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Our school no longer represents our surrounding community.  This is a problem.  When I began teaching nine years ago we enjoyed enthusiastic support from members of our community, including local businesses and organizations.  Each year these relationships have dwindled; there is less and less of a connection between students and adults in the community.  Bluntly and sadly put, the feeling is these aren't our kids.  If a student decides to skip school and hang out at the local deli, there is little chance that they will be spotted an adult who will recognize them - an adult who will relay the message to the student's parent.  It is difficult for students to take pride in a place that is not home.

They say, "It takes a village to raise a child." Family and community engagement is integral to a quality education. Ensuring participation is especially important in communities where poverty, language barriers or discrimination have resulted in disenfranchisement. Apparently, this lesson is lost on our governor, whose SB 24 will strip the neediest communities of any meaningful participation in their public schools with the creation of a "Commissioner's Network" of schools.

"Parent involvement in education is widely recognized as important, yet it remains weak in many communities. One important reason for this weakness is that urban schools have grown increasingly isolated from the families and communities they serve. Many of the same neighborhoods with families who are disconnected from public schools, however, often contain strong community-based organizations (CBOs) with deep roots in the lives of families. Many CBOs are beginning to collaborate with public schools, and these collaborations might potentially offer effective strategies to engage families more broadly and deeply in schools."

In yesterday's State of the City, Mayor Bloomberg said he would encourage Eva Moskowitz' Success Academy charter chain and KIPP to accelerate their expansion.  He may have a fight on his hands. First, see the stickers being pasted all over the glossy recruiting ads in the Williamsburg subways and bus stops for her new charter, to be co-located in MS 50.  (thanks to GothamSchools for the photo to the right.) According to many observers, Eva Moskowitz is recruiting almost exclusively in the northern, primarily white sections of Williamsburg.  (This is a practice she followed  with  the Upper West Success charter on the Upper West side, holding recruiting sessions in the Trump hi-rise condos and at the Jewish center, and producing thousands of glossy promotional flyers in English and almost none in Spanish -- despite the charter law which requires the recruitment of English language learners.)    In Williamsburg, a new coalition, called the Southside Community Schools Coalition has emerged to fight the charter, and its openly racist tactics,  including long-time educational leaders and activists like Luis Garden Acosta, founder of El Puente,  Congresswoman Nydia Velazquez, CM Diana Reyna, several local churches, and the District 14 Community Education Council.  An excerpt from their message is below

"Katie Campos will be appointed to serve as Assistant Secretary for Education. Ms. Campos is the co-founder and Executive Director of Buffalo ReformED, a not-for-profit education reform advocacy organization that empowers the community to prioritize education by putting students first. Buffalo ReformED builds and strengthens relationships between school leaders, teachers, parents, community leaders and elected officials in Buffalo. Through Buffalo ReformED, Ms. Campos has emerged as a leading parent advocate in the education reform debate in Buffalo. Previously, Ms. Campos was the Director of Public Affairs for the New York Charter Schools Association, where she was advocated for quality Charter Schools legislation in the NYS Legislature and coordinated grassroots advocacy efforts at individual charter schools in Upstate New York. Ms. Campos also served as the Director of Development at Democrats for Education Reform, where she promoted education reform to elected officials and community groups through proactive outreach and marketing. Ms. Campos earned her B.A. in Political Science from Washington University in St. Louis."

The public charter school movement has grown rapidly in the 20 years since the first public charter school opened in 1992, with over 5,600 schools now serving more than two million students. One of the most exceptional developments within the first two decades of the movement has been the rise of high performing public charter schools with missions intently focused on educating students from traditionally underserved communities. Given that the demographics of these communities are often homogenous, it is no surprise the demographics of these schools are that way as well. In fact, the student populations at these public charter schools usually mirror the populations in nearby district schools. While much media attention rightly has been given to these schools, the past decade or so also has seen a noteworthy rise in high performing public charter schools with missions intentionally designed to serve racially and economically integrated student populations. These schools are utilizing their autonomy to achieve a diverse student population through location-based strategies, recruitment efforts and enrollment processes. Perhaps most notably, a growing number of cities-and the parents and educators in them-are welcoming both types of public charter school models for their respective (and in some cases unprecedented) contributions to raising student achievement, particularly for students who have previously struggled in school. This brief showcases this development in three of these cities: Denver, Washington, D.C., and San Diego.

The Board of Regents of the Rhode Island Department of Education voted 5-4 last night in favor of a proposal to allow Achievement First, a nonprofit that has established charter schools throughout New England, to continue plans to bring two corporate charter schools to Providence. City Councilman Bryan Principe hosted a press conference yesterday morning urging the Board of the Regents to postpone the vote. Principe has been a leader in the movement against Achievement First and spoke to the board at last night's meeting. "There is widespread community opposition to this plan," he said. Principe presented a long list of those opposed to Achievement First, including 22 members of the General Assembly, seven members of the Providence City Council and 33 various community, parent and labor organizations.

In today's knowledge‐based economy, education-especially education beyond high school-is central to achieving the American Dream. Yet, recent research points to devastating statistics related to educational outcomes in the nation's communities of color.  For example, only 54 percent of Native American students will graduate high school on‐time. Half of today's African American and Latino eighth‐graders will drop out of high school before graduation. And, only 10 percent of African‐American and Latino eighth grade students will complete any sort of college degree. While Asian American student outcomes are seemingly high compared to other students of color, this is not true for all Asian groups. Within the Southeast Asian community, 34 percent of Laotian, 39 percent of Cambodian, and 40 percent of Hmong adults do not have a high school diploma or equivalent.

"An important new study, The Long Shadow: Family Background, Disadvantaged Urban Youth, and the Transition to Adulthood by Karl Alexander, Doris Entwisle, and Linda Olson, casts doubt on the current policy push to starve neighborhood public schools and fund charter schools that are not connected to supportive communities."

Having a shared vision and accountability, local buy-in, and strong partnerships are essential to scaling up a community schools model, reports an interactive online guide from the Coalition for Community Schools, released today.

"The governor is correct that fundamental financial reform is necessary. Such reform must include fundamental resource reallocation to allow for more balanced educational opportunity across communities. This must include communities large and small, wealthy and poor and not be distracted by the siren of consolidation."

As advocates for public education, The Learning Community has grave concerns about the RI-CAN school report cards that evaluate every Rhode Island public school based on faulty methodology. RI-CAN claims that their report cards "are designed to help families in Rhode Island access online information about their local schools" when in truth the report cards spread misinformation to concerned citizens. Instead of providing access to accurate data, RI-CAN summarizes a school's performance by using only one grade level's achievement on state standardized tests and mathematically incorrect calculations.  No efforts at holding schools accountable will succeed unless the measures used are fair and accurate. It is worth mentioning that we are expressing our strong opposition to the report cards despite the fact that The Learning Community ranked in the Top 10 schools in Rhode Island on 7 of the 14 indicators. The methodological deficiencies of the RI-CAN report cards render them at best useless and, at worst, harmful to our state's efforts to support the education of every child.

If somebody told me, 15 years ago, when I was spending many of my days working with community groups in the Bronx and East New York dealing with the consequences of the crack epidemic, that you could solve the problems of neighborhoods under siege by insulating students in local schools from the conditions surrounding them, and devoting every ounce of teachers energies to raising their test scores, I would have said "what planet are you living on?." Students were bringing the stresses of their daily lives into the classroom in ways that no teacher with a heart could ignore, and which created obstacles to concentrating in school, much less doing their homework , that people living in middle class communities couldn't imagine. To be effective in getting students to learn, teachers had to be social workers, surrogate parents, and neighborhood protectors as well as people imparting skills, and at times, the interpersonal dimensions of their work were more important than the strictly instructional components. Now, such thinking is considered a form of educational heresy.

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.

But in those communities, there was one set of institutions that remained functioning and intact, and those were the neighborhood public schools. No matter what happened in the surrounding area, their doors remained open and they tried to serve young people whose lives were being turned inside out by a catastrophe of a kind that no one thought could take place in the United States of America. I visited those schools and while they showed serious signs of decay, and often seemed overwhelmed by the problems deeply wounded students brought inside their doors, they were in truth, their neighborhoods most important "safe zones," and at times provided an uplift for everyone through the artistic events they put on and the success of their teams Now flash ahead twenty years later and these very same schools are being blamed for the economic failures of the communities they are located in, and the educational failures of the students they work with. Their teachers are being publicly pilloried as overpaid and selfish, and a drain on a national economy that requires schools to be run with the efficiency of American business.

Central Falls, Rhode Island may seem like an unlikely standard bearer for a reading or public school revolution - it is the poorest district in the state with more than 85% of its students on free or reduced lunch plans. And, the city itself recently went bankrupt. Yet, a remarkable collaboration between The Learning Community charter school and surrounding non-charter public elementary schools continues to demonstrate that students are hungry to learn and that, in the words of The Learning Community credo, poverty is not a barrier to success.  The collaboration is part of what is called the Growing Readers Initiative - an effort to share best practices between teachers from different systems to turnaround some of the lowest reading scores in the state.

There's nothing wrong with providing families with options. When charters open in their own privately financed, state-of-the-art buildings in poverty-stricken neighborhoods where they're welcomed by the community, there may be reasons to celebrate. But when charters co-locate in mixed-income areas, choice is only half the story. The existing schools in which they set up shop suffer both in terms of resources (only so many kids can fit in the lunchroom at one time) and morale. If the Cobble Hill Success Academy opens as planned in the Brooklyn School for Global Studies, which also houses a second high school and a special-needs program, in five years the building will be at 108 percent capacity - unless, of course, the other schools shrivel up and die. Call us paranoid, but parents like me are starting to wonder whether Mayor Bloomberg's larger goal isn't to privatize the entire New York City public school system. Why else would he be foisting charters on communities that don't want them? And how else can he justify diverting tax dollars to organizations that employ people to blanket neighborhoods with advertisements and try to poach students from public schools that are already thriving?

So, let's look at a few big old schools and the new ones that replaced them in the same building. In particular let's look at the schools' comparative reading levels and comparative math. Until very recently, I didn't have these files, and until very recently I didn't think about same-building schools (called campus schools) too much, either. But then, the DOE made an inaccurate and unsupported claim about one of these campuses, and a few weeks later, Communities for Change set the record straight. The DOE's claim was the usual one ("similar" kids, astronomically better results). But the report from Communities for Change, showed that campus schools across the city were serving much lower concentrations of high-need special education students than the schools that they replaced. Before the old Seward shut down, for example, the concentration of self-contained students was 9%. In 2011, the new campus schools served 0%. Seward Park campus is in Manhattan, and the new schools earned As and Bs. Like disability averages, school wide average scores give us a good indicator of whether or not kids are ready for high school. Here is a comparison between incoming scores at closed old high schools and at the new schools on their campuses. These are actually relative rankings, and the details are explained below.

A reader posted a comment that I think is profound. The more that people begin to see education as a consumer choice, the more they will be unwilling to pay for other people's children. And if they have no children in school, then they have no reason to underwrite other people's private choices. The basic compact that public education creates is this: The public is responsible for the education of the children of the state, the district, the community. We all benefit when other people's children are educated. It is our responsibility as citizens to support a high-quality public education, even if we don't have children in the public schools. But once the concept of private choice becomes dominant, then the sense of communal responsibility is dissolved. Each of us is then given permission to think of what is best for me, not what is best for we.

Change.org's decision marks an important point in our fight for public education, and for America's best interests more generally. When astroturf groups undermine schools and workers, they are not acting in the best interests of children, parents, teachers or the community. This action, and others like it, show that clever names and rhetoric are no longer enough to hide corporate interests from communities determined to protect the common good.