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?

There was detailed oral testimony, reports in writing, PowerPoints, videos and presentations, mining school data and parsing each school’s performance, progress and circumstances. There were probably a dozen newspaper stories over the two months reporting on the hearings, several documenting the cases these speakers made. Independent research by the Center for New York City Affairs at the New School confirms much of what the advocates were saying.

On Jan 26-27, Klein attended the 9-hour PEP meeting where the cases were made again, with passion and conviction, by the people who will be most affected. Klein was scanning his Blackberry a lot.

In one telling moment about seven hours into the meeting, someone asked the mayor’s appointees on the panel if they could make the case for closing these schools. None of them did.

So the question can’t be whether the supporters of the targeted schools made a case to keep these schools open: that case was made again and again and again, at meeting after meeting. It’s whether Klein and the DOE have made a case for closing these schools. And the answer is no.

The DOE overrode its own criteria for closing schools in several instances, by closing some schools even when their Progress Report grades were better than the cutoffs, and frequently ignoring proficient Quality Reviews.

“These are schools that have graduation rates in the 40s,” he told Scotto (and has told anyone else who will listen). Forty percent is a figure, not a case. Looking closer, the average four-year rate in the closing high schools is 49 percent. Their six-year graduation rate is much higher at an average 62 percent, as you would expect in schools that serve high numbers of special education students, recent immigrants, transfers and over-the-counter kids.

Defending his record on closing more than 90 schools over eight years, many of them large full-service high schools, Klein told Scotto, “We’re replacing large failing high schools, like Far Rockaway and others with new, smaller, often career and technical, places where parents and children want to go.” Yet the school that took Far Rockaway’s most needy students when it closed was the only other one on the Rockaways peninsula — Beach Channel High School. Now Beach Channel is on the DOE’s closing list, having gone from a 4-year grad rate of about 52 percent (above the citywide average at that time) before Klein, to below 47 percent last year.

In fact, there is something of a pattern in the closing high schools of rising graduation rates before 2002-03 when Klein came in and declining rates in the years that followed. So when Klein says “failing,” as if they were someone else’s mess, it’s fair to ask what he did about them–or didn’t. Those schools were left to die, in the views of parents and teachers who knew them well. Klein cannot make the case that he tried to save them.

Supposedly students do better in the new small schools. By way of proof, Klein told Scotto they have higher graduation rates. He says parents vote with their feet and don’t send their children to the closing schools. He has said the same about his charter schools versus schools in the surrounding neighborhoods.

But there is a reason that parents in some of the closing school neighborhoods are starting to use the S-word (segregation) about Klein’s policies. The small schools, and the charter schools as well, do not serve the same populations as those in the abandoned large high schools. There are distinctions, by level of special education services required, by percentages of students in extreme poverty, by ELL percentages and the numbers of homeless and over-the-counter students. These findings are available and have been presented to Deputy White.

Some people at the PEP meeting said they feared a pattern of closing schools and opening charter schools in their communities was a stealth effort to privatize the management of their local public schools and cream the best students, leaving the most challenging kids in under-resourced or neglected schools. Are they ill-informed? Check this interactive map to see where the closing schools and charters are concentrated.

Klein then told Scotto that the whole PEP meeting was orchestrated by the UFT. “They orchestrated the whole thing, there’s no question, and they had a big rally beforehand to get people whipped up, and of course, you know, their job is to protect jobs. My job is to protect children.” (Yes, he really said that.)

As UFT President Michael Mulgrew told Elizabeth Kaledin on Inside City Hall Wednesday, the parents who came to the rally and PEP meeting on union-provided buses got, well, transportation. What they came to say was their business. To charge that they came to push a UFT agenda is silly and insulting. What they said was that they are seeing a move toward a two-tiered school system. And they are not going to stand for it.

Mike Johnston, a member of the Commission on No Child Left Behind, who is also a Colorado state senator and former principal, bunted some softball pitches lobbed at him late last year by interviewer Michael F. Shaughnessy of Eastern New Mexico University. Many of the observations were minor league.

By virtue of Johnston’s having been at some point and for some time an actual principal, he is “uniquely qualified to lead this committee,” according to Shaughnessy.

Johnston seeks to “build on the commission’s previous work by developing updated federal policy to improve teacher and principal effectiveness.”  The focus on teachers and principals as joint problem-solvers is commendable in theory. It’s more than a good idea; it’s indispensable to success.

But the relationship between classroom educators (who are the preponderant experts on education) and the executive who operates the building, must be symbiotic and without the prejudicial power of a superior force. Equality during fair weather that defaults to the doctrine of “rank has its privileges” when there’s an impasse is a ruse.

Principals are not forces of nature, given to divine right, especially these days when so many of them have no background in education. Is it too much to ask in this elusive climate of “reform” that school leaders actually possess vision rather than impose and enforce their own?

Johnston supports the commission’s “major shift in the way the nation measures teacher quality — from evaluations based on qualifications to those based significantly on classroom results together with principal or peer evaluations.”

(Oops — Johnston did not couple “teacher quality” with “principal quality” this time. Could it have been a reverse “slip of the tongue”?)

If he really means “or,” when he says “principal or peer evaluations,” then he’s a reformer we can believe in,at least tentatively. The phrase “classroom results” is a minefield of volatile implications. Teachers should no more lose their jobs over their students’  performance on standardized tests than should doctors lose their licenses over their patients’ performance on blood tests.

Johnston’s unquenchable thirst for the designer brand of NCLB Kool-Aid is enough to make true educators lose their insatiable appetite for teaching. He applauds that “states have developed the sophisticated data systems needed to measure…effectiveness.” He does not want to “prop up the status quo.”

Because “status quo” is a wet putty concept that means whatever people with conflicting views scheme it to mean to suit their aims, that adaptable abstraction is ideally fit for artificially unifying opposing camps. Very convenient.

But sure enough Johnston gives himself away by fulminating against seniority (I wonder whether he opposes seniority among members of Congress) and union contracts. He feels they “don’t make sense” because they keep experienced teachers on the job at the expense of “energetic” ones and they cause “inefficiency” in budgeting.

He cites, without disclaimer, the New Teacher Project. This innocuous sounding outfit is a notorious client of “reformist” school systems and union busters. It is not a legitimate and impartial source of research and it is an authority on nothing other than its self-aggrandizement. The NTP is highly suspicious and condemns the high percentage of satisfactory performance ratings earned by teachers. They interpret it as evidence that “excellence goes unrecognized, professional development needs go unmet, and poor performance goes unaddressed.”

From an unimpeachable source of warped logic.

Johnston’s stand on NCLB and special education is calculatingly naive and dense with gall. He says that “NCLB has changed the game for students with disabilities…They’re no longer invisible in state accountability systems,-which means they are finally getting more of the attention they deserve.”

Almost every special education teacher in the nation can testify to the falsity of this claim. Such irony. Such paradox. Such contradiction. Such cynicism.

The truth is that special education students are getting less attention than ever. Their needs are being neglected, services denied to them and deprivations concealed from them, their parents and teachers, on an unprecedented scale. Principals in  public school systems like New York City are given incentives and, indirectly, bonuses, for treating special education kids as second-class students.

To make sure that teachers don’t rest on their laurels, Johnston has pulled them out like rugs from under them. He appears to have renewed his long-term subscription to the Journal for Pseudo-Research, claiming that the “major reasons that students chose to drop out was that classes were not interesting,” not “because they couldn’t do the work,” or, presumably, unmentionable socio-economic factors.

NCLB is massively flawed but salvageable, although Johnson’s formula is doomed to fail even if it passes legislatively.Great transformations are possible in human and natural history. After all, ancient dinosaurs have been “salvaged” into modern pigeons.

So there’s hope for NCLB. Shall we throw a few crumbs to the reformers?

"You didn't ask WHICH goals."

In the world of Tweed’s top-down directives, issued by apparatchiks who view time spent in real schools with Kurtz’s “the horror, the horror,” more than one good idea has been transformed into its opposite.

In this regard, exhibit number one is the school quality review. In its original conception, the school quality review was founded on the premise that the most important information about a school’s performance came not from decontextualized statistics, but from observations by professional educators. A team of accomplished educator reviewers has a rich knowledge of good teaching and learning practices, so they can recognize in a school the presence — and the absence — of such practices. Just as importantly, they can provide useful feedback to a school on how a school can develop good teaching and learning practices.

But put that idea in the hands of Tweed, and it becomes a virtually unrecognizable caricature of the real thing. Too many of Tweed’s reviewers lack either the ability or the will to conduct a professional educational observation, and come sweeping into a school with a number of formal checklists in hand.  Too little of their time in the school is spent observing real classes and talking to real teachers and students. And too many principals lack even an elementary understanding of good teaching and learning practices, and so engage in the mindless production of volume upon volume of meaningless paper in a quest to satisfy what they see as the insatiable gods of the school quality review volcano.

Enter goals. Every professional teacher has goals for their classes and students. Sit down and have a conversation with a teacher about his or her students, and you will discover a robust knowledge of and ambitious agenda for those students. No New York City public school teacher has ever suggested that goal setting for students is not part of their professional obligation as educators.

But the way in which Tweed has run its school quality reviews has set loose something quite different, a paperwork Frankenstein centered on the mass production of written goals of every sort imaginable. In school after school, principals have set to producing volumes of paper that rival the Encyclopedia Britannica for size. Some principals went so far as to hire outside firms to aid in the production of paper. And the assembly line work of this production of paper has been unloaded upon teachers. Teachers have sent to me forms from their schools in which principals demand that teachers produce a minimum of three written goals every two weeks for their students, another set of goals for the term, and still another set of goals for the year. In high schools where teachers see from 150 to 170 students every day, this is an incredible diversion of time and energy that should be dedicated to the classroom, and all to no constructive educational purpose.

For close to two years now, the UFT has met with top officials at Tweed on this issue of the mindless production of paper for the school quality reviews. In conversation after conversation, they all insist that this state of affairs is not what they intended and that reams of paper will not help a principal score well on a school quality review. But when it comes to actually telling a principal to cease and desist, they fall back on their dogma that the principal is king of his castle and do nothing.

Faced with the proliferation of paper work goals that detracted from education and the unwillingness of Tweed to rein it in, the UFT filed grievances which demanded that time be provided for this work, so that it not continue to detract from the real work of education.

Such “details” matter little to the growing legion of spin-meisters working under Tweed’s Press Secretary David Cantor. With a firm belief that there is an never ending supply of “useful idiots” who will carry their message without asking troubling questions, they have been telling all who will listen that teachers and the UFT don’t want to set goals for their students.  And there certainly are the always gullible, such as Eduwonk’s Andy Rotherham, who rush to the barricades on Tweed’s behalf without asking even the simplest of questions. But Tweed has tried to fool all the people for too long, and those with a modicum of independence and integrity now ask the questions. And the answers do not place the reign of Joel Klein in a positive light.

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.

As we approached the capital, we were excited to participate in the day, be part of the political process, and were ready to advocate for our school. You could imagine our concern when we entered the convention hall and encountered a “message” quite different than our own. Although there were similar groups representing their own schools, the day’s organizers were pushing a very negative message about public schools, certain public officials and teachers unions.

I was asked by a colleague, “What are they so upset about?” I explained the events of the past few weeks, the aborted effort to raise the charter cap, and several of the reforms that I believe the charter movement must embrace, including greater fiscal transparency and accountability and reforming the charter funding formula towards student-based funding. Many of these reforms were proposed by the UFT and supported by many legislators. The response from each and every parent with us was one of overwhelming support for these reforms.

But these are not the reforms that organizers from the New York Charter Schools Association and the New York City Center for Charter Schools want to advocate. Instead, the mood was anti-public school. The pre-packaged, pre-printed message that we were handed was narrow. We were instructed to demand that elected officials protect just charter schools from funding cuts — as if the other public schools don’t matter. As if we’re not in the middle of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. But this wasn’t real parent, teacher, and student voice. It was an agenda — driven by special interests in the charter movement — and the good people in New York’s charter community were being used to promote it. It was upsetting to see that when parents’ voices were loudest, the message they brought was not really their own.

We left the rally and got some much needed fresh air. When the teachers, parents, and students from Beginning with Children met with our elected officials, we chose to speak from the heart. Parents and students spoke in their own words. It was powerful (and gratifying) to hear the children speak about our school in such a positive manner. It was equally humbling to listen to the reasons why our parents decided to enroll their children in our school. One parent explained why he travels some distance to drop off his 5th grade daughter every morning. As he described, “both of my sons graduated from there and are doing so well because of the education they received.” This was true advocacy and an authentic message, from the hearts and minds of the people who know and care.

I am proud of what Beginning with Children accomplished in Albany. As a charter school teacher for close to a decade, I am passionate about our sector. As a union member I am secure in my right to speak. No scripts. No talking points. Just from the heart.

But a closer look reveals that to a large extent the differences in school graduation rates are a function of a very specific demographic rather than a function of school quality. Joel Klein has concentrated high-need (self contained) special education students in fewer and fewer high schools because — for whatever reason — his new schools generally do not accept them. These are students who require very small classes and intensive academic, behavioral and/or emotional support. Those are just words to folks who do not teach, but to the schools that embrace these kids (and the closing high schools did indeed embrace them) they conjure up a world of challenges. These are the kids whom teachers wake up to worry about at 4 a.m., and sometimes the worry is that no one else will worry. For many teachers the idiosyncratic success of special education kids is deeply meaningful simply because every scrap of it is so hard-won. For many, success with self-contained special education is why they teach.

These students do not, however, tend to graduate with a diploma, on time.

When we look at high need schools as a whole, the differences in graduation rates generally track the differences in the rate of self-contained students. To exaggerate only slightly, show me a high-need NYC high school that is 10% behind its “peers” for graduation, and I’ll show you a school with 10% more self-contained students. To be more precise, the statistical fact of the matter is that in the relationship of the 190 schools in a composite of the DoE’s peer groups for the closing schools, there exists a significant negative correlation between the graduation rate and the percent of self-contained students in the school. As one number goes down as the other goes up:

So I ask two questions:

First, Tweed has said that one of its core goals in creating sophisticated accountability is to get beyond demographics to a true measure of the quality of the school. So, when will Tweed own up?

And second: What is Joel Klein doing for self-contained students in these schools?

I’ll answer that second question. What he’s doing is “incentivizing.” Next year, he’s giving schools a little more extra credit on their Progress Reports if they can move these kids along.

One might think Tweed would acknowledge that it had created a real problem: a separate and unequal school system that was being unfairly blamed for Tweed’s own mismanagement.

One might also think Tweed would have said, “Gee, maybe we need to think more about creating broader, academically diverse institutions; focusing our talents on research-driven coherent programs for high-need students; and ensuring that they are implemented with fidelity.”

But that’s not how Tweed thinks. There are some excellent instructional people at Tweed, but they don’t happen to have much power. Those in power decided that the problem for special education students is all a matter of incentives. So the prescription is extra points on Progress Reports for self-contained, backed by the threat of closing down the school.

Let the gaming begin.

[Sources for the chart are DoE HS data set for Progress Reports and 2008-2009 Special Education Delivery Reports found at each school’s Web site.]

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 $500 million 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?

Andrew also made a serious accusation about the state Legislature doing “harmful things” to charters. What specifically does he have in mind? Could it be Speaker Silver and State Senator Sampson’s proposal to double the charter cap from 200 to 400 — thereby placing the state in a stronger position to win Race to the Top funding? Or efforts to replace the City’s mad rush to grant charters with a more prudent approach by the Regents and SUNY based on a common standard of quality? How about the proposal to strengthen parent (democratic) voice, rather than the blatant disregard that has characterized Klein’s administration? Or the bolstering of charter oversight to avoid future embarrassing scandals such as those perpetrated by his fellow BES alumna Sheila Joseph? Surely Andrew also wants to end the shameless profiteering by for-profit management companies, like Victory Schools, and by over-paid CEOs?

Alternately, perhaps Andrew was instead referring to the damaging work of charter lobbyists, “huddling” with the elected officials who do their bidding, which scuttled necessary reforms. Precisely which legislative agenda does Andrew support?

During the past three years, we’ve admired how seriously Andrew takes the school’s mission to prepare students for active citizenship. Students gave impressive point/counter-point testimonies on mayoral control, although their arguments to extend term limits seemed to oversell the Mayor’s accomplishments. Not limited to sober hearings and speeches, students celebrated on inauguration day with the rest of Harlem. It also seems that Andrew might share our concerns over equity of opportunity across the charter sector, given that his school’s English language learner and poverty rates are closer to the neighborhood averages than found in most of the City’s charters. Despite an attenuated argument (as parsed by Aaron Pallas), Andrew claims to be opposed to creaming the best students, as are we.

So given his track record of democratic deliberation and expressed commitment to equity, how then does Andrew square the decision to cut and run to Rhode Island? [2] How will he explain this to the students and parents of Democracy Prep, which hasn’t even graduated its inaugural class [3]? Or to state officials, from whom he is expecting a second charter and who might expect Andrew to stick around?

While Andrew may consider himself among “the best charter operators in the country” who are also “mobile,” families often don’t have the same luxury. The least they should be able to expect is some stability in their public institutions and commitment from public officials. Maybe Seth Andrew simply prefers lessons in democracy from Obama’s predecessor, who never intended to “stay the course.”

[1] We recognize that Andrew has not yet fully benefited from this particular largess, notwithstanding other means of ample support.

[2] We trust that Andrew is not simply attracted to the de-regulated, wild-west nature of Rhode Island’s charter sector, which has no components of a model accountability system or mechanism for performance-based contracts.

[3] Calling Mona Davids!

Terrell reminded me of Reuben Nassau, a high school classmate of mine. “When the lights go out, we all Negroes,” Reuben said to me after I rejected his homecoming invitation.

Terrell and Reuben Nassau were about as similar as a lobster and a unicorn.

During my first, nervous, long-skirted week of teaching, Terrell was quiet, peaceful, and polite. As a new teacher, it’s so nice to have someone treat you with politeness, I wrote in a note to him after the first week of class.

Terrell remained quiet, peaceful, and polite for the rest of the semester.

Terrell came to class in spurts. He’d come for almost an entire week, and then leave an empty seat in the third row for the next week.

I missed Terrell when that chair was empty.

Terrell’s handwriting was large and slanted and he could barely read it himself. Terrell wanted to be a lawyer.

Terrell’s average in my class was a zero. I was unsure how his reading or writing skills were because he didn’t turn anything in. His grandmother told me during parent-teacher night that she thinks it is because he is overweight and has that big, discolored birthmark on his neck. She referred to it as the “mark.” Terrell stood behind her, holding her little, faded-yellow sweater around his arms. I told Witchell’s grandmother that his grades were way too low, but as a gentleman, his marks were exceptional.

Terrell’s grandmother was my third and last parent that came to parent-teacher night. She was the most polite.

One day in class, we were working on our outlines for our Lord of the Flies character analysis papers. I made my way around to Terrell, who sat with pen in hand, book closed neatly. His hair was tied back in the usual ponytail. He smiled at me.

How you doin’ on this, Terrell?

To be honest? He looked up at me. Not so good, Miss G.

I pulled up a chair and sat, noticing two large runs in my stockings.

Tell me what to help you with, Terrell. Say the words.

Terrell tells me that really— he needs to read the book. I agree with him. He also tells me that he would like to read it. But now, he has no time.

But Terrell, I tell him, I read you the book in class. You must have caught some pieces.

Yeah, but the way you read, Miss G, he says.

What about it?

Your voice. It’s different. It’s real interesting, but I forget to pay attention to the story sometimes.

Yuna, my hairdresser, still tells me the story of the Tortoise and the Hare. The story is all right, but I am always more fascinated by her Korean accent — the way her tongue makes mundane words brand new.

I pull a chair up to Terrell’s desk.

So, let’s see… with all the materials I’ve given you, you could write the paper without having read the book. It would just take some time… Let’s say, about three hours. The essay is 40 percent of your grade. Three hours and you’d pass.

Terrell stares in thought. He looks sophisticated. Like a CEO. A monk.

You have to decide if it’s worth it.

He nods his head, like he understands; he just needs to find room for the equation in his head.

I’m looking for the place between us where it escapes, where I lose him, where my words and his words, after getting along so nicely, part ways without exchanging numbers.

Well, see Miss G, here’s the thing.

Tell me “the thing.”

I wait…

The thing is, it’s not just this class. Not just your class.

I wait…

I mean, I’m failing all of my classes.

I listen.

There’s more than three hours in store for me if I want to pass, you know? I have all this work for global, and I never wake up in time for Ms. Rios class either, so I’m all messed up in math…

You’re failing all those classes?

Yeah.

Lord of the Flies became trivial, almost mind-numbing. Piggy is at McDonald’s ordering a Number Two, Super-Sized with a Cherry Coke.

How does that feel? I ask, forgetting my role as “teacher,” because I really want to know.

Honestly? he begins.

I wait.

I wait.

You just get kinda used to it.

I look.

Yeah, I guess I’m kinda just used to it.

I look at Terrell — polite, warm, Terrell — and see the comfortable little cove of what I’ve titled “failure” that he has made into his home. It has worn-in furniture, orange candles, a locked door, no peephole. I can see somebody laying there, by the flickering earth-tone light, not really wanting to leave. I’m trying to decide if I could even blame him. I’m wondering if maybe I could even get comfortable there.

“Encouragement,” we learned in the humid mass of pedagogy at Teacher’s College. We learned to stand cheering YOU CAN DO IT, even if our hearts believe, “Let’s instill some hope, at least.” We learn remember that chapter we read on positive feedback.

I’d like to tape a sign outside the door of that comfortable shack of failure, that has so many kids like Terrell, just warm and waiting. It would say:

BEFORE ENTERING:

1. Don’t bother pretending to believe in me.
2. It may take a lot more than what you’ve come with to prove you care.
3. You will begin as nothing, and may end as everything.

As a sunburnt little girl in Ocean City years back, I watched a turtle tiptoeing so slowly across a speeding highway, headed straight for his own splattering death. I assessed his speed, his misdirection, and translated it into all I knew how to: weakness. I never sensed possible courage. I mistook him for helpless.

Yuna would say, “Turtle go slow. But bottom line, get there. Turtle get there.”

We’ll get there, Terrell, I think. You help me when I get tired, and I’ll help when you get tired. But let’s get there.

That teacher is Joel Klein, and the students are New York City elementary and middle public schools. Klein just announced [see here and here], that no matter how they performed — good, bad or indifferent — 5% of the schools would fail on the School Progress Reports, 10% would receive a ‘D’ grade and 25% would receive an ‘A’ grade.

Why would Klein do what no educator with integrity would do? Because the goal here is not educational. It is political. What this change does is ensure that he will have 5% to 15% of the schools eligible for closure. And having been through a year when Tweed continually amended Educational Impact Statements and offered ex post facto justifications for failing to follow its own standards in closing schools, he is now intent that he will have schools with the appropriate scores to close.

Only a persistently failing management of a school system could determine that its schools were failures, before one piece of its data was in.

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?

Just about everything. As reported by Gotham Schools and the New York Post, Joseph ran ENY Prep as if it were her personal fiefdom, telling parents, teachers, students and her own board members that it was her way or the highway.  From the City’s own (and understated) report, her “superintendent” salary was repeatedly increased without any Board deliberation; Joseph allowed “broad discrepancies” in her accounting of student enrollment — the very basis of ENY Prep’s $2.6 million in public revenue; she remained on the school’s Board of Trustees (voting on her own compensation, no less) despite a City order for her to resign; she submitted incomplete financial disclosure forms.  Most damning, the City found in the school’s Board “a lack of interest or ability in overseeing the academic, operational or fiscal operations of the school.”

But that’s only half the story. All, ALL, of ENY Prep’s teachers left or were fired last year. The State Education Department found that Joseph discharged 48 students, conveniently before state exams were given, and disabled students were “counseled” out of the school.  In commenting on the findings, the City’s charter schools chief Mike Duffy described them as the worst violations he’d ever seen.

In a shameless effort to barricade their positions, the New York Charter School Association and the NYC Center for Charter School Excellence have claimed that ENY Prep’s likely closure is proof that charter “accountability” is working, and needs no reform.  But their case is as weak as it is theoretical:

Take, for starters, that 100 percent of the ENY Prep students who took last year’s math exam met or exceeded state standards; 86 percent met or exceeded the standard in ELA.  Despite Joseph’s arrogance and dysfunction, teachers and students were accountable for their responsibilities and performed at a high level.

And consider the courageous, if distressed, efforts by parents to stop Joseph’s reign of terror.  In this widely circulated letter, concerned parents chronicled years of malpractice — from the dissolution of the school’s founding board and Joseph’s efforts to block a parent association to a pattern of student expulsions and teachers living in fear of termination. Parents were accountable for their responsibilities, and took action to improve the school.

If charter sector accountability was working, why didn’t city and state officials step up their oversight when Joseph paid herself $217,000 in 2006-07 (nearly 13 percent of the school’s gross revenue)?  Why weren’t the red flags noticed when ENY Prep omitted teacher turnover data on their mandatory state reports?  Didn’t officials notice all those board resignations and student “withdrawals”?

Finally, why did Klein’s charter chief only investigate the school after parents raised concerns and after Joseph’s damage was done? Why, having failed so miserably at providing oversight of a school they chartered, are Klein and Mayor Bloomberg fighting against efforts to bring real accountability to the New York charter sector?

The fact of the matter is that the charter sector remains unaccountable to students, parents, and the public at large.  Although some individual charters take their public responsibilities seriously, the sector does not have sufficient safeguards against Joseph’s kind of abuse.  As Mona Davids, head of the New York Charter Parents Association has expressed, parents have insufficient recourse to fight against inexcusable practices.  As Juan Gonzalez has reported, the charter sector has invited corruption, self-dealing, and profiteering.  Left unchecked, Gonzalez warns that Bloomberg’s “mad rush” to create more charters without meaningful accountability will unleash “bigger financial scandals than in the bad old days of community school boards.”

In early January, the UFT proposed a series of reforms to make charter schools more accountable and transparent to the students, parents, and public that charters must serve and to the teachers they employ.  The UFT was joined by many elected officials who see the same abuses and know they must be put to an end.

These recommendations called for:

• limits on charter school administrator and management salaries to within the appropriate range of public sector compensation,
• empowering the City and State comptrollers to audit charter schools’ fiscal, operational, and programmatic activities,
• holding charter school board members and employees to the same and rigorous financial disclosure requirements and conflict of interest prohibitions as all other public officials,
• more timely public reporting of all sources of a charter school’s funding and all fees paid to outside consultants and contractors; employee names and salaries, including data on teacher turnover; annual budgets; and audited financial statements;
• establishing independent parent associations or parent and teacher associations and school leadership teams similar to those required in district public schools, and
• automatic recognition of the unions that represent employees in the school district where a charter is located as the representative of workers in charter schools for the negotiation of de novo contracts.

If adopted, these proposals would strengthen the charter sector’s accountability and transparency. Had they existed prior to Sheila Joseph’s arrival on the charter scene, many of her transgressions could have been avoided. Parents would not be scrambling to find a new school. Teachers would not be afraid to speak up, would not face retaliation, and could negotiate a contract with management that is custom-tailored to their school.

To these proposals we’d like to add one more — state receivership.  It is unconscionable that in places like East New York Preparatory Charter School and Merrick Academy Charter School, the students, parents, and teachers are punished for the failures of the school’s Board of Trustees and the city and state’s lackluster “oversight.”  In these instances, the state must have the authority to take over the charter school and re-constitute the board of trustees. This will allow successful schools — as measured by the hard work of students, teachers, and parents — to continue and blossom under leadership that actually puts children first. That would be real, not punitive and theoretical, accountability.

[Editor's note: Mr. Foteah is a second-year teacher in an elementary school in Queens. He blogs at The World As I See It, where this post originally appeared.]

Several weeks ago, my colleague across the hall and I were offered what sounded like a sensational opportunity for our impoverished students, something they might never experience in their lives: a trip to see the Broadway show “Wicked.” We were thrilled up until the point when we were told “the catch.” We each have 28 kids in our class, but, unfortunately, only 43 tickets were available.

Ouch. Talk about a punch in the gut. I am staunchly against ever withholding the experience of a field trip from my students, even for behavioral issues. (I’ll clarify: I would never disallow a child to attend the trip based on a transgression in school. I don’t believe in taking things away without warning, like some teachers do. I would however, if cause arose, make the child earn the right to go on the trip. The latter scenario has not occurred in my career thus far).

Given the news that only 43 out of 56 children would be getting this once-in-a-lifetime gift, I knew I would be forced to make some difficult decisions.

There was another wrench in the plan. Our two other colleagues in the grade were not offered any tickets, effectively shutting their students out. We rectified this though, and extended invitations to them to select students they felt should go, saying we would chaperone. One colleague, who teaches an ESL class, felt her students would be uncomfortable with us, given the potential for communication barriers. (There are no issues among us in school, but we all agreed a trip without their patient, strategy-equipped teacher could be difficult). The other chose 12 students.

I spent about an hour one night agonizing over which of my students I would offer the trip to. There were some absolutes, students who always do homework, demonstrate effort, and respect themselves and others (my core ideals for my classroom). The others I chose were the students who came pretty close to those standards.

The day came when I had to tell the class everything that was going on, and when I brought them to the meeting area to do so, I was terribly nervous. Leaving nearly half my class behind goes against what I believe as a provider of memories and unique experiences for my students. However, I was fair in the way I chose the ticket recipients. I asked the class to tell me what I look for in my students, to name those traits I value.

They were able to tell me: respect for self and others, homework completion, and effort in class (which can be measured by the amount of pride a student takes in his work — something that I feel is evidenced through handwriting, depth of thought, neatness, etc). With those attributes listed on the board, I explained that the only fair way for me to select students for this special trip was to choose the ones who best embodied them. And so, 15 permission slips were distributed, and 13 pairs of eyes were cast downward. I felt terrible, but I took it as a teachable moment.

“There are rewards in life for hard work,” I told them. “Right now, some students are being rewarded with a special trip. In the future, it could be the middle school you want to go to, or the college, or your job. But whatever it is, when you work hard, you receive rewards.”

Was the message lost on those students who were left behind for the trip? I don’t know. I don’t think I’ll ever know. But I have no trouble sleeping at night knowing what I did. I could have easily made a list of “good” and “bad” students, but that would fly in the face of my belief that there are no such things, only “students making choices.” I could have taken my highest achievers, but why penalize the ones who go to work with their parents on school nights, or who’s parents aren’t able to help them at home? I could have taken my “favorites” — oops! We know no teacher has those!

You get the point. No, I am confident I did the right thing. In an ideal situation, every one of the students in every one of the classes in the grade would be going, but the solution at which I arrived was fairest. My students left behind may think that makes me wicked, but I think they realize and appreciate my reasoning.

The trip was awesome. The kids all dressed like handsome young men and lovely young ladies — ties, shoes, and all! The flipside of it is that the kids who weren’t coming looked emerald green with envy as the other munchkins strolled in. I definitely felt badly for them, but I received good news on the bus ride to the show. Seems like more tickets are on the way, so everyone will get a chance to see the show.