Mayor Bill de Blasio campaigned against the charter industry and against school closings. But when he tried to slow (not stop) their invasions of public schools, the billionaires pinned his ears back with a big TV campaign and with Cuomo’s help. It all came down to this: not what was best for 1 million students, but what was best for the charter business.
And now:
PRESS RELEASE
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: April 20, 2016
CONTACTS:
Jane Maisel (917) 678-1913
Contact after 3 pm:
Jim Donahue
(917) 318-8762 donohuenyc@gmail.com
or
Jim Shoaf jimshoaf@me.com
PRESS CONFERENCE
100 Hester Street, NYC
Wednesday, April 20, 5:15 pm
Mayor de Blasio’s “RENEWAL”
means public school “REMOVAL”
New York City– Bronx high school, Foreign Language Academy for Global Studies (FLAGS), may be closed by a vote of the Panel for Educational Policy, held this evening, Wednesday, April 20th, despite the fact that it was classified by NYS as a Receivership School and by the NYC DOE as a Renewal School and was supposed to have time and support renew itself. Its space will be given to a charter school, as the DOE has recommended, with the full cooperation of the current UFT leadership.
At 5:15 p.m., families and teachers will hold a press conference before the Panel for Educational Policy (PEP) votes. They will decry this betrayal and explain how school closures perpetuate systemic segregation and racism, while serving the private interests of charter school profiteers.
According to Aixa Rodriguez, NYC DOE teacher, notice of FLAGS’ possible closure was, “like a poison. We began hemorrhaging students. The stigma of the label is what made our enrollment fall, and then our low enrollment was used as a reason to close us.”
“The DOE loves to break up schools into small schools, but their love isn’t sustained once there is a choice between a small school and a charter. It looks as if the small school movement is nothing more than a method for picking off public schools, one by one, as their buildings are demanded by charter schools. And the schools that are being closed are in communities with the fewest economic resources.” observed Jane Maisel, member of Change the Stakes.
Rodriguez describes a cascade of problems set off by the threat of closure: teachers looking for other jobs, the school improvement grant only distributed in February which was the same month the proposal to close FLAGS was delivered, while students were not informed of the closure with enough time to participate in the first round of the high school application process.
“Were the new toilets a gift for the new tenants, Academic Leadership Charter? They were never meant for us.”
At the April 5 meeting, the school community was already so resigned that not a single parent, teacher or student spoke. Senior Deputy Chancellor Dorita Gibson told the audience that it is never easy to make the decision to close a school, and that it really is not possible to run a good high school with only 100 students. This was the same argument used with the recent closure of three other schools, and was supported by the UFT’s current president, Michael Mulgrew.
Yet over the past year, the school staff’s multiple suggestions for attracting new students were all rejected by the principal. When a CEC 7 member suggested that the DOE should keep its commitment to the students by reviving rather than closing the school, building on the strength of the mostly multilingual student body, her ideas were dismissed. Apparently occupying space that has been requested by a charter school is tantamount to a death sentence for a school. Teachers and parents do not accept the DOE’s chilling logic. Parents and teachers ask the PEP members to make an independent judgement on this trend of sacrificing schools, but we will be surprised if the members of the PEP are willing to resist giving their rubber stamp approval to the DOE’s decision.
Jim Donohue teaches English at Renewal School JHS 145 in the Bronx. His school fought to prevent a charter co-location during high stakes standardized testing season last year. According to Donohue, “Success Academy came into our school last year and pointed out the classrooms they wanted. The DOE welcomed them with open arms and told us to get packing. We have been scattered across 4 floors of the building, and Success Academy has beautifully renovated the 19 classrooms that they staked a claim to. This is defined as RENEWAL.”
Tonight the PEP will also vote on the expansion of Success Academy Charter School Bed-Stuy 1 at the site of Foundations Academy, a Renewal School that will cease to exist after this year. The correlation between the Receivership and Renewal program and the sites where charters are opening and expanding is undeniable. Concerned teachers and parents wish to make this hypocrisy clear to members of the PEP. Closing Renewal Schools and allowing charter schools to take over their space undermines the restoration Mayor de Blasio promised and institutes a climate of fear and demoralization. Advocates demand a moratorium on public school closures, demand that city officials join NYC citizens in fighting the law that requires the DOE to pay for charter school space, and that all public schools be meaningfully respected and given a genuine chance to thrive.
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Diane Ravitch's blog 
This is as alarming as anything I have read. So many thousands of public education believers supported De Blasio…and now he capitulates totally to the forces of evil, the Wall Street leeches who are on a roll in turning America’s public schools into profit making ventures for big business. It is truly sickening.
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De Blasio is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the real estate industry, going back to his vote in the City Council for the huge Atlantic Yards development project that opened the floodgates to the uncontrolled high-rise development (funded largely by hot money from overseas) that is disfiguring Brooklyn. And charter schools are a real estate play, among other things. Eva Moskowitz is acutely aware of this, expanding aggressively into rapidly-gentrifying neighborhoods where, in a sinister irony, the Black and Latino children she claims to want to save from the horrendous public schools are being rapidly displaced.
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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mark-crispin-miller/whats-the-biggest-scandal-in-de-blasios-administration_b_9721568.html
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Crap, I just violated my own rule on posting HuffPo links. Use this link instead.
http://markcrispinmiller.com/2016/04/whats-the-biggest-scandal-in-de-blasios-administration-that-he-belongs-to-the-developers-destroying-new-york-city/
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$20 bucks says the Mayor is “not familiar with the specifics” of this school closure.
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You’re an expensive bet! I say two bits and only if you buy first round.
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I don’t understand how a charter school can “cherry pick” its location. The DOE claims it is very difficult to open a new school. How are these schools, whether it’s Success Academy or Sean Combs, able to open a new school with what seems like ease? They are private managed, but they use public resources. Who says the community needs these schools? How is Success Academy able to open new schools or expand existing schools after so much negative publicity and lawsuits?
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“…with the full cooperation of current UFT leadership,” and the mayor. Who can you count on to be ethical in the world today? No one.
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The politicians have no problems asking for and accepting campaign contributions and the unions process dues deductions while stabbing membership in the back.
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Meanwhile in Cincinnati, the Cincinnati school board is the official “charter authorizer” for one Carpe Diem School, grades 7-12, with a second planned soon. These are part of a system of education, so-called blended learning schools, well known for hiring TFA and serving up to 300 students in huge warehouse-like spaces filled with computers, one per student.
They are staffed with five teachers, one per subject (ELA, Math, social studies, science, health/wellness), three administrators, and about four paraprofessionals trained to monitor student performance on data dashboards, and a handful of specially trained learning coaches( not certified teachers). Special education is handled by paraprofessionals. This school has an independent board and budget, takes an average of $7222 per student away from the district, per year.
Here is the kicker: the CEO of Carp Diem, Robert Sommers, has applied to be Ohio’s State Supervisor of Education and has a letter of reference from Tom Vander Ark, CEO of Getting Smart, a marketing tool for all things tech. Vander Ark is the person tapped by Bill Gates to lead education initiatives for the Gates Foundation.
There are other applicants who are pushers of charter schools and tech-based schools applying for the state superintendent. I guess they think the record of charter corruption makes Ohio an attractive target for scaling up. Republican political operatives in Ohio are abundant. I will soon have some more comments about the large applicant pool for this position (more than forty). I believe finalists have been selected, but I do not know who they are.
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It’s appalling.
Is there ONE candidate for Ohio state superintendent who didn’t come out of the ed reform lobby?
I knew they would push this cheap tech garbage into public schools.
Charter schools aren’t a big enough market.
We’re ALL getting “blended learning”, whether we like it not- once again, “choice” is a lie.
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The search firm listed the following 4 candidates Shonda Hardman,
former chief of schools for Houston, Penny Schwinn, chief of accountability and performance officer for the state of Delaware’s Dept. of Education, Robert Sommers, Tina Thomas-Manning, superintendent of Reynoldsburg schools near Columbus, and front-runner,Tom Lasley, a fan and “believer” in charter schools.
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The search committee’s decision about the candidate to recommend will be made around April 28.
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Yes, Chiara, as usual you’re absolutely right.
The Oligarchs funding so-called reform are flexible and opportunistic in their greed and will-to-power. They are wedded to charter schools only insofar as they serve their purpose of destabilizing public education and weakening the unions. The instant they stop serving that purpose, charter operators will have a much, much harder time getting phone calls to their billionaire patrons returned.
When/if the public schools have been sufficiently reduced to a rump institution serving those who have no other “choice,” most charters in their current incarnation will be readily disposed of, since the ultimate goal is to have the children of Proles in front of computers, fifty or more to a room, where their “production” can be recorded and monetized, and teachers reduced to temporary, at-will Overseers.
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Across the river in New Jersey, much the same scenario is being played out in Newark. Mayor Ras Baraka, who ran in opposition to Shavar Jeffries (now ensconced as President of DFER) has gone utterly silent on the question of charters. This after the departure of Cami Anderson, due in some measure to the protests of the wonderful student activists of the Newark Students Union. See more from Bob Braun:
http://www.bobbraunsledger.com/silence-of-the-lambs-or-whatever-happened-to-the-newark-educational-success-board/
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http://chicago.suntimes.com/politics/cps-reassigns-troy-laraviere/CPS reassigns Troy Laraviere
On Wed, Apr 20, 2016 at 1:31 PM, Diane Ravitchs blog wrote:
> dianeravitch posted: “Mayor Bill de Blasio campaigned against the charter > industry and against school closings. But when he tried to slow (not stop) > their invasions of public schools, the billionaires pinned his ears back > with a big TV campaign and with Cuomo’s help. It all ca” >
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Very disappointing news. I spent my first three years as a teacher in a District 75 school that shared FLAGS’ (the school mentioned in the press release) building on Jackson Avenue in the South Bronx, just across the street from the notorious St. Mary’s Park. This is the neighborhood Jonathan Kozol covered in his book “Amazing Grace.” I remember the faculty at FLAGS as passionate and committed to serving some of the most challenged and challenging kids I’ve encountered in 26 years of working with troubled adolescents.
Shame on you, Mr. Mayor.
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They should stop fooling around and just turn public schools over to the charter operators.
It’s really unfair to children in public schools to continue to pretend anyone in government is interested in their schools. Just privatize in one fell swoop. It’s obvious the public schools are slated for replacement anyway.
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FLAGS’s enrollment was in a free-fall long before it was assigned ‘receivership’ or ‘renewal school’ status. There are likely two reasons for this: one, the number of children who live in the district and in the South Bronx, period, is in a sustained decline. Anyone who has the means to do so leaves. Two, high school enrollment in NYC is determined by choice, and parents and students aren’t choosing FLAGS. FLAGS’s graduation rate is 44%, and only 2% of its graduates are able to enter an open-admissions CUNY college without remediation. 2%! These numbers might have something to do with the enrollment decline.
I am guessing that very few — oh, hell, I’ll say zero — parents who are posting on this blog or who are members of Change the Stakes or who are teachers at FLAGS would send their own kids to a high school with a 44% graduation rate and a 98% remediation rate. What compelling reason is there to keep this school open?
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Well, maybe none. It has been ten years since FLAGS was on my radar screen, As you point out, the South Bronx isn’t exactly the garden spot of the Five Boroughs–though parts of it, interestingly, are starting to gentrify modestly. But what compelling reason is there to turn this real estate over to a charter operator?
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Tim, why doesn’t the city give FLAGS to Eva? She can fix it. Zip code is no excuse!
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I’m not sure what Eva has to do with this, but I’m guessing she would recommend closing down a school with numbers like these, even–especially–if it were a charter.
It also looks as if it’s time for a reminder: charters were conceived as being an alternative to traditional public schools, period, not just something to clean up the district’s messes.
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Tim, you always jump to the fore to praise Eva and to damn public schools. Charters were conceived as schools to collaborate with district schools, to accept the children with the greatest needs, and to share what they learned with public schools. They have gone far from the original vision. Now they compete, not collaborate; they exclude the children with the greatest needs; and they share nothing because they have nothing to share other than pushing out kids with low scores.
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Are the richest 0.1%, who are financially bolstering the charter school business sector, willing to put money in escrow, to prove their long-term belief in the system?
If the answer is, “H_ll, No” then, charter school performance must be measured, sans the plutocratic dollars.
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Mark wrote “But what compelling reason is there to turn this real estate over to a charter operator?”
No real estate is being turned over to anyone. The city owns the building, which even with FLAGS operational is less than 50% utilized. The District 75 school where you once worked is still in the building and will be co-located with the new charter school.
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Charters should not be allowed to take public space for free. The legislature and Cuomo pushed that through, in response to the millions that Cuomo collected from the hedge fund guys.
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“Eva Moskowitz has to stop being tolerated, enabled, supported…”
That’s why charters are guaranteed space or rent. Maybe de Blasio, who was polling at around 10% when he made that comment at a UFT gathering, didn’t actually believe he’d be mayor. It’s a weird twist on the old “elections have consequences” chestnut.
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I’d equate this charter cherry picking business to an antique dealer walking through the Smithsonian, pointing and saying, “I’ll take that artifact and that one, and that one…” Public schools are paid for by the public and they belong to the public. I cannot see how turning schools and classrooms over to privately run corporations can be acceptable at any level.
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