected officials joined the UFT to propose a package of legislative reforms designed to ensure that charter schools would be true public schools, educating all students.
At that time, Thomas Carroll, prolific charter advocate and long time champion of the far right in state politics, took to the pages of New York City tabloids to condemn our proposal. The idea that charter schools should educate all students, including those with the greatest need, was a poison pill, Carroll declared. It would force charters to adopt terrible admissions quotas. It was the work of Michael Mulgrew, our new UFT president, who is “a bare-knuckled trench-fighter” in Carroll’s book. More »
Because what he told NY1 TV’s Mike Scotto on “Inside City Hall” Monday about the 19 closing schools was, “Nobody could make a good case why these schools shouldn’t be closed.”
Has he been away? His deputy chancellors, John White, Santi Taveras and Kathleen Grimm, chaired 20 public hearings over the last two months where parents, teachers and support staff, CEC leaders, Council members, Assembly representatives, grandmothers, local business leaders, students, graduates, principals and advocates testified on why most of the schools on the list should not close. Did the deputies not report back? More »
Craig Garber, UFT Chapter Leader at Beginning with Children Charter School in Brooklyn, reflects on his recent trip to Albany as part of Charter School Lobby Day, orchestrated by the New York Charter Schools Association and the New York City Charter Schools Center.
The early morning three-hour drive to Albany put me in a reflective mood. My mind wandered from lesson plans and midterms to the state of New York’s charter schools. I wasn’t sure what my particular “message” was going to be. But I figured I had better think of something, given that I and the 50 other members of my school’s community would be meeting with our state senator, our assembly member and perhaps the Governor. What do I have to say? What do the parents of our students have to say? Most importantly, what do our students have to say for themselves?
I decided to speak from the heart. I believe in my school. We are a small charter located in Williamsburg. We have strong academics, a proud eighteen-year history in Brooklyn, and a genuine sense of community within the school itself. We are the kind of school where people want to send their children because parents have a genuine opportunity to be involved. More »
Seth Andrew, 31, founder of Democracy Preparatory Charter School and aspiring Charter Management Organization CEO.
This weekend, the parents and students of Democracy Preparatory Charter School learned that Seth Andrew, the school’s founder/leader, intends to leave New York and open new charter schools in Rhode Island. This is a surprising turn of events, given Andrew’s track record of spirited public engagement in New York. Ironically, it appears as if Andrew could use a lesson in democracy from President Obama: “we don’t quit!”
In rationalizing the move, Andrew commented that the environment in New York just isn’t “supportive” enough. Apparently, the preferential treatment given by Klein and Bloomberg to charters over district schools isn’t good enough. Or the fact that charters receive nearly the same operating funding as a typical district school, despite enrolling a less-challenging student body. Or the City’s allocation of over $500million in capital funding to charter and partnership schools and the placement of two-thirds of the City’s charters in free public space. [1] Not to mention the heretofore light touch by the City’s oversight officials. Inexplicably, these ‘unsupportive’ policies place New York among the top 10 places in the country to run charters — but what do NAPCS and CER know, anyway? More »
East New York Preparatory Charter School founder and Maybelline honoree Sheila Joseph
Sheila Joseph, the disgraced founder of East New York Preparatory Charter School, was once a rising star in New York’s charter school movement. Today, she has become a stark symbol of why New York charter schools so desperately need the accountability and transparency reforms, the guards against profiteering and the guarantees of teacher and parent voice advocated by the UFT and elected officials.
Born in Rockaway, Joseph attended Berkeley, got a law degree at Georgetown, and for three years served as a Teaching Fellow. She received a cool $100K from Joel Klein’s Charter Center and was a fellow at Building Excellent Schools, the well-heeled training program for hard-charging charter CEOs.[1] Heralded as “the first African American woman to found a charter school in New York,” she is the star of an upcoming documentary and was even honored by Maybelline as a leader in education reform. With a back-story like this, what could possibly go wrong?
In the hard scrabble streets that wind through the housing projects of Brooklyn’s Red Hook community, men and women still remember Patrick Daly, fifteen years after he lost his life in the service of their children. Fearless, Daly had sought out a student who had run from his school in distress. In his quest to protect one of his charges, Daly was caught in the crossfire of a gang shoot-out, and his lifeblood stained the center mall of the Red Hook Houses.
Inside PS 15, now named after Daly, an intrepid staff carry on his mission and his work. This is a school which serves a high needs community, with many students living in poverty, many English Language Learners and many Special Education students. By every measure, including the NYC Department of Education’s own [they have received an 'A' on their school progress report every year grades have been given], they meet that challenge successfully. The Patrick F. Daly School is a great school, of the sort that the Mayor and the Chancellor claim, in other contexts, they want every public school to be. More »
In the heat of the Albany battle over the extension of the cap on the number of charter schools in New York State, the core agenda of the New York Charter School Association [NYCSA] has been stripped of all pretense. Faced with a set of reform proposals put forward by the UFT and elected officials to fix the broken charter school funding formula, NYCSA did not join in calls for reducing the funding lag, for having funding follow high needs students living in poverty, English Language Learners and Special Education students and for moving the cost of TRS pensions off the books of charter schools. Fair funding for charter schools is simply not important to the right-wing ideologues at NYCSA.
No, rather than take on such vital issues for charter schools, NYCSA has been waging an all-out campaign on behalf of for profit charter management firms Victory Schools and National Heritage Academies and on behalf of NYC D0E Chancellor Joel Klein. Legislation proposed by State Senate leader John Sampson and State Assembly Speaker Shelly Silver would combine an increase on the cap with a prohibition of for profit involvement in charter schools and limits on the NYC DoE policy of capriciously siting charter schools in district buildings to the detriment of the public schools already using the space. NYCSA is so opposed to these measures that it has its publicists at the New York Postcall for the defeat of a bill which would extend the charter cap to 400 schools.
Victory Schools is the outfit that is sucking up 25¢ of every public funding dollar that should go to the students of Merrick Academy. In an article published in this past Sunday’s Daily News, New Yorkers learned of the involvement of Victory in a scheme which had Victory owner Steven Klinsky sending thousands of campaign dollars to State Senator Malcolm Smith; in turn, Smith directed over $100,000 of public dollars to a Victory School which had paid over three-quarters of a million dollars in management fees to Victory. National Heritage Academies is the corporation which challenged the right of its New York employees to organize into a union and bargain collectively. These are the “good” corporate citizens for whom NYCSA is going to the wall.
Truth be told, the presence of for profit corporations and money from right-wing corporations such as Wal-Mart and hedge-fund operators such as Richard Gilder and Carl Icahn has had a corrupting influence on New York charter schools. Last Friday, the Albany Times-Union published an article on how the leading voice in the anti-union jeremiad on the editorial pages of the New York Post and New York Daily News, Thomas Carroll of Brighter Choice Charter Schools, had received tens of millions of dollars from these sources. With that sort of support, no wonder that he has made the promotion of their agenda into a full-time job.
It’s this simple. New York Charter School Association: for profit, not for schools.
UPDATE:
A sharp reader points out that Jeff Clark, the President and CEO National Heritage Academies, is on NYCSA’s Board of Trustees, and that Bill Phillips, current NYCSA President, worked for two for-profits, Beacon Education Management and SABIS Educational Systems, prior to leading NYCSA.
UFT President Michael Mulgrew appeared on NY1’s “Inside City Hall” on Jan. 7. He spoke about charter schools, the Race to the Top application, this week’s class size lawsuit, and other issues.
There will be the usual attempts to spin the publication of a new study on New York City charter schools by the Center for Research on Educational Outcomes [CREDO]. Let us accept, for purposes of argument, the claim that will issue forth from the usual quarters that the study demonstrates that New York City charter schools are doing a much better job of educating students than district schools.* Three questions follow logically: More »
Once again the union is standing up for its members rather than kids by creating roadblocks and obstacles to the growth of charter schools, which definitive independent research, President Obama and the Regents have all said are crucial to our children’s future. The union’s proposal to constrain charters risks undermining New York’s shot at winning hundreds of millions of Race to the Top dollars while thwarting the efforts of thousands of parents who are demanding these innovative schools for their children. The ultimate aim of the union’s proposal is to destroy or unionize all charters.
To borrow a felicitous turn of phrase from New York Times sportswriter Mike Tanier, Cantor’s Ochocinco impersonation is dumbing down trash talk.
And like Ochocinco’s performance last night, Cantor is ‘0’ for the game. He doesn’t even pretend to address the main issues raised in the UFT’s report — the failure of charter schools to educate their far share of the neediest students, the profiteering off public funds which should be going to the classroom, the lack of transparency and accountability, the need to fix the broken charter funding formula. No, in a completely transparent way, it’s all about Tweed’s agenda to make sure that charter schools are not union schools.
Perhaps it was all because of an injury to Cantor’s typing fingers, and we should be praying for his quick recovery.
With growing appeals for changes in New York’s charter school law, prominent elected officials joined the United Federation of Teachers today in a call for major reforms which would ensure that charter schools become public schools in the fullest meaning of the term — not private schools supported with public funds.
State Senator John Sampson, leader of the Senate’s majority Democratic Conference, and New York City Comptroller John Liu joined UFT President Michael Mulgrew in this call. State Senators Eric Schneiderman and Toby Stavisky and State Assembly members Michael Benedetto, Alan Maisel, Jose Peralta, Adam Clayton Powell, IV and Linda Rosenthal were present and participating in the call.
Representatives of the New York Charter School Association have been lobbying against New York State receiving Race to the Top funds, elected officials in Albany and Washington DC have told the UFT. If successful, these efforts would deny funds for important educational reforms to both district and charter schools in New York — at a time when all of these schools are facing draconian cuts in funding.
But NYCSA — and the allied New York City Charter School Center — are once again placing their ideological agenda above the interests of the schools they claim to represent. Their agenda to eliminate the limits on charter school expansion in New York and create a completely deregulated, unfettered charter school sector, such as that in Arizona and Ohio, is taking precedence over the needs of all public schools — including charter schools. Little does it matter that where states like Arizona and Ohio have abandoned the careful and deliberate chartering of schools that has taken place in New York, an essential part of which is the charter cap, the quality of charter schools has plummeted. More »
Responding to the UFT’s proposals for 
Representatives of the New York Charter School Association have been lobbying against New York State receiving Race to the Top funds, elected officials in Albany and Washington DC have told the UFT. If successful, these efforts would deny funds for important educational reforms to both district and charter schools in New York — at a time when all of these schools are facing draconian cuts in funding.