Leonie Haimson has posted the full text of the parents’ complaint against Success Academy charters. You can read it here.
A number of readers have asked why charter schools should be allowed to break federal laws and why they call themselves public schools when they are not subject to same expectations and legal requirements as public schools. Should they be allowed to operate as private schools with public money?
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No, they should not be allowed to receive any public money without being required to follow federal laws.
Or state and local laws that actual public schools must follow regarding oversight, and legal expectations, either, for that matter.
This is kind of amazing. Despite all the hype and endorsements from big name politicos like Arne Duncan, they may repeal Tennessee’s Achievement District and put the schools back under public governance.
http://www.commercialappeal.com/news/government/state/bill-filed-to-abolish-states-achievement-school-district-29b9fefa-28de-436d-e053-0100007f8534-365847821.html
The public schools are actually doing better than the new model.
With public funds, comes pubic responsibility. Welcome to the world of public education and meeting the needs of every student—not just the ones you deem “worthy”. I am hopeful the families will find some remedies under these complaints.
Juan Gonzalez, in todays NY Daily News writes:
“But when your charter network gets to be as big and wealthy as many suburban school districts, what’s the excuse for not appropriately servicing your special needs students?”
This is the bottom line. Success Academy is not just bigger than many suburban school districts now — it is bigger than many smaller cities. But they don’t have to do what city and suburban school districts do and educate all children – or at least pay for their education in a private school out of their own funds. They can keep the least expensive students — and the ones most able to respond to their method of teaching and discipline and test well — and get rid of the more expensive ones and the ones least likely to be successful. A charter school that does this will – by definition — always be more successful than a public school. It’s surprising more charters aren’t being more ruthless in weeding out their “less desirable” students since the incentive is certainly there. I suppose you need those millions in donations to subsidize those shrinking classes and the loss of student funding. I wonder if the rich billionaires who donate many millions in a single evening realize that their donations make it possible for Success Academy to weed out the undesirable children, since the funding a charter school receives per child pales in comparison to those donations. After all, a single million dollar donation (and they get many of those) compensates for the loss of per pupil funding for 58 unwanted special needs kids. And just think of the overall costs savings, not to mention the ability to brag about the test scores of the children you DO allow to remain and reach a testing grade!
The other shocking thing in the lawsuit revelations is how often and how many times they are holding kids back. I suppose one way to decrease your attrition rate is to hold on to students and just never let them get to 3rd grade. A child spent 2 years in Kindergarten and 2 years in first grade. (Were they 8 or 9 by then?) And then they threatened to hold the child back again? Since when have we defined “success” as failing children until they leave? Of course, that’s another thing that SUNY Charter Institute never cared to look closely at for fear their poster child of a school would be found wanting.
Is there any oversight for the overseers? Who makes sure that the SUNY Charter Institute is not looking the other way? Anyone with the ability to look closely at this charter school could have seen what was going on. Unfortunately, the only people with that ability was SUNY and that was the last thing they wanted to do.
What might happen next is that Success Academy might go the Mike Petrilli route, and come clean about how … “You know, on second thought, we don’t teach all kids, we do turn away kids, and kick out kids who are Special Ed. or otherwise difficult to educate …
” … and it’s good that we do!”
Look for statements like:
“We at Success Academy cannot be all things to all children.”
“To do what we do, and do it right, we have regretfully have to exclude certain students from our school’s mission.”
or use Petrilli-speak:
“Our school’s mission is to focus on the strivers.”
Then, they’ll ram through legislation that gives them the legal right to continue doing all the disgusting sh%# that’s detailed in the Federal Civil Rights Filing.
Here’s Petrilli on this charters-are-a-needed-refuge-for-the-strivers logic:
http://edexcellence.net/commentary/education-gadfly-daily/flypaper/2013/the-charter-expulsion-flap-who-speaks-for-the-strivers.html
MIKE PETRILLI
“But (charter school creaming) is not necessarily a bad thing. In my view, we should be proud of the charter schools that are identifying and serving high-potential low-income students—kids who are committed to using education to escape poverty and are often supported in that effort by education-minded parents.
“The reason to celebrate these schools and the role they play is because the traditional system has been downright hostile to the needs of such striving children and families—as have been many charter critics. Magnet ‘exam schools,’ such as those recently profiled by Checker Finn and Jessica Hockett, are viewed with suspicion; tracking or ability grouping is seen as elitist; any effort to provide special classes, environments, or challenges for motivated or high-achieving kids is cast as perpetuating inequality—even when all the kids are poor, and even though there’s a ton of evidence that high achievers do best around other high achievers.
“And now these ‘social justice’ types want to berate schools for asking disruptive students to leave. For sure, there should be checks on pushing kids out willy-nilly. Thankfully, charter officials in D.C. are already on the case, publicizing discipline data and prodding the handful of schools with sky-high expulsion and suspension rates to find better approaches.
“But let’s not forget about the needs (even rights) of the other kids to learn. Isn’t it possible that U.S. public schools have gone too far in the direction of accommodating the disruptors at the expense of everyone else? Or been guilty of ‘defining deviancy down,’ in Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s words?
“As Eduwonk Andy wrote this week, it’s probably because charter schools are willing (and able) to enforce discipline that they are so popular with parents. That wouldn’t be true if they had to retain chronic disrupters.
“To be sure, this raises tough questions for the system as a whole. As I said in the Washington Post video, there are reasons to be concerned that district schools will become the last resort for the toughest-to-serve kids.
“But in life there are trade-offs, and I would be willing to accept a somewhat less ideal outcome for the most-challenged students if it meant tremendously better life outcomes for their peers.
“Misguided notions of ‘equity’ have turned many public school systems into leveling leviathans. We shouldn’t let the same happen to charters, the last salvation of the strivers.”
Jack, I totally agree that is what the charter schools are now doing. After all these many years of claiming they are getting results with the average kid in a failing school, they are finally conceding defeat. Of course, that means that they are no better than public schools, and often worse. Their entire reason for existing is gone.
So now, desperate to justify their existence, they are a g&t program for the kids who can handle it. Of course, the DOE is perfectly capable of setting up public schools for strivers and has always been successful when they do it. A charter school is simply doing what schools have been doing for 50 years (including parochial schools).
Really, there is no reason for charters to exist anymore. Until they return to their quickly abandoned mission to educate the kids HARDEST to educate instead of their newly declared mission to educate the EASIEST kids. Reading what Mike Petrilli wrote makes me truly embarrassed for him. And for the SUNY Charter Institute. Ironic that SUNY is now pretending to be concerned about charter school high attrition and suspension rates and got to go lists. They have never cared. In fact, I watched them during their meeting when they approved 14 new Success Academy schools in October 2014 when they laughed it off. Really it was truly appalling and I hope a documentary filmmaker gets that footage and confronts SUNY with it.
A while back, urban guys, lacking skills or opportunities, sprung up at traffic lights to clean our windshields, for alms. Today, it’s suburban guys, springing up to foist junk on school districts, for alms from Broad, Gates, and Walton’s.