Charters in New York City are angry that the DeBlasio administration intends to stop sharing the names and addresses of public school students, which the charters need for marketing and recruitment.
The Mayor is responding to complaints by public school parents, who object to the city sharing their children’s personal information with the charters.
Wait! What happened to those long waiting lists?
The charters, which enroll about 10% of the city’s children, will have a news conference today to express their indignation.
CHARTER LEADERS AND PARENTS TO DENOUNCE DE BLASIO ADMINISTRATION’S PLAN TO BLOCK CHARTERS FROM SENDING INFORMATION TO FAMILIES ABOUT SCHOOL OPTIONS
(NEW YORK) – Tomorrow, April 11, at 11:00 AM, New York City Charter School Center CEO James Merriman will be joined by charter leaders and parents to speak out against a proposed measure to undercut educational transparency and school choice. The Department of Education (DOE) has indicated its intent to reverse a policy that allows charter schools to utilize DOE services, through a third-party vendor called Vanguard, to send mailings to prospective parents in their neighborhoods. The policy change would fundamentally undercut charter schools’ ability to let parents know about all the education options in their neighborhood, making it harder to receive applications.
WHAT: Press conference call with charter school leaders and parents speak out on changes to way charter schools inform families of their school options.
WHO: James Merriman, NYC Charter School Center CEO
Arthur Samuels, Executive Director, MESA Charter School
Mitchell Flax, Founder & Head of School, Valence College Prep
Parents of charter school students
WHEN: Tomorrow, April 11, 2019 at 11:00 a.m.
Call- in Number: Please email Abdul Sada at asada@skdknick.com to receive call-in information.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Meanwhile, Reform PR is pushing the charters: https://nypost.com/2019/04/09/case-closed-charter-schools-deliver-more-education-bang-for-the-buck/amp/
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That nwsppr was a good-for-nothing rag when I lived in NYC ’70’s& ’80’s, looks like it still is.
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The Post Dispatch does not allow me to post responses to letters…an unusual treatment of a subscriber. I am allowed to use current affairs to respond on a forum where what I say quickly disappears. So I reprinted the letter from professional lobbyist Laura Slay (of the charter school former mayor’s family)..I did the best I could. http://interact.stltoday.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=1313618&p=8730014#p8730014
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Is this “normal”? Do other cities share public school student names/ addresses for purposes of advertising? What a breach of privacy!
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and given the option to have an opinion on this, I can’t imagine parents who would say, oh, yes, go ahead…
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The reality here in NYC is that the charter movement is now dead. With the democratic controlled house now the party is over for our charter foes who have siphoned money away from public schools and even want marketing materials from NYC so they can prey on the weak media savvy parents who have no clue regarding slick marketing.
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“Wait! What happened to those long waiting lists?”
How about it, charter school enthusiasts? You’ve–along with Davis Guggenheim and other propagandists for your cause–have led us to believe that demand exceeds supply in your sector of the economy.
So why do you need to recruit? I thought I understood that students were beating down the door to gain entry to your “schools.”
Please advise.
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They gave away my older child’s name and address years ago and we continue to receive unsolicited mailings from time to time.
Did anyone else notice that the contact listed in the press release is a pr firm?
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The Success Academy network already spends over $3 million in “scholar recruitment ” and “Parent and community outreach and engagement” (see p 8 – http://www.p12.nysed.gov/psc/csdirectory/SuccessAcademyCharterSchoolBronx3/1617FS.pdf). And with all those resources they can’t manage without raiding the data of the public schools???
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Wait. Charter school advocates want schools to operate and compete in the “education marketplace” like businesses. Then, they want the competition–public schools–to give them their “customer” list so they can poach them and undermine their funding? Chutzpah!
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Well put, Arthur!
They want their competitor to hand over their customer list so they can send them their marketing materials.
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The city never should have been complicit in the first place. Why should public schools aid charters that already get preferential treatment? The main goal of charters is to gain access to public money that automatically reduces the pubic schools’ budget. There is no reason public schools should cooperate with private agents that drain the public school budget resulting in fewer resources to educate the neediest students.
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How did they get away with this? Aren’t there laws against this? I’m contacting our school district now to find out if they do this.
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I wonder if some of the concern is that charters desperately need to fill attrition seats. So they need names of older students — preferable ones already performing at or above grade level* — to come to the school.
*There have been pro-charter newspaper articles written in which the parent raving about how much he or she loves their kid’s charter accidentally mentions in passing how their child was pre-tested and told they could not enter the grade they won the lottery for, but would have to repeat the same grade they had just finished. I don’t know how often such practices occur, but such a practice guarantees not only discourages parents of kids that the charter doesn’t want to teach from enrolling their child — after all, not all parents want their child repeating a grade when they seem to be doing okay in their current school — and such a practice also guarantees to keep a seat in an older grade open until the lottery number of a child they do want to teach comes up. Tell the first 3 kids they have to repeat a grade (leaving that 3rd grade seat open) and when kid number 4 comes up and the pre-test shows strong academic ability, there is a seat for number 4 in 3rd grade. But you need to do a lot of marketing to lots of kids.
One of the many great crimes of the reform movement that demonstrates their goal is NOT to improve schools is that the one thing charters refuse to talk about is “retention” — how many students are held back. Since the entire reform movement is about marketing and the children’s education is far less important than bragging rights, if the charters that are most praised frequently hold back children and have them take an extra year, two, or even three to get through elementary school, no one is to know. If the reform movement was really about children, they would not only be revealing retention rates, but saying “we have found that many kids need more time to get through the curriculum and we should have discussions about slowing it down or how to address their needs without having them feel like failures.” Instead they hide it because their prime concern is making charter CEOs and teachers look superior.
It is typical of the sub-par education journalists in NYC that they take the word of charter CEOs and not one of them has ever had the curiosity to ask “how many students are you holding back”? Or have you ever told a family who won the lottery their child must repeat a year or they can’t enroll in your charter?” Nor have they followed up when those anecdotal stories are told but just diligently do their good stenography and write up whatever they are told without asking any follow-up questions.
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Clearly there is no waiting list or the charter industry would not be in need of names and addresses so they can recruit more students. Eva’s schools don’t mind attrition because they don’t replace those who leave.
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They do replace those who leave in the early grades (up to 4th grade). But the important question is HOW they replace them.
Parents have inadvertently revealed in various interviews that their child won a lottery seat for a post-Kindergarten early grade but their child was pre-tested and told they would have to repeat a grade to enter their school. (Those parents interviewed were currently at the school and fine with their kid being made to enter an earlier grade.)
But not all parents are fine with it.
A few years ago pro-charter NY1 ran a news story bashing a neighborhood public school. They bashed the public school because it was overcrowded and an out of zone student who had been there for a year or two had left the school because she had won a lottery seat for a Success Academy school.
When the parents later learned that the only way their child could attend Success Academy was for their daughter to enter into a lower grade than the one she had won the lottery for, the parents wanted their seat back in the public school. NY1 was so angry at the overcrowded public school for not letting this out of zone family back but NY1 did not even question the fact that the charter school was forcing parents to have their kids repeat years if they wanted to enroll!
If this technique is used – especially in schools serving the most disadvantaged students, then Success Academy could have 5 open 2nd or 3rd grade seats but Success Academy could prevent any lottery winner who isn’t already performing at or above grade level to take those open 2nd grade seats. So those seats can remain “open” and the charter can churn through all the lottery winners until they find 5 students who they want to take those 2nd grade seats. The students they don’t want in that grade are told they either have to repeat 1st grade again or go somewhere else. Or perhaps the parents insist and their child gets some of that patented SA treatment the first week of school that was documented by the NAACP report that even progressive democrats pretend does not exist.
Maybe that’s why the charters need lots and lots of names. Just having hundreds of kids on the waiting list does not mean that there are hundreds of kids on the waitlist who are acceptable to the charter and they need to be able to have long waiting lists to cherry pick the students they want and discourage the parents of the rest by using their favorite tactics that have been revealed in the myriad of complaints that are regularly ignored by their enablers at the SUNY Charter Institute.
Some 2nd and 3rd grade seats are open through attrition(students leaving) and some are open because a charter has a policy to just keep flunking and flunking a student so that he or she will not reach a testing grade. But my guess is that none of those open seats in 3rd grade can be filled by a lottery winner who Success Academy hasn’t certified as academically worthy to take that seat. I always wonder if offering at-risk low-income lottery winning students a seat in a lower grade at enrollment is a regular practice, IF the pre-enrollment test doesn’t demonstrate that they will be very good students in the grade they won the lottery for.
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It depends. According to FERPA, “A school may disclose directory information to anyone, without consent, if it has given parents: general notice of the information it has designated as “directory information;” the right to opt out of these disclosures; and the period of time they have to notify the school of their desire to opt out.” In the old days, the worst our parents had to worry about was military recruiters targeting high schoolers. Now, it’s data mining. Your student’s data can be bought and sold multiple times through a myriad of complicated transactions/agreements, and you have no idea who has it or what they are doing with it. In the end, it’s not about the students, it’s about the $$$.
https://www2.ed.gov/policy/gen/guid/fpco/brochures/parents.html
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In 2011, Arne Duncan changed FERPA regulations to make it easy for data miners to get student info without parent consent
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NYC neither asks for parent consent nor allows them to opt out of charter school marketing.
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Call me cynical but do they cull through these lists of names to only send mailings out to what they deem as “desirable” surnames and/or addresses, communities, etc? We know they aren’t aiming to recruit special needs or children who reside in poorer zip codes. Must be nice to have a marketing and recruitment budget. 🙄
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Competition to break the public monopoly was one argument for creating privately managed charter schools. Many states passed charter laws that undermine fair competition between public schools and privately managed charter schools by deregulating charters and “freeing” charters from state’s education codes that public schools are mandated to still follow.
Public funding of public school districts is diverted from existing students to oversight of charter petitions, charter law suits, and demands by local charters to share buildings to parcel taxes.
Privately managed charter school supporters demand equality as both are publicly funded. Yet, school board diverting public school resources to upgrading one’s competition because the competition is also publicly funded: doesn’t make sense.
Lobbyist for privately managed charter schools get state laws passed that advantage privately managed charters and disadvantage public schools. Likewise, public school lobbyist work in their side’s interest but both sides legislative wins undermine fair competition when state law favors a side.
Often public school boards and their administrations try to govern blind to the competition of state laws or they feel need to be even-handed. When established public school board and their administrations remain neutral to the existential threat of publicly managed charter schools, advantage is to privately managed charter schools.
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The Charter school elite has been using a false image and illusion to attract a clientele and undermine public education which is one of the main pillars of democracy. Therefore, charter schools are a definite dangerous plague against the health of the people’s democratic rights in the long term, in effect. Short-sighted people can’t see what’s coming with the false promises of the charter school lobby. Antoine
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