New York State regulators may close two of Albany’s charter schools, sponsored by the Brighter Choice Foundation.
“Copies of the letters sent to the Brighter Choice school officials were not immediately available Monday, but the recommendation was based on academic performance, according to a person familiar with the situation.If the institute formally adopts the recommendation it would mean more than one-third of the dozen charter schools that once made Albany ground zero for the contentious debate about their role in public education in New York will have closed in recent years.”
Two other Brighter Choice charters have closed in the past two years.
This is a big deal, because Albany had a larger percentage of its students in charters than any other city in the state.
Brighter Choice opened nearly a dozen charters in the state’s Capitol. It is very high-profile. An article in the conservative journal “Education Next” in 2009 called Brighter Choice charters “the Holy Grail” of school reform because it had achieved both high academic performance and scale.
A state audit last year criticized one of the schools in the charter chain for spending too much on leasing facilities from—who else?—the Brighter Choice Foundation. Auditors said the school could have saved from $200,000 to $2.3 million if it had purchased the elementary school by issuing debt instead of continuing to lease the building from the foundation.
The founder of Brighter Choice is Tom Carroll, who helped to write the charter law when he worked for the Pataki administration in 1998 and is on the boards of several charters. He has often written opinion pieces in Néw York City tabloids extolling the virtues of charters.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“…but the recommendation was based on academic performance, according to a person familiar with the situation.”
I’m not familiar with this situation, but I wonder if someone close to Albany could comment on their academic performance. One tactic commonly used by charter operators and the politicians is to claim academic issues when their performance may be similar to that of the neighborhood public school. The real problem is lack of funding due to less than projected enrollemtns. This allows them to still claim there is a demand for their “product” and they can say, “See… we actually close schools that underform unlike the traditional public schools.”
It looks like something went amiss with Diane’s links—here is the Times-Union piece: http://www.timesunion.com/local/article/State-considers-closing-Brighter-Choice-middle-5974124.php
I know nothing about the schools in real life, but I always have a copy of the most recent NYS state test results file with me wherever I go. The explanation that the schools will be closed for low performance seems plausible to me, and they do not appear to be under-enrolled. Its math/ELA scores are only very slightly higher than the average for the Albany City district in grades 6-8, and that is an appallingly low benchmark to beat.
Interestingly, there are also two single-sex Brighter Choice K-5 schools in Albany that actually score quite well. I assume that they feed at least some of their students to the middle schools, but I don’t know for sure. If they do, it will make the case for closing the middle schools pretty simple: not only are they not performing better than the district, they are also squandering the work being done by their elementary schools.
I live in Albany and send my kids to public schools here. I’m actually kind of surprised by this because Brighter Choice for Girls and for Boys have a better reputation than the other charter schools in town. As Tim pointed out, the elementary schools do fairly well, and they have been open much longer than the middle schools, so I figured they would be fed by the elementary schools.
They are demographically similar to the public schools, although somewhat more heavily African American and slightly poorer. (The public middle schools are about 60% African American. The charter schools are about 85%). There are many fewer special ed students and English Language Learners in the charter schools.
The scores aren’t terribly different than those of demographically similar students in the public schools, but I understand they do many more practice tests.
After fighting the inundation of charter schools in our city for years, I can’t believe I am hoping that these two schools don’t close. Or if they do, the state gives them a 12 month lead time. We are a small district of 9,000 students. We can not as easily absorb the opening and closing of charter schools the way a large district like New York City or Chicago can. After many charter schools opened in a very short time in our city, we closed one of our middle schools that needed a lot of infrastructure work and whose student body had dwindled to about 20% of what it once was. Since that time, several charter schools have closed and other students have left charters to return to public school. Our middle schools are completely full. We now have 6th grade remaining in elementary school in some schools, and moving to the middle school from other elementary schools. Not an ideal situation at all. If it is like other times charter schools have closed, we won’t know for sure until late summer, and it looks like we might have about 260 middle schoolers to absorb in schools that are overflowing already.
This arbitrariness and last minute decision making isn’t fair to the students, employees, and families of either the public schools or the charter schools. I am so sick of the NYS Education Dept.
S,
Yes, the BCCS elementary schools are very good, but the middles have struggled academically. I think running a successful middle school is a much harder thing to do and requires a different staff culture. Also, as an open enrollment school, there are plenty of kids at the middles who weren’t at the elementaries, and their incoming scores are very poor coming from the higher poverty district elementaries.
There are quite a few district schools that have performed much worse for a long time that are in no danger of shutting down. In fact, the Albany charter average beats the Albany City average in every grade and subject (3-8) except one.
I agree that closing a school is a traumatic experience for all involved and should be a last resort. It’s a shame to close a school that parents clearly still want their children to go to. But, the data shows that a charter that does poorly almost always continues to do poorly.
I agree that longer lead time would be helpful to everyone. But, it’s SUNY that makes that decision for their schools, not NYS Ed Department (FYI, I think the elementaries are Regents schools and the middles are SUNY).
Same authorizer closed a school with performance better than neighboring school last year based on performance being lower than expected statewide.
http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/albany/2014/06/8546214/ark-sinking-troy-laments-charters-death-sentence
Where will these students go? Will they stop learning with no more school, no more classrooms and no more teachers? I hope there is a place that will be available to them without regard to ability, background, family involvement, etc. A place where young people go to learn from well educated adults familiar with developing learners of all styles. Are there places like that? If not, policy makers should create and fully fund them. Make them available to the entire public and make sure the resources to address a wide variety of needs and interests are readily available. Call them “schools for the public’ or something like that…yeah, that’s the ticket.
+1
It’s so absolutely incredible how blatant these schools are. Rather than putting money toward the children you’re supposed to be educating, you (they) work out these financial scams to benefit their bottom line.
As a former employee of one of the BCCS that closed, I have to say that there are positives and negatives to charters. I have worked in both district and charter schools so I could compare. Behavior wise, I found the charter schools equal to the district schools. However, the charter schools lacked the resources to manage many of the behavior problems. Due to needing to keep enrollment numbers up, children were not expelled and continued to behave poorly (walking out of class, yelling at teachers, etc.). The BCCS I was in really cared about the children and there was a family-like atmosphere. However, many of the students did not perform well academically due to several factors. 1) Many of the students entered the school below grade level academically. Even improvements would not have been enough to be proficient on the state exam. 2) not sure about other schools, but our school had very little parent involvement despite outreach from the school, 3) behavior issues impacted the ability to learn, 4) middle schools are much different with elementary. A lot more outside factors impact in-school learning.
Although I think it is good to have alternative school choices, I do not approve of spending tax dollars to fund multiple schools that are all performing the same.