Hedge fund manager Julian Robertson gave Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academy charter chain $25 million to help it expand. The chain picked up another $10 million from its friends at a fund-raising event.
Clearly, the 1% has not been disturbed by the stories of students humiliated by their teacher or students with disabilities pushed out to keep the scores high.
Even with all this additional funding, Moskowitz still demands that the city give her free space (taken away from existing schools that enroll the students she pushes out) or pay her rent in private space. When a Success Academy school co-locates with a public school, it refurbishes its rooms, separates them from the other school whose building it was, and creates a separate-and-unequal situation.
Nice work, billionaires!
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Doesn’t this make you crazy?
Yes, the private public unaudited Success Academy gets beaucoup money. If I remember correctly, by Chancellor’s Regulations, NYC “traditional” public schools prevented or inhibited parents from raising money to support their local schools. No extra money allowed to provide direct funding or hold raffles that could be used to subsidize teacher salaries or buy equipment/supplies. (I’m not sure if bake sales were also frowned on.)
The theory was that this would create or increase inequities–widen wealth/opportunity gaps–because richer zip codes would contribute more to fund school budgets. There was validity in that logic–but it missed the obvious elephantine point. Why shouldn’t all schools be adequately resourced in the first place?
And since BOE/DOE was so exquisitely concerned about fairness, why haven’t we acted effectively to get billions due from the successful CFE suit? I’ll bet Chicago teachers and parents would have shut down their schools years ago in the face of such contemptuous disregard for quality education-and in the face of injustice.
Eva moves from success to success and we go begging. If we ever get what we deserve, we will call it a victory. So egregious. It makes me nuts.
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You don’t remember correctly.
PTAs can pay for anything and everything with the exception of core subject teachers. Cluster teachers (music, art, library), aides, paras, assistant teachers, computers, air conditioners, furniture, books, printers, bathroom renovations, among other things, may be paid for solely with parent donations.
The schools with big six- and even seven-figure PTA budgets educate shockingly small numbers of socioeconomically at-risk kids and black or Latino children. The tax-deductible donations (don’t forget your corporate match!) do not need to be shared with less fortunate schools, even in a DOE collocation (see Lower Lab and PS 198, e.g.).
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Tim, are you suggesting that Success Academy should be sharing its donations with the schools that co-locate with it? What a great idea!
By the way, you are wrong because public school parents in co-located schools often use a portion of that money for things that benefit all the students in the school. They don’t use it to undermine and attack the teachers in their co-located space. Too bad Success Academy doesn’t share any of its money but then again, marketing and advertising and high administrator salaries is far more important than providing tutoring and aides to the schools that have to accept all the students on Success Academy’s got to go list.
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I suspect the children of the 1% do not attend the so-called “Success” Academy. So the culture of the school is something they will endorse for other people’s children. It just perpetuates the income/achievement/privilege gap.
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Perfectly said.
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Are you implying that there is not a racially diverse element of the 1% that lives in underserved communities and should have better choices for their families?
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John DOE,
I don’t know every single member of the 1% but I don’t know of any who live in underserved communities.
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And public schools with PTAs comprised of parents with jobs in the financial sector that fundraise over a million dollars to spend exclusively on “their school” don’t contribute to the same “separate but unequal” environment.
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I guess it doesn’t contribute to that if the kids don’t see it?
A kid in District 7 probably isn’t aware that just over the river parents are asked to donate $1000, $1200, or more every year so their kids have an assistant teacher in every class and AC. What District 7 kid doesn’t know won’t hurt him!
(And oh yeah, those assistant teachers aren’t covered by the UFT work rules, so they have to pull bathroom duty and lunch and recess and all the rest–almost like charter school teachers!)
Sometimes, though, the kids DO know.
http://www.villagevoice.com/news/inside-a-divided-upper-east-side-public-school-6428826
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If only those public schools in District 7 had the extra $5,000 per pupil that Success Academy gets for its non-rent costs. The galaxy budget of those District 7 schools is as much as $5,000 per pupil less than Success Academy gets BEFORE the extra $10 million the city pays in rent. The correct comparison is the school-based budgets, and of course, Success Academy gets thousands more per pupil to spend in the schools. The public school students are charged for busing, aides and other services for all the kids on the got-to-go lists that leave Success Academy twice as frequently as they leave other decent charter schools.
Tim, if you cared about the kids in District 7, you would tell Ms. Moskowitz to use her extra money that those District 7 schools don’t have to pay her own rent — as many other charter schools do with far less money — instead of using it on lavish dinners at Cipiriani’s. Why would she rob the kids from the poorest public schools by demanding free rent when Brooklyn Prospect pays its own rent?
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Remember, charters don’t get a tuition match on the district’s transportation costs or categorical aid.
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FLERP, we both know that public schools get as little as $9,000 per pupil to spend in the same schools where charters get nearly 14,000 per student. With free rent, it’s hard to know where rich charters spend the money, but my guess is that the public relations and advertising budgets take up a huge portion. Not to mention the cost of staff trained to convince parents of kids on the “got to go” list that their kid will remain in 2nd grade yet another year unless they pull him from the school, stat.
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I don’t know what you know. If if costs public schools $9,000 per student to educate students, then the fact that the city spends $25,000 per student is a quite an indictment of the NYC public school system.
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Actually, it is an indictment of charter school funding. That $25,000 per student covers the pension of every retired teacher who has taught in NYC public schools for the last 30 years. It covers the cost of the safety net so that charter schools can rid themselves of the expensive pupils that Eva Moskowitz claims need to be in $100,000/year private schools for severely disturbed children (remember that is 20% of the 5 year olds in her low-income schools). It covers rent and maintenance including the money that is charged to public school students to pay for the $20 million dollar charter school lease. If your keep charging a declining number of public school students for the expensive overhead costs of charter schools, that number will keep growing.
It’s as if two hospitals were paid the same rate per patient. But one got to only treat the kids with strep throat and send kids with cancer back to the other hospital. The one who only treats strep throat patients does it for $14,000 per patient; the one who has to treat the kids with cancer who are kicked out of the strep throat hospital gets $9,000 per patient. What a travesty. No wonder there is plenty of money left for advertising and paying people like Tim.
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Not that more evidence is needed, but this is yet another quintessential example of how democracy and equity continues to be purposefully subverted. I don’t fault the parent who choose charter schools. However, it is immoral to use taxes to take money from the majority to theoretically benefit a chosen few. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2014/02/26/education-reform-and-the-corrosion-of-community-responsibility/
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This is an outrage
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Some will reply (I’m not one of them) that this is just “free market” forces playing out; that sellers and buyers, providers and consumers are adjusting to new products and service. If some go out of business, if some consumers get “screwed”, and others get rich, then that is pure capitalism being played out (?).
What is the reply? How much control is exercised by local, state or federal gov’ts to “even the playing fied”; to ensure the less fortunate get their fair share of the pie (if they are really do one?). What, and where are the reasons, axioms or rationales to keep privatization forces away? Are they based on market forces, religious persuasions, logical arguments (not that these are mutually exclusive domains)?
If socio-economic forces based on market-evolutionary forces of competition cause there to be a selective pressure against public schools, then who’s to say this is wrong? After all, unless one has some system of axioms and absolute postulates (a “religion”), then everything is just moral-relativism and post-modern nihilism, and there is no sound reason to oppose privatization forces.
Yes, I do believe there are sound reasons to oppose privatization efforts but they are derived from my faith-postulates, not any materialistic market arguments.
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Education would not be subjected to free market ideology and all the chaos that entails if our leaders didn’t choose it to be that way. Citizens have rarely been allowed to weigh in on whether this is the best path. Chaos and churn are harmful to students, and our primary responsibility should be to them. Charters are not worth the upheaval inflicted on students, and all the waste and fraud associated with them.
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Agreed, because “the love of money is a root of much evil”.
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Remind me again why this operation needs public money.
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$35 million comes out to about $3,200 per currently enrolled Success student. The NYC DOE is spending $24,600 per traditional public school student this year, give or take.
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If they get 25 million from just 1 donor, shirley they can get more. Shirley.
But that’s actually neither here not there because I don’t believe Success Academy should get a single dime of public money.
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Tim, that $35 million isn’t for a single-year operating budget. The NYC taxpayer combined with the SA budget is actually paying over $32,000 per SA pupil.
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Milky,
Given that the DOE is paying $13,877 for each Success (and all other NYC charter) student per the NYSED 2015-2016 Charter School Basic Tuition grid, I’ll have to ask you to show your work and/or provide a link.
https://stateaid.nysed.gov/charter/html_docs/charter_1516_rates.htm
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That’s HALF of the per pupil expenditure in Utah, Tim. It would be HUGE for public schools here. It may seem a pittance to you, but it would be a huge game changer for states like mine, or poorer schools.
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Tim (purposely?) forgot the free rent that NYC is required to spend for Success Academy. In fact, if you look at the galaxy budgets of every public school in NYC, which is the money that parallels that costs that charter schools have (since charter schools get everything else as freebies, just like public schools), you will see that public schools spend far less than charter schools. A school like PS 87 has a galaxy budget of 7.3 million to spend on 853 students, or about $8,500 per student. And they can’t even kick out the 5 year olds who they decide are too much bother or expense as Success Academy famously does.
Tim, what exactly is Success Academy doing with their extra 5,000 per student?
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Let’s see Tim. NO rent and NO laundry list of unfunded mandates and NO high needs population. My gut is telling me to call you a lame-brained imbecile, but my head is reminding me just how sensitive you are. So I will forgo any ad hominem attacks and just criticize the faultiness of your understanding of exactly how school funding works and why per pupil expenditures do not begin to paint an accurate picture.
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Rage,
Any protestations to the contrary, I am convinced that Tim is paid by SA to comment here in defense of Eva. Give him a break. Who would want to have such a horrible job?
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And all of the half-baked, uncertified, burned-and-churned “teachers” at SA must help with the bottom line too.
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Thanks for the advice Diane. I know you are right but “GentleSuggestionsForTheTestocracy” just isn’t me.
Do you think Eva is getting her money’s worth?
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I keep waiting for a philanthropist to aim giving at our public schools. Wouldn’t it have been great if instead Julian Robertson had created the Robertson after-school chess initiative for every middle school in Queens? Or the Robertson child-care facility in Mt. Vernon, so teenage mothers wouldn’t have to drop out for lack of childcare (Mt. Vernon’s nursery was scrapped years ago because of funding)?
But doesn’t happen….
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Because, it’s not about educating kids. It’s about making money.
Fox’s Rupert Murdoch, “When it comes to K through 12 education, we see a $500 billion sector in the U.S. alone.”
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Poopy. Low grade fever and listless.
Sent from my iPhone
>
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“[N]ot been disturbed”? I’d say they’re downright ecstatic about those things, hence their further investments in ensuring those oppressions continue, widen, and deepen.
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We need to get behind a movement to change the tax code. Without an amazing write-off for investing in “under-served” areas, hedge funders would not be interested in poor children.
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Here in Miami FL the proliferation of charter schools (parasites) is on steroids, though the market is just about saturated. I know their legal, but why would our own school district, MDCPS (4th largest in nation), approve so many of them. It seems against the districts own best interest.
For example, now maintenance monies have to get divided by more units/buildings because even charters get painted with the some funds. So, if a public school needs some major work there are more delays and less funds because charters need the same services. Why would a school board allow such proliferations; why cannot they say “no” more often and not approve the new building?
To me it really comes down to the myth of “choice”. That parents want “alternatives” because they are unhappy with their public school, but it is these same parents (for the most part) that never join the PTSA or work and contribute to strengthen their local school (their local expression of participatory democracy in public pedagogy).
No, they want “freedom” to have the schools they want. Do we give them the same freedom to create a new police force or fire dept because they may be unhappy with them?
Whatever happened to the axiom “one has no right to complain, unless they first have contributed to fixing the problem”?
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Rick,
The game is to starve the public schools of resources so parents flee to better-resourced charters.
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“The Wicked Witch of the Test”
The Wicked Witch of the Test
Is having great Success
With flying money fest
That never takes a rest
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Today, the website Plunderbund published Denis Smith’s, “Individual Choice and Our Strained Social Fabric”. Smith drills down on what greed in education costs our nation. “Charter schools go heavy on using the word academy and identification with a brand, replacing identification with a community…loss of a community’s social bonds and cohesion, gives rise to (separation, distrust and alienation).
Smith’s opinion is brief and insightful, equal to the best work of national columnists.
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Although I risk sounding whiney, I am nonetheless compelled to make note of the fact that I find demoralizing and disgusting the ease with which this self-righteous, self-aggrandizing and shameless woman collects millions from her wealthy friends.
So I ask hedgefunders: can I have $20 to buy pens and pencils for my impoverished and vulnerable high school students? Presently, I am making these purchases out of my salary, which is meager indeed compared to the $25,000,000 you’ve just dished out to Eva Moskowitz.
So: how about it?
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