Group items tagged

"Why would Moskowitz feel the need to lay down a gauntlet in opposition to a president and two secretaries of education who have all been vigorous charter school supporters? For that matter, why take on the entire civil rights community? To answer these questions, I decided to take a look at the data on suspensions from New York City schools, both public and charter."

What better proof for all the ills of many charter schools, but especially those under Eva Moskowitz than this handbook for parents from Eva's scam factory, accused of trying to avoid Spanish speaking kids, often the lowest scorers due to language issues? And what a nice way to force out non-compliant parents, especially Spanish speaking who can't read the handbook in English. If a public school were to try this they would be brought up on charges.

Like many other gentrifying Brooklyn neighborhoods, Bedford-Stuyvesant has an influx of new residents who have a complex relationship with the public schools. On the whole, the newcomers are a progressive group, committed, at least in principle, to the idea of public education for their children. But many are also dismayed by the quality of their options, which include elementary schools where half of the students - in some cases, fewer - passed the state's reading and math exams last year. At the home of Chris Antista, a graphic designer and wine distributor, they gathered in late March to express their concerns and hear about an alternative from three teachers at the Community Roots Charter School. The three are planning to open a new charter school in Brooklyn in September 2014. Eric Grannis, a lawyer in private practice and the husband of Eva Moskowitz, founder and C.E.O. of a chain of schools, the Success Academy Charter Schools, organized the meeting.

The Bloomberg administration and the charter school operators always claim that in the rapid proliferation of charter schools across the city, they are merely responding to parent "demand" but this ignores the aggressive recruiting methods they use to build up their "waiting lists."  Eva Moskowitz has hired paid recruiters to "poach" students for her Success Academy charters, as in the video below, outside PS 261 in Brooklyn.  Not to mention her extensive and expensive advertising campaigns, in which she spent $1.6 million dollars on marketing efforts alone in 2009-2010, amounting to $1,300 per incoming student. This year, there is evidence that Harlem in particular has become so oversaturated with charters, that they have been forced to go far afield to solicit applications.  Parents as far away as lower Manhattan have receiving mailings from Democracy Prep and Harlem Link. 

On the board are some of the most well-known and polarizing figures in public education, including Ms. Rhee; Mr. Klein, now a News Corporation executive; and Eva S. Moskowitz, the former councilwoman who now runs a chain of charter schools. Also on the board are former Mayor Edward I. Koch; Geoffrey Canada, the founder of the Harlem Children's Zone organization, a network of charter schools; and a number of venture capitalists and hedge fund managers, who have served as the movement's financial backers. Aside from promoting changes throughout the state, members of the group hope to neutralize the might of the teachers' unions, whose money, endorsements and get-out-the-vote efforts have swung many close elections.

One of New York City's wealthiest charter school operators is expected to be approved for a 50% increase in per-pupil management fees

The panel that oversees education policy in New York City approved the first charter school for brownstone Brooklyn on Wednesday night, backing a plan to give it space inside a building already shared by three other public schools. The Panel for Educational Policy handed a significant victory to a network of charter schools run by Eva S. Moskowitz, the former city councilwoman, in her quest to expand its reach to affluent parts of the city.

Much controversy has been aroused and much ink has been expended about the way in which Eva Moskowitz is now defying the original stated purpose of charter schools, and marketing her chain of Success Academies to white middle class families in Brooklyn and on the Upper West Side.  Her glossy flyers, sent to households by the truckload, with many families having already received five or six, increasingly feature the faces of little white children. There has also been much debate about the problems of NYC's demanding school "choice" process -- but not much said about how school choice may further segregate  our public schools, especially in many areas of Brownstone Brooklyn, where the last ten years or more of gradual gentrification have led to more diversity in neighborhood schools.  While the UCLA Civil Rights project has shown how charter schools contributes to more segregation nationwide, here are the observations of one Brooklyn parent who is also a high school teacher, Cindy Black, about what happened when a new elementary school of "choice" -- though not a charter -- opened up  in her community

Fresh from a bruising battle to open a charter school in the Upper West Side, Eva Moskowitz, the former city councilwoman who runs a network of charters in New York City, is gearing up to expand into middle-class enclaves by opening a school in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, next fall.

Success Charter Network founder and former Councilmember Eva Moskowitz faces multiple hurdles in her attempt to open a K-8 charter school in the Cobble Hill/ Boerum Hill area next fall.

Waving signs and shouting out questions, parents from local schools interrupted an information session held Saturday by a charter school planning to move into Cobble Hill. The meeting, held at the Carroll Gardens library, broke up before head of Success Academy charter schools, former Councilwoman Eva Moskowitz, could deliver her planned presentation.

The city wants to give one third of a formerly-struggling Cobble Hill high school to a high-performing charter school - but parents are already fighting the co-location plan. Under the plan, the Baltic and Court street school - which is home to Brooklyn School for Global Studies and the School for International Studies - would house grades kindergarten through fourth of Success Charter Network's school, run by former City Councilwoman Eva Moskowitz.

"Horace Meister, a regular contributor, has discovered a shocking instance of contradictory research, posted a year apart by the same "independent" governmental agency. The first report, published a year ago, criticized New York City's charter schools for enrolling small proportions of high-need students; the second report, published a month ago, claimed that the city's charter schools had a lower attrition rate of high-needs students than public schools. Meister read the two reports carefully and with growing disgust. He concluded that the Independent Budget Office had massaged the data to reach a conclusion favoring the powerful charter lobby. Eva Moskowitz read the second report and wrote an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal called "The Myth of Charter School 'Cherry Picking.'" Horace Meister says it is not myth: it is reality."

As originally envisioned, charter schools were supposed to be a way of empowering communities to have a stronger voice in decision-making at their local schools - with community leaders, parents, and teachers on the boards and decisions being made in ways that gave stakeholders direct access rather than layers of bureaucracy. In New York, however, the expansion and oversight of the state's charter sector seems to be moving in the opposite direction. As evidence, I encourage a review of yesterday's decision by one of the state's charter authorizers to allow the Success Charter Network to merge at least five of its schools (and soon eleven, and likely eventually all forty of their schools) under a single board - essentially creating a new school district run by non-profit corporate leadership rather than public officials or local leaders.

The Success Academy Charter schools are among the city's highest performing and most controversial schools, as they are state-funded and housed rent-free in public school buildings, and on Tuesday a state board allowed five of these schools boards to merge under a single board of trustees. NY1's Education reporter Lindsey Christ filed the following report.

Opponents of Success Academy Cobble Hill recently created perhaps the most apropos hashtag in the brief history of Twitter: "#nosuccess." Some might find it rather odd that, in a city suffering from so much educational failure, those claiming to speak for children would promote "no success." While the intended meaning of the hashtag was obvious, let's be clear: While our opponents don't want our schools to exist, they also block much-needed reforms that could bring about far-reaching success. But what else would we expect from the United Federation of Teachers, which has stopped at nothing to prevent great new public charters from opening and to shut down high-performing charters? (It sued to do just that this spring; thankfully, it lost.)

Minutes after Mayor Bloomberg finished delivering his State of the City address today, reactions started flying about his aggressive slate of education proposals. The reactions ranged from withering (in the case of UFT President Michael Mulgrew) to bewildered (Ernest Logan, principals union president) to supportive (charter school operator Eva Moskowitz and others whose organizations would benefit from the proposals). Below, I've compiled the complete set of education-related reactions that dropped into my inbox. I'll add to the list as more reactions roll in.

Video.