Carol Burris asks a simple question: How would you feel if strangers moved in to your home, uninvited, taking away half your living quarters? You may not like it, but you can’t do anything about it.
That is what happens when the school district allows a privately managed charter to “co-locate” in a public school, taking choice space for itself. Critics used to call this practice a “charter invasion.”
Burris tells the story of a successful public school dedicated to the performing arts in a poor community. A charter school will move in, taking away the space for the performing arts. How is this fair?
Imagine this. You get a call telling you that another family will now occupy the second floor of your home. After you recover from your initial shock, you complain. “Outrageous,” you say. That is where I have my office, our second bathroom and the guest bedroom for when my mother comes to stay.” You quickly learn the decision is not yours to make. This is a top-down order, and you must comply.
As far-fetched as the above might seem, the above is what principals in New York City and other cities around the country face when charter schools demand space. And although principals may not “own” their schools, the community that surrounds the school surely does. Yet, no matter how strongly they protest, community voices are nearly always ignored.
With increasing frequency, community-based schools, located predominantly in poor neighborhoods, are being hedged in, disrupted and derailed by charter school co-location, which is the forced insertion of a charter school into an existing neighborhood public school.
The students and parents of Meyer Levin School for the Performing Arts (I. S. 285) are learning this lesson now. Meyer Levin, which is located in the East Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn, is a magnet for middle school students who want to develop their musical and performance talents. Eighty nine percent of the school’s student body receives free or reduced priced lunch, and 93 percent are black. Nearly one in five have a learning disability. Although some students come from other parts of the city, the vast majority are neighborhood kids.
Five weeks ago, the phone call arrived that a new Uncommon Elementary Charter School wanted to move into Meyer Levin, which the New York City Department of Education claims is an underutilized building. The Uncommon Charter would take over the third floor where the school’s dance study, two band rooms, theater production room, choral room, lighting room, sound room, computer labs and community offices for special programs are located. In other words, they would take the floor that is the heart of this performing arts school.
Shortly after the call, the charter school came to the building for a walk -through. When she heard about the visit, community activist, Zakiyah Ansari, was outraged. Four of her daughters had graduated from the school and she understood its deep ties to the community. “It is like someone coming to your home to figure out what piece of furniture they want. And this happened even before approval. “
Ansari remembers Meyer Levin with great fondness. “My daughters had so much when they were there. They had a science lab, a steel pan orchestra, one of my daughters got into poetry. They had access to amazing things that I thought all schools had, until I learned that what they were experiencing was rare.”
Ansari’s praise for the school was echoed by other parents—as was her outrage that a charter school would come in to claim space. Kianne Guadeloupe, the mother of a seventh grader speaks with pride about her older daughter who graduated and went on to Brooklyn College Academy. She credits the school’s arts program for giving her confidence and helping her to succeed. Her belief in the transformative power of the arts was shared by parent and PTA member, Donna Rose, who is the mother of an eighth grader with special needs. “If they take that floor they will take away what the school is all about—the performing arts. My daughter learned her dance skills here. Getting into dance brought her out of her shell, and now she is on the honor roll. She always wants to be in school now.”
Make no mistake: Meyer Levin is not a failing school. Its scores are above the district average, and above the state average for students who are black and economically disadvantaged. The school’s focus on the arts has helped support academics in the school. And the performing arts program anchors the community, and is a source of great pride.
Excellent analogy, Carol!
Good analogy for illegal immigration, too.
I think you’re looking for Brietbart.Com.
“Meyer Levin is not a failing school. Its scores are above the district average, and above the state average for students who are black and economically disadvantaged.”
But using the edudeformer’s and privateer’s logic and language, what Diane calls the “coin of the realm” (which is made of tin, not silver or gold), only serves to reinforce their discourse and memes. Test scores, being completely epistemologically and ontologically invalid (as proved by Wilson), used as a justification for what is widely viewed as a solid community public school can only fail in the long run. Any short term gains are negated by being propped up with errors and falsehoods.
I struggle to accept any point made by anyone when that point is made with false thinking. We know that standardized test scores are a false argument (because they have been proven to be invalid as indicators of student learning) so that to attempt to justify using them is a moot point in being brought up. Start with a falsehood and one almost always ends up with a falsehood. Or in more mundane vulgar terms “crap in crap out”. Only rarely does one get at the truth of a matter by starting with a falsehood, kind of like a blind and anosmic squirrel occasionally getting an acorn, that is, by accident.
Duane, how to you feel about co-location?
Does the phrase “camels head in the tent. .. ” mean anything to you?
Señor Swacker: good points, but as I see it, by THEIR OWN METRICS the charter/privatization folks can’t justify this kind of move.
And it makes hash of their “multiple measures” deflection—which is nothing but “multiple measures” that circle back to raising test scores. And once the the misleading numbers & stats are taken away (since they declare the opposite of what the rheeophormistas want them to say), the rheephormsters in this case are left with nothing but naked greed and lust for control.
Not to mention…
As I see it in this example, when using THEIR OWN METRICS against them (along with other more useful info) it becomes clear what they mean by “it’s all about the kids”—it’s all about giving some kids a disruptive and destructive advantage against many other kids. And not in some indirect, hard-to-see way. As evidenced on other blogs, literally shoving into the faces of the students and staff and parents and associated communities of the “traditional” aka “big gubmint monopoly” schools that they are being deliberately disadvantaged by making them lose any chance of providing the kind of environment that nurtures genuine teaching and learning.
Another way to look at it. How difficult is it for the colocated rheephorm cohort to see that they are being privileged above their public school peers? Like so many other rheephorm policies and practices this involves reframing the big stuff like one’s view of other human beings and whether equity is a valued/devalued goal and whether or not society is or should be organized on the basis of a few winners/many losers. In other words, in this and similar cases they’re teaching, IMHO, all the wrong values for an open democratic fair society.
Again, though, I appreciate your comments and look forward to see many more of them on this blog.
😎
“The Cuckoo’s Nest” (thanks to Máté Wierdl for the cuckoo metaphor)
Birds of a charter
Flock together
Lay their eggs in public schools
Feed from a mother
Of another
In a land where cuckoo rules
For anyone who is not familiar with the nesting behavior of cuckoos, there is this from wikipedia
“About 56 of the Old World species and 3 of the New World species (pheasant, pavonine, and striped) are brood parasites, laying their eggs in the nests of other birds.[17] These species are obligate brood parasites, meaning that they only reproduce in this fashion. In addition to the above noted species, yet others sometimes engage in non-obligate brood parasitism, laying their eggs in the nests of members of their own species in addition to raising their own young. The best-known example is the European common cuckoo. The shells of the eggs of brood-parasites are usually thick.[19] They have two distinct layers with an outer chalky layer that is believed to provide resistance to cracking when the eggs are dropped in the host nest.[20] The cuckoo egg hatches earlier than the host’s, and the cuckoo chick grows faster; in most cases the chick evicts the eggs or young of the host species.”
I recently saw a ‘Nature’ that showed this on film. cuckoo hatchling actually topples each of the other eggs over the edge of the nest where they fall to forest floor.
Even worse & perhaps more apt: some other species (I forget the name): the alien hatchling has a sharp ‘baby tooth’ at the end of its beak, & feeds by ingesting the contents of the other eggs!
If a charter moves into a shared public space, their existence should not impede, curtail or diminish the services of the public school. For example, if they decide to offer music class on the stage instead of a regular music room, this is wrong because it directly inhibits the operation of the public school. Of if they decide to turn the counseling suite into a classroom for the charter so school counselors will have to see students in the hall, this is wrong and violates privacy. The existence of a charter should not curtail the operation of the school. I have heard horror stories to the contrary where there is essentially a have (charter), have not (public), system at work in the same building. This is wrong as children and parents can see the difference.
This does sound like a case for serious civil disobedience/direct action.
Too bad we don’t have a “Castle Law” to defend community based, democratic, transparent, non-profit, publicly funded, public schools when a community is invaded by often fraudulent and inferior publicly funded, autocratic, opaque private sector charter schools.
“Ultimately the city’s PEP (Panel for Educational Policy) committee makes the decision on whether the co-location will take place.”
I hope Carol will do a followup on the composition of this panel (elected? appointed? qualifications for membership?) and the criteria for determining whether the space in a public school building is underutilized.
In this case, I imagine the justification for saying the space was under-utilized came from the existing “co-location” of a community service organization in the space, ignorance of the floor space required to maintain a viable performing arts program, and also from some entrenched stereotypes about the educational necessity and value of studies in the arts. I use the work “studies” deliberately, because one of the hard parts in sustaining arts programs in schools is that the perception that they are merely enrichments, frills, luxuries– not essential, not “mindful,” a distraction from academics, and a waste of time, especially for children and families who are living in poverty.
I wonder how and why this panel came to have so much power in New York City and whether their judgments are really based on formal and sensible educational criteria or on a formula that calculates the most cost-effective ratio of square-foot occupancy, per-pupil, or “per seat.”
If I recall correctly, after the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, previously wealthy families did have to give up part of their home to others who were placed their by the revolutionary authorities. Also, because they were bourgeois, their food allowance were smaller than their new colocataires whose “need” outweighed their own.
Not to mention one of the causes of the American Revolution was the forced quartering of British soldiers in colonists’ homes. This practice helped to inspire the third amendment to the US Constitution. http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/parliament-passes-the-quartering-act
crossposted at http://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/What-can-happen-when-a-nei-in-Best_Web_OpEds-Burris_Charter-School-Failure_Charter-Schools_Community-160403-928.html#comment590865
with commentary about charter schools…with embedded links to this site.
Didn’t the Germans move into Civilian homes when they occupied France? And they expected to be fed and cared for by the original inhabitants, confiscating whatever they needed from their “patrons”.
Or perhaps we might think of a parasite, invading and thriving on the host body.
If you’ve ever lived with an unwanted house guest who extends their stay, you have an understanding about the difficulties inherent in sharing a facility with parasitic occupiers (no matter what their intentions).
flos56: apparently you aren’t on the right emailing lists. The rheephorm riposte to your missive from Planet Reality comes courtesy of Rhee World where Rheeality Distortion Fields have the power [a la that radio superhero of yesterday, the Shadow, to “cloud men’s minds”] is—
That if you don’t make those students “cry” [right from Eva M Her Own Bad Self] by insulting, demeaning, and humiliating them in public in front of everyone else by making sure they know they’re second class citizens in their own public schools—
Those “little test-taking machines” [Paul Fucaloro, Eva Moskowitz’s former righthand man and her pedagogical inspiration] haven’t learned anything worth learning when it comes to labeling, sorting and stack ranking human beings in a social order.
After all, as rheephormsters far and near keep repeating using different words and phrases, if the vast majority of losers [aka “social inferiors”] don’t learn to bow and scrape before the small minority of winners [aka “social superiors”], then what’s the point of charters and privatization and such?
Or are you questioning that most sacred metric of all, $tudent $ucce$$? Indulging in what one rheephormer that visits this blog has lableled “metaphysical excuses” that deny the basis of all civilization as we know it: ROI, greed and virtuous selfishness.
On the other hand, if you are questioning rheephorm [de]values…
I’m with you.
😎
Just wondering (NOT) why we didn’t read this first in the NYTimes…
Someone has surely made a bad decision in this case. Who has the power to reverse it?
If charters taking over public school facilities, with the ultimate intention of forcing the public school out, “used to be called” charter invasion, it’s an accurate description and should be brought back into general use, for that’s precisely what it is.