Valerie Strauss clearly explains who were the losers in the bruising battle between the billionaires and de Blasio: students with disabilities.
Archives for category: Harlem Success Academy
Steve Nelson has written a brilliant commentary on the way we judge school “success.”
He begins by discussing the Moskowitz-de Blasio battle and notes that the $5 million attack ads were sponsored by “Families for Excellent Schools.”
He writes:
“This campaign is calculated propaganda. The only “family” materially involved in this organization is the Walton family which, through the Walton Family Foundation, is a major contributor to “Families for Excellence.” The Walton family, along with their billionaire peers the Broad family, the Koch family and the Gates family, are funding so-called school reform efforts like this around the country. The parents and children who appear in these ads may well be sincere, but they are pawns in a much larger game. Charter school operators, particularly Eva Moskowitz, head of the Success charter network, shamelessly use their students to promote their political agenda, as seen in the recent demonstrations in Albany.”
The point of the campaign is to persuade the public that charter schools are better than public schools, which is not true.
Nelson points out that the allegedly “better” schools have selection mechanisms–like Ivy League colleges or selective schools-that recruit selective populations.
He writes:
“All of these comparisons are based on the unquestioned assumption that the success of a school’s students — standardized test scores, SAT scores, college placement — is a direct reflection of the quality of the school. By this measure, Stuyvesant and Bronx Science are superb schools and PS 106 is abysmal; Scarsdale schools are wonderful, public schools in Harlem are awful; Columbia University is much better than City College. This is the way we have been conditioned to judge educational institutions… and it is absolutely meaningless.”
Thank goodness, there is one journalist at the New York Times who sees the big money behind the charter “movement.” It is Michael Powell, who writes a political column.
Michael Winerip used to write a clear-eyed weekly column on education for the Times, but for no reason, his column was dropped, and there is no more regular education columnist. Winerip used to be a scourge of those who love high-stakes testing and privatization. Maybe he disagreed with the predictable editorial board once too often. Now he covers “boomers” or something equally vital.
This is a snippet from Michael Powell’s insightful column:
Speaking of Eva Moskowitz, he writes:
“It’s worth noting this is a nicely gilded crusade. She oversees 20 schools, and is paid $485,000. She is no outlier.
“Deborah Kenney, chief executive of Harlem Village Academies, which runs two schools, has Charles Bronfman and John Legend, not to mention Hugh Jackman, on her organization’s board. Ms. Kenney is paid $499,000.
“Then there is Ian Rowe, leader of the well-regarded Bronx Preparatory School, who receives $338,000. And Our World Charter, a charter school in Astoria, Queens, where the C.E.O. makes a smidgen under $200,000.”
He adds:
“The problem is that the hedge fund chaps who adore charters tend toward the triumphalist. Keep offering more, they suggest, and any parent with a wit will divine the obvious choice.
“They rarely note the downside to these hothouse flowers. At Harlem Village Academy Leadership School, where Ms. Kenney makes her half-million, 50 percent of teachers with less than five years’ experience left last year. Her other school had a 60 percent teacher turnover rate, and suspended 38 percent of its students in 2010.”
And more:
“Ms. Moskowitz’s schools paid $519,000 or so last year to SKD Knickerbocker, a prominent political consulting firm. She gave $254,000 to Education Reform Now, which in its federal tax forms notes that it educated the public on the “harm caused” by the 2012 Chicago teachers’ strike.”
But she can’t pay rent.
Now that a judge has ruled that the State Comptroller may not audit Success Academy because it is “not a unit of the state,” the obvious question is: if it can’t be audited, if it is not a public school, why should it get free public space?
You can’t say this often enough.
Money matters in politics.
Forget principle. Think money.
Andrew Cuomo wants to be re-elected Governor of New York with a large majority.
He has raised $33 million.
One of his biggest sources of money is Wall Street.
Wall Street loves charter schools.
Wall Street doesn’t love public schools.
The fact that only 3% of students in New York State attend charter schools doesn’t matter to Andrew Cuomo.
Cuomo now wants to take charge of dispensing millions in public funds to charter schools for construction, and he wants to assure them that they can have public space without paying rent. He wants the power to give free space to charters, no matter what Mayor Bill de Blasio says.
The fact that high-flying charters like Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academy not only excludes children with special needs but literally pushes them out of their schools does not matter to Andrew Cuomo. Success Academy is for winners, not losers. Children with disabilities don’t belong in Success Academy’s charters.
I have been trying to remember something that his father Mario Cuomo said. I can’t find it. I have googled, and I can’t find it. Mario Cuomo, known for his eloquence, once explained that a parent gives more love and affection to the weakest child, not the strongest one. I remember it well, even though I can’t find the source. It was very moving, spoken by a decent and kind human being, a loving father.
Did he teach this lesson to Andrew? I think not. Andrew is ready to toss the neediest children overboard. They don’t have high test scores. They don’t count. They drag down scores. They don’t matter to Andrew Cuomo. In his eyes, they are dispensable. They are invisible. And the hedge fund managers, so necessary for his re-election, don’t like losers. They like high scores. They like winners.
And that is why Andrew Cuomo has become the lobbyist for the hedge-fund supported charter sector. After all, they did give him $800,000 for his re-election campaign.
Parents and other supporters of public schools will rally today against Governor Cuomo’s attempt to wrest control of the New York City public schools for the benefit of his campaign contributors.
Dan Morris. 917.952.8920.
Julian Vinocur. 212.328.9268.
Media Advisory for Fri. March 14, Noon, Cuomo’s Midtown Office
Rally Against Quid Pro Cuomo State Budget Deal and Gubernatorial Control of NYC Schools
*Parents condemn Cuomo’s pay-to-play budget deal with charter school lobbyists who are bankrolling his re-election campaign and want to undermine New York City’s power over its schools.*
WHAT: Public school parents, community leaders, and elected officials will rally against the budget deal Cuomo clearly orchestrated with the Senate Majority to advance the extremist, anti-de Blasio agenda of charter school lobbyists who are heavily funding the Governor’s re-election campaign. This disturbing Quid pro Cuomo opens the door to gubernatorial control of New York City schools.
WHO: Outraged public school parents, community leaders, and elected officials who won’t stand for Cuomo and the Senate Majority cutting a pay-to-play budget deal with charter school lobbyists.
WHERE: Governor Cuomo’s Midtown office: 633 Third Avenue, between E40th and E41st Streets.
WHEN: Friday, March 14, Noon.
In New York state, the Assembly is led by Sheldon Silver, Speaker of the Assembly. In this interview, he expressed opposition to the State Senate’s bill to protect Eva Moskowitz and to assure that all of New York City’s nearly 200 charters get rent-free space in public school buildings. Eva has a chain of 22 charters. Mayor de Blasio just agreed to give her five more, but turned down three proposed charters for her chain. Two of those schools do not exist and have no pupils. The third will have to relocate 194 students.
Silver said about the State Senate’s proposal:
“This whole right of having a building around you — yet there’s thousands of children sitting in trailers in city public schools. Does anybody speak for their right?” Silver asked reporters during a rare visit to the Capitol’s press room. “They don’t have Wall Street billionaires who can put ads on, or contribute to campaigns, and therefore, nobody represents them and they’re doomed to sitting in trailers for the rest of their school career? That’s unfortunate. Some of that money, maybe, from all the advertising, would do well to build some buildings for a lot of students if they actually support them.”
If Silver acts on his views, the legislation won’t pass.
194 children were displaced from one of Eva Moskowitz’s 22 charters. Her chain, which spends millions on marketing, public relations, and advertising can easily afford to rent space for a school for them. The legislation proposed by the State Senate would guarantee
Eva the right to expand in a public school without regard to the children they displace and to stay there rent-free.
On the other side are 1.1 million children in the public schools, who have no billionaires to fight for them. They now depend on Speaker Silver to defend them from those who would bully their way into their schools, take away their art room, their dance room, their resource room for special education kids, their computer room, and any other space they choose.
The New York State Senate has drafted a budget proposal to make sure that Eva Moskowitz gets the eight charters she wants, not just the five that Mayor Bill de Blasio approved. This is how big money talks. Under the proposal, Eva can kick the special education kids out of their school to make way for her new middle school, which has no high-needs special education students. Furthermore, the proposal would protect all rent-free co-locations, allowing handsomely funded charters whose boards include billionaires to take public space at no cost to them. Even more astonishing, charters that are co-located inside public school buildings are given the power to veto any effort to move them; in other words, the charters are given greater “rights” than the public schools that they invade.
Amazing that the Republican-dominated State Senate would write legislation that guts mayoral control to benefit one charter entrepreneur, while simultaneously undercutting the education and rights of the 94% of kids in New York City who do not go to charters.
I am no fan of mayoral control, but I am also no fan of special-interest legislation written for the protection of privately managed charters.
If ever there was a demonstration of the toxic and divisive role of charters in politics, this is it. This bill to protect the billionaires’ plaything is not about improving education for all. It is about me-first and he devil take the other 94%.
Here is a response from the Alliance for Quality Education:
For Immediate Release
For Info:
Billy Easton 518-461-9171
Alliance for Quality Education Reacts to Senate Majority Budget Resolution
The Senate Majority budget proposal adds only $217 million in new school aid—only 56% of what the Assembly added. The Senate Majority actually offers more state funding to private schools than it does to public schools by authorizing a tax credit for private schools that is estimated to cost the state at least $250 million in the first year.
“It is unconscionable that the State Senate Majority is proposing to do more for private and charter schools than for our public schools,” said Billy Easton, Executive Director, Alliance for Quality Education. “The Senate adds $250 million in state funding for private schools, but only adds $217 million for public schools. The $250 million the Senate is giving in state financed tax credits to fund private schools should instead be invested in restoring arts, music, and high quality curriculum in our public schools. They said their priority was to cut the Gap Elimination Adjustment, but when it came time to give out the money, private schools won out.”
On privately-run charter schools the Senate Majority would make a number of changes to favor charter schools in New York City at the expense of public school students. These include:
· Increasing the amount of money that public schools are required to pay to charter schools;
· Requiring free rent for private charter schools in public school buildings;
· Overriding the decisions of Mayor de Blasio to reverse the co-location of three of Eva Moskowitz’s charter schools;
· Giving charter schools power to veto any changes in co-location arrangements, even though public schools are denied the same rights under the mayoral control legislation that the Senate Majority championed.
“The Senate Majority, Governor Cuomo and the wealthy campaign donors providing the political muscle to the charter school movement are all in synch when it comes to special treatment for charter schools,” Easton said. “While our public schools are hemorrhaging programs, the Senate Majority and the Governor have clearly signaled that privately run charter schools that serve only 3% of students top the list of priorities.”
About AQE
The Alliance for Quality Education is a coalition mobilizing communities across the state to keep New York true to its promise of ensuring a high quality public education to all students regardless of zip code, income or race. Combining its legislative and policy expertise with grassroots organizing, AQE advances proven-to-work strategies that lead to student success and echo a powerful public demand for a high quality education.
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This article, which I co-wrote with Avi Blaustein, an independent education researcher, was cross-posted on Huffington Post.
It explains that Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academy charters do not serve the most disadvantaged students in New York City; that her school in Harlem (Success Academy 4) that will not expand is NOT the highest scoring school in the state; and that her schools have few, if any, of the highest-need special education students and a high attrition rate.
By Diane Ravitch and Avi Blaustein
The battle between NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio and Eva Moskowitz, CEO of the Success Academy charter chain, has blown up into a national controversy, covered on national television, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal.
Mayor de Blasio had the nerve to award the Moskowitz chain only five of the eight charters that it wanted, and Moskowitz has been on the warpath to get all eight, even if it means pushing kids with disabilities out of their public school classrooms.
What is missing from the controversy so far is any interest on the part of the journalists in basic facts. Instead, what is happening is a public relations battle. Moskowitz has attacked Mayor de Blasio in multiple media appearances, and no one in the media has bothered to check any of her claims.
Let’s fill that gap.
On MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Ms. Moskowitz claimed that Success Academy 4 in Harlem is the “highest performing school in New York State in math in in fifth grade.” This is obviously an odd metric to use in judging a school. Picking out one subject in a single grade should raise suspicion among the media, but it hasn’t.
It is also not true. On the fifth grade state math test, the students at Success Academy 4 are, in fact, #8 in New York City (tied with another school) and presumably even lower when compared to schools across the state. The fourth grade math test scoresare #54 in New York City (tied with six other schools). The third grade math scores rank #63 in New York City (tied with 6 other schools). The school’s rankings are even worse in English. The fifth grade English test scores rank #59 in New York City (tied with seven other schools), the fourth grade English test scores rank #81 in New York City (tied with five other schools), and the third grade English test scores rank #65 in New York City (tied with eight other schools).
The school is not the “highest performing school in the state” in any grade.
Moskowitz’s interviewers have said that the students at Success Academy 4 are the “most disadvantaged kids in New York City,” to which she assented. She has said “it’s a random lottery school. We don’t know who they are.”
We do, in fact, know who the students at Success Academy are. They are not the most disadvantaged kids in New York City. Harlem Success Academy schools have half the number of English Language Learners as the neighboring public schools in Harlem. The students in Success Academy 4 include 15 percent fewer free lunch students and an economic need index (a measure of students in temporary housing and/or who receive public assistance) that is 35 percent lower than nearby public schools.
Moskowitz’s Success Academy 4 has almost none of the highest special needs students as compared to nearby Harlem public schools. In a school with nearly 500 students, Success Academy 4 has zero, or one, such students, while the average Harlem public school includes 14.1 percent such students. With little sense of irony or embarrassment, Moskowitz has attacked Bill de Blasio for preventing the school’s expansion inside PS 149. Her school’s expansion would have come at the cost of space for students with disabilities. The school has already lost “a fully equipped music room … A state-mandated SAVE room … A computer lab… Individual rooms for occupational and physical therapy … and the English Language Learners (ELL) classroom,” due to earlier Success Academy expansions in the same building.
Moskowitz said, referring to the students in her schools, “we’ve had these children since kindergarten.” But she forgot to mention all the students who have left the school since kindergarten. Or the fact that Harlem Success Academy 4 suspends students at a rate 300 percent higher than the average in the district. Last year’s seventh grade class at Harlem Success Academy 1 had a 52.1 percent attrition rate since 2006-07. That’s more than half of the kindergarten students gone before they even graduate from middle school. Last year’s sixth grade class had a 45.2 percent attrition rate since 2006-07. That’s almost half of the kindergarten class gone and two more years left in middle school. In just four years Harlem Success Academy 4 has lost over 21 percent of its students. The pattern of students leaving is not random. Students with low test scores, English Language Learners, and special education students are most likely to disappear from the school’s roster. Large numbers of students disappear beginning in 3rd grade, but not in the earlier grades. No natural pattern of student mobility can explain the sudden disappearance of students at the grade when state testing just happens to begin.
Moskowitz made a number of other claims during her Morning Joe appearance. She said “we are self-sustaining on the public dollar alone.” In fact, Success Academyspends $2,072 more per student than schools serving similar populations. This additional funding comes from donations by the very same hedge fund moguls who have donated over $400,000 to Governor Cuomo’s re-election campaign (charter supporters in the financial and real estate sector have contributed some $800,000 to Governor Cuomo’s campaign).
Moskowitz has said “in terms of cracking the code that’s what we’ve set out to do.” But we don’t need charter schools to crack the code if the cryptographic key is to keep out the neediest students and kick out students with low test scores. Public schools could do that too. Then they too would have higher test scores and a high attrition rate. They don’t do it because it would probably be illegal. And besides, it is the wrong thing to do. Public schools are expected to educate everyone, not just those who are likeliest to succeed.
In an article in the New York Daily News, which has been an outspoken champion of charter schools and Eva Moskowitz’s attacks on Mayor Bill de Blasio, Noah Gotbaum explains why Eva’s schools are “successful”: they leave out the neediest students. Â Gotbaum is a public school parent and has children with special needs.
Gotbaum writes:
Eva Moskowitz is up in arms. Her schools are being “closed,” she says, and her students left “educationally homeless” by the mayor’s “war” on charters. She’s even called in the civil rights lawyers.
Truth is, it is Moskowitz and her patrons who are waging war — insisting that autistic and severely emotionally disturbed kids be forced out of their own building to make room for her high-performing “scholars.”
Contrary to the cry of the governor and hedge funders, Mayor de Blasio was absolutely right to reverse Success Academy’s co-location agreement and ensure our most vulnerable kids get needed services and a sound education.
Let’s examine the facts.
In the dying weeks of his administration, Mayor Bloomberg rammed through a record 45 new school-sharing arrangements — including 17 new charters. Late last month, de Blasio allowed 36 of these to move forward, including 14 of the 17 new charter co-locations. Moskowitz’s Success Academies network was handed five new sites. Hardly a war or personal vendetta.
Of the three reversed charter co-locations, two were for new Success charter elementary schools, neither of which has yet to accept a single student. This makes Success’ claims of “closed” schools and “evicted” students disingenuous at best.
The final charter rollback was the proposed move of Harlem Success 4’s fifth through seventh grades into the PS 149 building in Harlem, already home to PS/MS 149; the very-high-needs Mickey Mantle school, which is part of special education District 75; and another Success Academy charter.
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To accommodate Moskowitz, Bloomberg’s DOE planned to move one-third of Mickey Mantle’s autistic and severely emotionally disturbed children out of the building, exiling them to three potential DOE sites long bus rides away from their northern Manhattan communities.
According to the city’s own Educational Impact Statement, the co-location would then have increased occupancy in the building for the remaining Mickey Mantle and PS 149 students to 132% — almost 400 students above the DOE’s already unrealistic “target capacity” of 1,200.
To accommodate the overcrowding, students in the public school would have been required to eat lunch at 10:40 am, but not students in Eva’s charter school.
Eva has been playing the victim of a vendetta on national television, but the real victims are the children who are pushed aside to make way for her students.
Read more:Â http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/de-blasio-fake-war-charters-article-1.1718314#ixzz2vkuKLHpk
This blogger–Better Living Through Mathematics–has a problem with the games played by charters, specifically by Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academy.
Not one willing to suspend his disbelief, he wrote that he has a problem with charters in general and was mightily disappointed by Governor Cuomo standing up for the 6% of children in New York City who attend them (and the 3% in New York State):
What’s my problem with charter schools, you ask? I don’t know where to begin, but here it is in a nutshell: chutzpah. You open a school, take all sorts of private money to fund advertising and publicity, exclude students from enrolling through a variety of strategies, and then expel those for whom you cannot or will not provide essential services or are discipline problems, underpay inexperienced teachers and work them to death so there is high turnover, then you instruct your teachers to “teach to the test” AND then have some students who might not measure up stay home on the day of the test, and then give your students copies of the test before they take it, shut up your students in computer labs to be “supervised” by $15 per hour aids, then rake off money for your shareholders and hire all sorts of corrupt ex-government officials to promote your cause, scream when you are asked to pay your share for the space you use to displace kids in public schools, AND then pat yourself on the back when your test scores show up marginally better than the local public school, which doesn’t do ANY of these things….
and you have the chutzpah to say you are “outperforming” public schools?
But what really bothered our mathematically minded friend was a conversation with a friend whose daughter got a great job at Success Academy–straight out of college–as an “educational coordinator” earning $49,000 a year. This is more than a starting teacher makes. Her sole job is to analyze the test scores, determine what teachers must do to get the numbers higher. And she has never taught!
Mr. Better Living Through Mathematics says that this is the educational equivalent of Moneyball:
What we have here is a the “Moneyball” approach to public education: if you need “good numbers” to prove your value, then hire someone whose full-time job is to analyze those numbers and tell teachers exactly what to teach in order to get those numbers to obey.
And what if the student can’t make those numbers? Well, if you were reading the job description closely, you would have seen this duty:
“Coordinate student Individualized Education Program (IEP) creation, and interact with teachers, parents, and special education providers to determine current and future educational services for all students.”
Hmmm, I wonder what those “interactions” with teachers, parents and special education providers about “current and future educational services” would look like? I can imagine it would sound something like this: “I’m sorry, but this does not seem like the right educational placement for your child. I do have a suggestion for an alternative that might be a better fit….”
