Horace Meister, a former data analyst at the New York City Department of Education, knows how to find the data. Here he tells a gripping, data-based story of hypocrisy.
He writes:
“The Hypocrisy of So-Called Ed Reformers and Politicians: A Short Story”
Andrew Cuomo, the Governor of New York State, recently released a report called The State of New York’s Failing Schools. This report claims to present “statistics and facts” that “expose a public education system badly in need of change” and is designed to support Cuomo’s proposal to turn “failing” schools over to private management and convert them into charter schools. But are these public schools failing? Are charter schools the answer? The facts say no.
To help concretize the question why don’t we take a closer look at one charter chain? Let’s examine how Success Academy maintains its success. Success Academy, the largest charter chain in New York City, and Cuomo are close allies. Success Academy’s donors donated generously to Cuomo’s re-election campaign too. Cuomo was a behind-the-scenes advocate of last year’s charter school rally in Albany led by Eva Moskowitz, CEO of Success Academy. A rally for which Success Academy closed its schools and bussed its students to the capital. Success Academy is repeating this gimmick, a gimmick that would be illegal for any public school, again this week.
Success Academy’s schools in Harlem have data going back a couple of years. The most recent data show that the Success Academy schools are not truly succeeding and the public schools identified as “failing” are not truly failing. New York City’s districts 3, 4, 5, and 6 overlap with the geographic boundaries served by Success Academy’s Harlem schools. There are 31 schools within this geographic region that are “failing” New York State accountability measures.
How do the students served by these 31 schools compare to the students served by Success Academy? The data are incontrovertible. Success Academy serves a much more privileged student body. The 31 “failing” schools serve an average of 22.9% English Language Learners, 25.6% special education students, 7.9% high need special education students, 22.8% students living in temporary housing, 70.7% students receiving public assistance, 83.4% students receiving free lunch, and 5.4% students entering middle school overage. On the other hand, Success Academy schools in the same geographic region serve on average 4.9% English Language Learners, 13.9% special education students, 0.7% high need special education students, 7.9% students living in temporary housing, 55.7% students receiving public assistance, 72.3% students receiving free lunch, and 0% students entering middle school overage.
It is obvious, as has been shown again and again in every data set ever studied, that the measures currently used to identify failing schools fail to accurately measure true school performance. Instead, they largely penalize schools that serve the neediest students. Despite claims by advocacy groups such as the so-called “Families for Excellent Schools” [funded by the Walton family, the Broad family, and other billionaire families], “a major ally of charter-school leader Eva Moskowitz,” the data clearly show that charter schools only succeed by not serving the most challenging students. They are definitely not the solution for closing the opportunity gap between America’s privileged and under-privileged.
The ending of our short tale grows yet more sordid. It turns out that Success Academy deliberately manipulated its enrollment system to avoid serving the neediest students in the communities in which it was located. On March 28, 2012 Success Academy requested that its charter authorizer “eliminate an existing, absolute at-risk admissions priority for students zoned to attend failing New York City public schools.” In what can only be characterized as an outright lie Success Academy claimed that this “preference… was difficult to apply, confusing to the public and… contributed to not allowing the schools to attract sufficient numbers of English Language Learners.”
Success Academy revealed its disdain for the members of the communities it is supposedly serving when it claimed the public was confused by an enrollment system that gave priority to students from certain schools. The charter chain misled when it claimed that it was “difficult to apply.” How hard can it be to prioritize students from “failing” schools, schools that we know are really serving a preponderance of at-risk students?
Success Academy lied when it claimed to want to create “a variable set-aside for ELLs, which would be set at 20 percent of the incoming class for the 2012-13 school year.” The data show that in the 2011-12 school year the Success Academy schools in Harlem served 6.3% ELLs. In 2012-13 that number declined to 6.2% ELLs and in 2013-14 that number declined even further to 4.9% ELLs.
It is obvious that by eliminating the priority for students from schools serving a preponderance of at-risk students, including high numbers of English Language Learners, Success Academy was able to further diminish the already small number of ELLs they served.
The charter authorizer, as is all too common, rubber-stamped Success Academy’s request. There was no genuine accountability and no oversight. The truth is obvious to anyone who bothers to examine the facts. Charter schools as a whole, despite claims by Cuomo and by charter special interest groups, have no interest in serving the students who are most in need. In fact some charter schools, as we have seen is the case with Success Academy, actively avoid serving these students. So what is their end-game?
Charter schools such as Success Academy, and their enabling politicians, want to expand their privatized education empires by increasing their ability to skim off the better situated students in public schools. Instead of closing the achievement gap, such a policy, if enacted, would further bifurcate America. What then is the solution?
In a country with almost 14,000 school districts, in a country where private schools exist in order to avoid having students from certain social classes interact at school with students from other social classes, in a country where the courts have made it extremely difficult to enforce schemes designed to establish equitable diversity within schools, we must re-open the national conversation on how to create schools that are a microcosm of our ideal inclusive society. Whatever it takes, from re-thinking housing policy, to sharing tax-revenue across regions, to re-visiting school enrollment systems, we must ensure that schools across America become less segregated, more integrated, and that there is less variability in demographics between schools in geographic proximity.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I don’t disagree with anything written here…particularly the issues with the haves and have nots. The Failing Schools report, while intended to show how poorly schools were doing on those ridiculous state tests, actually showed a glaring problem with poverty. These children are being held hostage by a system that wants to keep them down intentionally. Also, the charter schools have no unions. That’s what Cuomo really wants.
Well, if Cuomo’s plan for NY education wasn’t clear before, it is now. He wants to continue to blame teachers and make it easier to fire them. Since not enough teachers failed their evaluations, he now wants to change the rules he agreed to. This teacher churn will have a detrimental effect on students, thus creating more reason for charters and privatization. He will further show that charters are needed because students are failing standardized tests (I won’t even get into that here.) He is already researching ways (from Massachusetts) to have private entities take over “failing” schools. The plan is set out clearly, and NY teachers, students, parents and taxpayers will grapple with issues that other states have been dealing with for years now.
Three cheers for Mr. Meister!! Critical information. We all know where the devil lives. (Seem s/he has an office at Success Academy.)
Decent, intelligent Americans who are sick of the corruption must stop the “throwing away your vote” mantra about third-party candidates, and must get very involved in changing election laws to give us more candidates and at least one more major party. It’s going to have to be either revolution or changing our system of fielding and electing candidates, and it must mean getting and staying involved in politics at the local level. It also means working long and hard at changing campaign funding. Revolutions are messy, and can make things worse, so –
Restating the obvious is not going to change anything.
Evey state needs a “Know Your Charter”:
“When we started Know Your Charter some criticized us for only posting district and charter school data. They said the only “fair” comparison (even though it is districts that lose money from the charter school funding system, not schools) was to look at building-to-building data. We chose to look at district-level data first because it is districts, not individual schools in them, that lose money to charters.
Well, today we posted the building data as well. So now it is possible to compare every Ohio school building — district or charter — with each other, as well as districts. This adds to the comparative data available at Know Your Charter. Including the building level data increases by 17 the number of data points now available for the public to compare. Adding those 17 points to the 26 from the original site and there are now 43 data points for comparing districts, schools and charters.”
http://10thperiod.blogspot.com/2015/02/know-your-charter-adds-data.html
M Fisher may not “disagree with anything written here”.
I do!
The butchering of the language along with a dearth of logical thought hinders the anti-edudeformer crowd almost as much as the edudeformers.
“It is obvious, as has been shown again and again in every data set ever studied, that the measures currently used to identify failing schools fail to accurately measure true school performance.”
The tests that make up these supposed assessments of the teaching and learning process and by extension the supposed evaluations of teachers, schools and districts are fraught with error. The main error/mistake (aside from the UNETHICAL USE of student learning assessments for purposes other than informing instruction) being that none of these assessments are “measuring devices”. They do not “measure” anything as there is no agreed upon “standard” of measurement, not to mention no agreed upon definition of what student learning entails. Without that, and Wilson proves that there can never be those agreements, any results are COMPLETELY INVALID, in other words, USELESS.
Folks, we’ve got to learn to quit using the edudeformers’ language ASAP. Using the wrong ideas and terminology makes our struggle all the harder.
“crowd almost as much as it helps the edudeformers”
Ay, Ay, Ay!!
Duane: With all due respect I think you have over-reacted to the excesses of the education reformer crowd. While it is true that tests are not perfect measuring devices they are definitely a source of information. Your argument plays right into the hands of folks who think that teachers don’t want to be held “accountable” (I would prefer the word “responsible”) for anything. We do. We just want the framework to be a fair one.
“…in a country where private schools exist in order to avoid having students from certain social classes interact at school with students from other social classes….”
Well, in some cases, sure. But private schools also exist because public schools have become co-opted by the testing industry. I would actually prefer that my children were in public school with a diverse cohort of fellow students, and I’m part of the diversity committee of my daughters’ school which seeks to make the school look more like public schools in terms of demographics. But so long as I can afford otherwise I will not subject my kids to year-round test prep and testing and the accompanying “no excuses” discipline found in low income schools like our local school. I realize that much of the testing and “no excuses” nonsense comes from above, and now mandated by law. Somehow public schools need to find a way to throw off the yoke of testing and test prep and then go beyond that to how can schools better serve individual students rather than students existing to serve the schools?
It’s difficult to cast off the yoke of testing when there is a collusion of billionaires and politicians making sure they hobble public schools. The main problem is too much money in politics creates a climate of free market, free rein for corporations, and people are just collateral damage.
I’ve been saying for years that if politicians are going to make education policy completely on standardized test scores, then they should just rank the schools by poverty level and then penalize the ones with the highest levels, since that is what the standardized test scores show anyway. It would save time and money and show what is really happening in schools.
In Utah, a bill by the eternal public school enemy, Senator Howard Stephenson, would take over “failing” schools and put them into control of the state office of education. How are those “failing” schools determined? Need I even ask? It says that “failing” charter schools would also be affected, but one of the worst charters is online, so I have no idea how that would work. Of course, that failing charter school could be shut down, but it’s a Connections Academy (hello, Pearson) school, so I’m not holding my breath.
I am half-expecting Cuomo to propose exempting charter schools from having to submit data to the SED. Even I, not a statistician, am able to glean quite easily the inequities between charter schools and the public schools they draw from just by looking at the NYS School Report Cards.
The truth doesn’t matter to pols like Cuomo and Melloy who only want to satisfy their bosses on Wall Street who buy them off and make demands, ie, destroy the public sector unions. They win by dividing the people against themselves and will continue to win until, perhaps, the invasion of charters into the suburbs, which is coming, awakens the voting populace to the danger in their midst and some sense of community with the urban population is recognized.
I was interested to see Senator Warren come out and denounce Gov. Walker this week for his comment implying that standing up against teachers trying to protect collective bargaining in Wisconsin was akin to facing down ISIS. Of course, talk is cheap, and all those Democrats like Cuomo, Warren, Clinton and Obama-Emanuel, who profess to want to tackle income inequality have yet to explain how their years of attacks on unions and support of charters achieve their supposed goal.
What can Hillary possibly say against Scott Walker? The truth is Scott Walker’s campaign against public employees and public schools tracks the Obama Ed Dept almost exactly.
Democrats will be arguing technical points on rhetoric. I guess she can draw a distinction on vouchers, but that’s becoming less and less meaningful since Cuomo has now folded on vouchers.
I can’t imagine what the plan is in Ohio. “Democrats will better regulate privatized schools”?
Yippee! I’d crawl over broken glass to vote for that!
Clinton spoke at an ed event last year where Jeb Bush also appeared.
She appears to agree with everything he said. I have no idea how she presents herself as somehow distinct from him on privatization now. She’s already ceded the entire public ed argument to conservatives.
It has been impossible to fight privatization when Randi decided to get into the charter game. She had to silently support co-locations and funding since she was now a player. But, you can’t play a game when you don’t know the rules and penalties. Now her charter is a national disgrace. Not only does it imply union, especially NYC teachers can’t teach, it hurt any chance we had to fight this movement, and our enemies are getting a giant laugh. Even funnier was Mulgrew trying to blame testing, when he is a supporter of both Common Core and a continuation if these tests.
Public education has no chance when leadership plays both ends of the field. A leader has to be strong and can’t play both sides. This is why Randi is a very weak person.
Wow my piece in today’s New York Times doesn’t fit squarely with your focus, you might want to share it with readers. I am now doing a monthly piece for them, looking for strategies that don’t focus on markets, high-stakes testing, chargers etc. We are in the same boat, as ever!
Link?
As reported by WNYT, snow on the east lawn of the NYS Capitol has recently been removed by NYS workers. Coincidentally, the Success Academy charter school rally is planned for this week. Did privately donated political funds( Success board members to Governor Cuomo) influence this taxpayer funded snow removal? Maybe this is just a coincidence……
I would like to know how Success Academy identified ELLs. Did they use an instrument or did they just use Hispanic surnames? In public schools we have to follow a state law procedure for identification purposes; did they follow the same procedures as the state or did they make it up as they went along? I wonder how accurate their numbers are.
By introducing the free market ideas of choice and competition, charter schools are supposed to improve education. The presumption is that an unfettered free market is beneficial. But, since 50% of U.S. citizens divide amongst themselves 1% of the countries income, and, 1% of the people in this country divide amongst themselves 43%. of the countries income. Who in this free market benefiting?
“… we must re-open the national conversation on how to create schools that are a microcosm of our ideal inclusive society. Whatever it takes, from re-thinking housing policy, to sharing tax-revenue across regions, to re-visiting school enrollment systems, we must ensure that schools across America become less segregated, more integrated, and that there is less variability in demographics between schools in geographic proximity.”
Why not just instance a fully communist regime? Just tell everyone where to live, where to work, where to go to school, and how much to divvy up. Why not just pay everyone the same, too? Then we can have an ideal microcosm.
Where did this guy get educated? And why do you publish this stuff?
Kudos, Horace Meister! You buried the lede way down in the final paragraph, but what a final paragraph it is. Segregation and the traditional zoned school district go hand in hand, and a remedy will require an enormous shock to the system.
Where to start, though? You’d figure that District 3, on the Upper West Side, with its impeccably liberal politics, would be receptive to integrating its schools. It is compact, dense, and has shocking racial and socioeconomic differences between schools that are located a few blocks from one another. Yet the response to a proposal to remove school zone lines as the only determinant for elementary schools in the district hasn’t exactly been warmly received. The schools with virtually no minority and/or poor students are too popular, it is said, to participate.
http://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20150206/upper-west-side/plan-would-send-kids-schools-based-on-special-needs-not-location
Whatever it takes!
“But I just want to send my kids to the neighborhood without ask these tests.”
How about if we just reopen the national conversation?
“Well, I suppose that’d be all right… “
neighborhood *school*, that is. Always blowing my punchlines with typos.
Tim, did you read the UCLA Civl Rights Project report about charter schools? It said that charters are more segregated than the districts in which they are located, even when the district is segregated.
I’ve read the New York report produced by the UCLA group. Its conclusions are slightly different from the national level report.
The entire report is worth a read, but for a quick review, I found pages 16-24 and 27-31 to be especially interesting:
–The two counties on Long Island, both part of the NYC metropolitan area, have the nation’s most segregated schools. There are a grand total of five charter schools on Long Island.
–New York City’s district schools are among the nation’s most segregated in the nation as well, mirroring (as zoned schools always do) its extreme residential segregation. These residential patterns and zone lines were established long before NY State had charter schools.
–New York City’s charter schools are almost always located in hypersegregated neighborhoods and frequently serve children who would otherwise attend “apartheid” zoned district schools. Charter schools designed to serve low-income children of color are as unattractive to white parents as district apartheid schools.
–The educational and economic benefits of integrated education are powerful, sustained, and largely “free.” Unlike other less-proven reforms such as class size, pre-K, or teacher quality, integration plans require little additional resources.
Click to access Kucsera-New-York-Extreme-Segregation-2014.pdf
Chapter 31 of “Reign” implicitly recognizes the life-altering effect that attending an integrated school can have on poor minority children. But in New York, even in the core of the bluest neighborhoods, we see either resistance (District 3) or measures that actively make things worse, like the District 15 rezoning plan that soon will have the student populations at PS 321 and PS 107 >90% white and Asian and <5% FRPL-eligible–if an elite private school in the city had demographics like these, it would be picketed, shamed, and ridiculed. Where are the meaningful, actionable solutions?
The hue and cry over charter school segregation in New York is a distraction. Perhaps a convenient one at that.
Tim,
You seem like a very intelligent man. Can you explain why Wall Street billionaires like Paul Tudor Jones and Joel Greenblatt and many others are pouring millions into charter schools that skim off the top students in poor neighborhoods, then crow that they have “the answer”? Will you admit that Eva’s schools in fact have far fewer students who are seriously disabled or ELL? Do you have some ideas about what we should do with the 92% of the city’s public school children who are not in a charter school? Do you think Eva would give up her nearly $600,000 a year to be the next chancellor? Do you think she could work her magic with all children? Or just those she wants?
Diane,
When I don’t know the answer to a question for sure, I always assume that the simplest and most logical answer is probably the correct one. The people who donate to Success and personally pay Moskowitz’s salary probably do so because they like her, they believe in her mission, and they want to help children. If credible evidence emerges to the contrary, I’ll consider it.
I have posted multiple times on this blog and others about Success does not typically educate the exact same kids as the schools it is collocated with. I have posted multiple times about Success’s failure to backfill, and how that practices is likely the largest contributor to their high proficiency rates on state tests. Anyone who would label me as an apologist for the network or the sector in general hasn’t been paying attention to what I’ve been writing.
The problem is, when you and other district-school advocates are so quick to brand charters as segregationist (and I’ll repeat that this is a particularly flimsy or even false charge in New York City) without offering meaningful solutions on the district side, it gives the appearance that you are interested more in smearing charters than you are doing anything to integrate schools. And I’ll say once more that integration is the only tool we have that even closely resembles a silver bullet. It isn’t more money, it isn’t more or better teachers, it isn’t more buildings.
Tim,
I agree with you about the value and importance of integration, and I would add, the importance of serious poverty-reduction. Our society accepts segregation and poverty as natural and inevitable. Imagine if the $5 billion wasted on Race to the Top had been used as a competition to fashion actionable plans to reduce segregation. Since we agree that integration is the closest thing we have to a silver bullet (actually, I think that the reduction of poverty is the closest thing we have to a silver bullet, and both together are a silver bullet), then it is impossible to feel positively about charters, which are spawning more intense segregation all over the country. Having two publicly funded school systems–one that accepts all by law, and the other free to take who they want and free to kick out whoever they want, will destroy public education, intensify segregation, and privatize what was once public. I fail to see the social value. As usual, the Wall Street billionaires are thinking of the next quarter, not the good of society.
Oh, and thank you for saying that I seem like an intelligent man. I am going to print out that comment and send it to my mother.
@Tim I read another article which stated that representatives from District 1 have counseled others against a zone-free school district, so it’s obviously not a panacea.
Also, your claim that there are “shocking racial and socioeconomic differences between schools that are located a few blocks from one another” is wrong. I live in District 3 and I can’t think of any schools for which that is the case. The most segregated schools are located in the southern (majority white) and northern (majority black) parts of the district. The middle part has quite diverse schools (PS 84, 166, 163, 75, 165) Even comparing two schools like 191 and 199 puts nine blocks between them. That’s not a few blocks, and given NYC’s density that would be many miles in a suburban landscape.
I’m sure you used that language for effect, but be aware that there are people who visit this blog who live in the same neighborhood as you do, so you can’t make up your facts.
Beth, if I had asked you to parody the mental gymnastics that residents of districts with hypersegregation perform to allow themselves to sleep at night, you couldn’t have done any better than what you’ve written here. I especially liked the argument that the distance (0.5 miles, an easy 10 min walk) between PS 199 (15% black and Hispanic, 8% FRPL-eligible) and PS 191 (84% black and Hispanic, 79% FRPL-eligible) is actually more like several miles because the city is denser than the suburbs. Moving on . . .
District 3 is a mere 2 sq. miles, a narrow rectangle running from 59th to 122nd Sts and CPW to Riverside Drive, with a tiny 0.05 square mile panhandle sitting directly atop Central Park. There are an embarrassment of transportation options—too many bus lines to count and 6 subway lines, including express lines that offer approximately a 2-3 minute long ride from 125th to 59th, and from the heart of the “isolated” portion atop Central Park directly through the spine of the district. The district is 25% black, 35% Hispanic, 30% white, 8% Asian, and 53% FRPL-eligible.
The less-integrated schools are not clustered exclusively in the far southern portion of the district. PS 452 (20% B+H, 10% FRPL) is on 77th St. PS 87 (19% B+H, 9% FRPL) is on 78th; PS 9 (28 B+H, 23% FRPL) is on 84th; PS 166 (29 B+H, 29 FRPL) is on 89th. The distances between the schools are far from insurmountable.
If people want to go to the trouble and expense of living in New York city only to send their kids to schools that are far, far less racially and economically diverse than the fancy private schools of the 1%, that’s up to them, I guess. But they don’t get to do that and then cry “segregation” like a knee-jerk reflex when it comes to charters.
Call me cynical, but it’s difficult for me to take that last paragraph seriously without knowing where Horace “Whatever It Takes!” Meister sends (or sent) his (or her) kids to school.
FLERP, Horace has an infant child.