A high school for at-risk students in Manhattan, now located in a beautiful state-of-the-art facility, will be relocated to make room for Eva Moskowitz’s charter empire to grow.
The students at Innovation Diploma Plus high school will be relocated to a 90-year-old school with no science labs or gym.
Success Academy recently raised its management fee to $2,000 per student. It has a wealthy and powerful board of directors. The city gives the charter chain free space in public school buildings wherever it wants, despite community protests. Success academy (formerly known as Harlem Success Academy) has recently expanded into middle-class and gentrifying neighborhoods, like affluent District 2 in Manhattan , Cobble Hill and Williamsburg in Brooklyn, and the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I think Eva should be required to take all the pregnant/parenting teens that are currently enrolled at Diploma Plus so they can continue to utilize the daycare facility.
Ooops, Success Academies are elementary schools, aren’t they? My bad. In that case, she should have to provide for those teens’ daycare services out of her own pocket.
Get ready for a Success Academy in Inwood, a “gentrifying neighborhood.”
The confiscation of the school is troubling..the message being sent to these kids makes me want to holler and scream. Maybe a few other New Yorkers will do the same?
They tried that already. A protest in front of the building, etc. We need a new tactic. Any suggestions?
Armed rebellion?
What is a “management fee” and who pays it?
Who gets the fee???
I don’t know the details here, but in general:
Each Charter Management Organization (CMOs) has a central organization that oversees and supports all of its member schools. Public funding is paid to the individual schools based on how many students they have. In order to support the central organization, the schools pay a fee to the central organization. In return, the central organization provides all sorts of services and support to the individual schools. It is possible that the central organization was running at a deficit so it needed to raise the fee. It is possible that the central organization has taken on additional service responsibilities and therefore needed to raise the fee. Without knowing more of the details of what services and provided, it is impossible to know if the individual schools are getting a “good deal” or not. Meanwhile, the compensation of the CMO executives is publicly disclosed and, of course, many people like to yap about those numbers. Finally, all of the CMO entities are usually nonprofit organizations.
Unless Diane knows a lot more about the finances of Success Academy than her blog posts reveal, she might just be using an incomplete fact to try to suggest impropriety. She can comment on what she knows.
Ken,
I have no inside information about Success Academy’s finances. I find it objectionable that SA takes space away from public schools when it has the resources to buy, lease or rent its own space. I also find it objectionable that it is moving into affluent and middle-income communities when its purpose was to “save” minority kids from “failing schools.” I can’t understand how anyone could feel good about pushing the high school for high-needs kids out of Brandeis to make more space for Eva’s charter. This kind of divisive behavior gives charters a bad name.
It should stop.
Diane
Thanks for the reply! Let’s assume that every point you just made was a good one. Why would you repeatedly write about the $2000 management fee as if something was clearly wrong with that when you don’t know the facts?
Ken, my understanding is that Success Academy’s management fee is now about the same as found in for-profit charters, about double that of other NYC nonprofits. You might want to read this by Leonie Haimson: http://nycpublicschoolparents.blogspot.com/2012/04/letter-to-suny-board-abou
t-success.html
Rightly or wrongly, I believe that when a corporation is as rich as Success Academy, it should not seek free public space because that reduces the space needed by public schools. I understand that the adolescents who will be removed from the Brandeis complex to make way for the expansion of Eva’s charter are 100% black and Hispanic; 50% pregnant girls. They are being shabbily, and they have no political influence. Doesn’t that make you feel bad?
Diane
The school pays it to the management company out of what it gets from the state/district per pupil money. So ultimately, we all pay it.
I looked up the cost per student of public education in New York. the state has not only spends the more per student ($16,239) but gets lower scores. “Governor Andrew Cuomo has argued that this funding has not necessarily led to higher achievement in the classroom, and the grade of C- for student achievement, ranked in the middle of all states, backs that assertion.”
Instead of castigating Success Acadamy, I recommend seeing what they’re doing. After all, this is supposed to be “about the kids”.
Jim Davis,
New York has one of the most inequitably funded school systems in nation.
Success Academy has additional funding by billionaires. Its CEO is not an educator. She is paid nearly half a million. Can’t compare apples and strawberries.