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Many uptown Manhattan parents hope that winning the lottery for a seat at Harlem Success Academy I will put their child on the path to academic achievement. But just because a child gets into Harlem Success does not mean he or she will complete 5th grade there. The school -- part of Eva Moskowitz's Success Academy network -- has a high attrition rate, leading critics to charge that the school may push out low achieving or difficult students.

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.)

District 15 parents, legal advocates and other supporters from the community held a press conference outside of 284 Baltic Street, between Court and Smith Streets, Wednesday morning to announce their intention to sue founder and CEO of Success Academy Charter Schools Eva Moskowitz, Brooklyn Success Academy III Trustees and the DOE over the alleged unlawful authorization of the charter school. The impassioned speeches were as chilly as the temperature on the sidewalk. "The Success Charter Network and Eva Moskowitz with the participation of the SUNY Board of Trustees have unlawfully co-located in this building in violation of the school's charter and charter law," said Sabrina Tann, senior staff counsel for Advocates for Justice.

"This Sunday's NY Times featured an outrageously one-sided article on Success charters.  It is not the first.  One remembers the Steve Brill article from 2010 on Harlem Success Academy which was so similar in tone that I had to keep checking to see that this was not the exact same piece. The Brill article was replete with many factual errors - claiming that the high-performing students at Success charters were exactly like those as the public schools with which it shared space, even though that was a clear falsehood that any reporter or editor could have checked if they had bothered to look at the data.  This time, the reporter Daniel Bergner admitted that the type of students enrolled may be different, writing in an offhand manner"

Parents from Harlem, Brooklyn and the Bronx gathered in front of the Lenox Avenue headquarters of Success Charter Network Thursday to protest the school's expansion plans. Parents fear three Harlem schools - Wadleigh Secondary School for the Performing Arts, Frederick Douglass Academy II and Opportunity Charter School - will be slated for full of partial closure to make way for Success schools to expand. All three schools are currently co-located or will be with Success schools

Today, The Los Angeles Times published an editorial reflecting on the parent trigger's lack of success, and described Parent Revolution's retooling effort: Instead of choosing the schools for a possible parent trigger and engineering the petitions, Parent Revolution now leaves it up to parents to determine whether they want to initiate major reforms and what kind. The article charitably describes the organization's success at this new strategy as "modest." Of course, this "new" strategy is the primary strategy used by all effective community organizers in modern times, and by successful organizers in history before the term was even coined.

This paper outlines how such an investment structure might be used to solve a different challenge: chronic academic underachievement among low-income students. The academic achievement gap is well documented and seemingly intractable. Low-income students do consistently worse than their middle and upper-income peers in all measures of academic success at every grade level, including standardized test scores, high school graduation rates, and college completion rates. A number of social and education reforms have been offered to help close the achievement gap. This paper will not attempt to add to this voluminous history; rather, it will explore a new approach to financing schools that demonstrate success in closing the gap. It will also deliberately steer clear of any discussion of pedagogy. Curriculum reform is beyond the scope of this proposal as well. That said, this paper will focus on a particular type of school-charters-because many have demonstrated success serving low-income students.

"There was a big to-do recently in New York when new standardized testing results were released and the controversial Success Academies charter chain received very high scores. What, exactly, do the scores really tell us about the schools? Matthew Di Carlo, senior fellow at the non-profit Washington D.C.-based Albert Shanker Institute, explains. This post appeared on the institute's blog."

A recent lengthy post from the Shanker Blog by Matt DiCarlo got my attention just prior to the Thanksgiving holiday entitled "The Uncertain Future of Charter School Proliferation." The post, and the blog as a whole, are no fan of charter schools, and casts doubt on charters in general on a national scale. Two areas of charter success in the country, the post acknowledges are Boston and New York City, as certain studies show. One factor, Mr. DiCarlo suggests, is that the "market share" of charter schools in these cities is small, so they they can "get a larger share" of "finite sources," presumably private funding. Count me skeptical on that one. Mr. DiCarlo also acknowledges more credibly that successful charter schools devote much greater time teaching and tutoring than district schools, which contribute to the higher charter results in Boston and New York City.

There are many ways to use student test scores to evaluate schools. This paper defines and examines different estimators, including regression-based value-added indicators, average gains, and successive cohort differences in achievement levels. Given that regression-based indicators are theoretically preferred but not always feasible, we consider whether simpler alternatives provide acceptable approximations. We argue that average gain indicators potentially can provide useful information, but differences across successive cohorts, such as grade trends, which are commonly cited in the popular press and used in the Safe Harbor provision of federal school accountability laws, are flawed and can be misleading when used for school accountability or program evaluation.

The New York City Department of Education ("NYCDOE") proposed to co-locate Brooklyn Success Academy Charter School 3 ("BSA3") in Building K293, located at 284 Baltic Street in Brooklyn, within the geographical confines of Community School District ("CSD") 15. BSA3 would be co-located in K293 with three existing NYCDOE schools: the Brooklyn School for Global Studies, serving approximately 415 students in grades 6-12 in the 2011-12 school year; the School for International Studies, serving approximately 522 students in grades 6-12 in the 2011-12 school year; and a District 75 program serving approximately 30 students at the high school level who are autistic, mentally retarded, or have multiple handicaps. The not-for-profit charter management organization (CMO), Success Charter Network, Inc., will operate BSA3. 

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

Success Academy opened in August 2011 in the Brandeis High School Campus building located on Manhattan's Upper West Side.Part of the highly popular Success Academy network of charter schools, Upper West is the network's first foray into middle and high income neighborhoods. The school draws its student population from a swath of Manhattan that encompasses everything from public and low-income housing to some of the most upscale addresses in the city.

Talk about inflating demand for your product. The Success Charter Network, a chain of charter schools headed by former City Councilwoman Eva Moskowitz, spent an astonishing $1.6million in the 2009-2010 school year just for publicity and recruitment of new students, the group's most recent financial reports show. The network spent more on publicity and recruitment that year than it did in the previous two years. In 2009-2010, the seven schools operated by the Success network admitted 1,200 new students. That means Moskowitz spent about $1,300 on marketing for every new enrollee.

"In the debate over charter schools, KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program) schools are hailed by charter advocates as illustrative of what these alternatives to public schools can produce. With KIPP, poverty need not impede academic success. Enroll students from economically impoverished backgrounds in a "no excuses" school like KIPP and their chances of attaining academic success would soar markedly. There, neither hunger, poor health, relentless stress, lack of access to the material sustenance and cultural experiences available to students from more affluent homes, nor other adverse effects of poverty are impediments to learning and the attainment of good test scores. If only poor youngsters were not in the nothing-but-excuses public schools where they are taught by nothing-but-excuses teachers. So the story goes and so it was conveyed to me by a KIPP schools manager who, in an oped exchange, presented what the chain considers its best supporting evidence. Whether this evidence actually makes the case for KIPP I will discuss below"

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.

The charter school movement has been a major political success, but it has been a civil rights failure. As the country continues moving steadily toward greater segregation and inequality of education for students of color in schools with lower achievement and graduation rates, the rapid growth of charter schools has been expanding a sector that is even more segregated than the public schools. The Civil Rights Project has been issuing annual reports on the spread of segregation in public schools and its impact on educational opportunity for 14 years. We know that choice programs can either offer quality educational options with racially and economically diverse schooling to children who otherwise have few opportunities, or choice programs can actually increase stratification and inequality depending on how they are designed. The charter effort, which has largely ignored the segregation issue, has been justified by claims about superior educational performance, which simply are not sustained by the research. Though there are some remarkable and diverse charter schools, most are neither. The lessons of what is needed to make choice work have usually been ignored in charter school policy. Magnet schools are the striking example of and offer a great deal of experience in how to create educationally successful and integrated choice options.

This NBER report concludes that teachers whose students tend to show high gains on their test scores (called "high value-added teachers") also contribute to later student success in young adulthood, as indicated by outcomes such as college attendance and future earnings. To support this claim, it is not sufficient for researchers to show an observed association between teacher value-added and later outcomes in young adulthood. It is also necessary to rule out plausible alternative explanations-for example, that parents who did the most to promote their offspring's long-term success also endeavored to secure high value-added teachers for their children. This review explains that, for the most part, the evidence needed to rule out these alternatives is missing from the report. Thus, policy-makers should tread cautiously in their reaction: the case has not been proved.

The success of school-choice initiatives is commonly measured in reading and math scores. But how does being admitted to a preferred school affect other parts of a student's life? In an article in Education Next, Harvard University's David J. Deming argues for looking beyond school-based outcomes, suggesting that that kind of growth can be achieved in ways that do not necessarily lead to long-term success. Instead, he analyzes the impact of winning a school choice lottery on the criminal activity of students in North Carolina's Charlotte-Mecklenburg school district over a period of seven years.

In 1988, Deborah Bial was working in a New York City after-school program when she ran into a former student, Lamont. He was a smart kid, a successful student who had won a scholarship to an elite college. But it hadn't worked out, and now he was back home in the Bronx. "I never would have dropped out of college if I had my posse with me," he told her. The next year Bial started the Posse Foundation. From her work with students around the city, she chose five New York City high school students who were clearly leaders - dynamic, intelligent, creative, resilient - but who might not have had the SAT scores to get into good schools. Vanderbilt University was willing to admit them all, tuition-free.  The students met regularly in their senior year of high school, through the summer, and at college. Surrounded by their posse, they all thrived. Today the Posse Foundation selects about 600 students a year, from eight different cities. They are grouped into posses of 10 students from the same city and go together to an elite college; about 40 colleges now participate in the program.