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Three West Harlem secondary schools are on the chopping block for poor performance and in danger of being closed. All three schools are, or will soon be, sharing buildings with charter schools belonging to the Success Academy Network. Some in the community think their schools are being sacrificed to allow for the expansion of the well-funded and politically potent Success Academy Network. They say the DOE has not done enough to support the struggling schools. The DOE is "starving these schools so they have an excuse to shut them down," said Noah Gotbaum, a representative for Community Education Council 3 who attended public hearings about the future of all three schools.

It's a lot more satisfying showing that a 'failing' school is being unfairly closed than showing that a 'miracle' school is getting accolades it doesn't deserve. I applied the same analysis I recently did for Jamaica High school to the just announced closure of a New York City school since 1913, Washington Irving High school.  I learned that they had very respectable Regents 'progress' scores compared to the rest of the New York City High schools.  A weighted Regents pass rate of 1 means that the students did just as expected on the Regents.  Higher than 1 means they outperformed expectations. 

Gov. Chris Christie said Wednesday his administration has developed a new system for reviewing and rating school performance for the state's annual schools report card. The state's nearly 600 school districts will be classified in to one of three categories; "focus schools," the worst, followed by "priority schools," and the best will be called "reward" schools. It's unclear whether the best performing schools would receive any additional perks for achieving "reward" status.

"Backing Governor Chris Christie and Commissioner Chris Cerf's unrelenting push for more "high-quality school options" in New Jersey, the Department of Education recently approved nine charter schools to open in September, bringing the total number of charter schools in New Jersey to 86. This move is part of a broader trend toward the marketization of education policy - the incorporation of market principles into the management and structure of public schools, as well as voucher programs to subsidize alternatives to public schools. These market principles include deregulation, competition, and the unqualified celebration of "choice," all of which are embodied in the charter school movement. Despite claims of greater efficiency, innovativeness, and responsiveness, however, the growing rhetoric around choice needs to be more closely scrutinized before we wholeheartedly jump on the charter school bandwagon."

John P. Reilly, KIPP Tech Valley Charter School board chairman, in his commentary ("A truce in the city School wars," Feb. 21) suggests that the Albany School District be viewed as a "portfolio" district with district-operated and charter Schools being treated more equally. This idea is without merit, as it ignores the substantial differences between public and charter Schools. Charter Schools are privately run and may exercise discretion regarding the children they educate. This makes them more akin to private Schools despite their public funding.

Advocates, lobbyists and celebrities including Bill Cosby are rubbing shoulders in Minneapolis this week to celebrate 20 years of the charter school movement. But a report released late Tuesday confirms a flaw that charter critics have raised over the last two decades: charter schools don't enroll students with disabilities at the same rate as traditional public schools, despite federal laws that require all publicly funded schools to serve disabled students. The Government Accountability Office report, commissioned by Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), found that 11 percent of students enrolled in public schools during the 2009-2010 school year had disabilities, compared with 8 percent of students in charter schools. The report is the first to quantify this gap.

"Neoliberal education reform is plagued by a contradiction in its commitments - schools need autonomy to be responsive to communities, yet most charters are run by non-educators with no stake in these communities. Insulated from public, democratic bodies, charters are operated by "charter management organizations." These organizations often manage multiple schools and are governed by unelected boards in which philanthropists vastly outnumber teachers or parents. Few charter schools are unionized, so educators have little say in the governance of the school. As the public school system is slowly dismantled, school-by-school, charters open in their place. Naturally, this has caused tension between neoliberal reformers and teachers."

As public school students and educators throughout Florida prepared to return to schools that have fewer teachers, larger classes and smaller budgets, a for-profit charter school company, Charter schools USA, paid for 2,000 employees to attend a pep rally. The rally included controversial charter schools proponent Michelle Rhee and Gov. Rick Scott - the man who pushed for $1.35 billion in cuts for public schools and increased funding for charter and virtual schools.

State Superintendent for Public Instruction Tony Bennett will recommend state takeover of four Indianapolis Public Schools. Under Bennett's plan, each would be run by an outside organization beginning with the 2012-13 School year. They are: Emma Donnan Middle School, Manual High School and T.C. Howe High School, all of which would be managed by Charter Schools USA. The Florida-based company operates 29 charter Schools in Florida, Georgia and Louisiana.

Tonight, the Panel for Educational Policy will vote on contracts for six Educational Partnership Organizations to take over a group of low-performing schools through the federal "restart" model. One of the restart schools is Banana Kelly High school, which EdVox wrote about last May. Banana Kelly High school is a small high school in the Bronx that seemed to have been set up to fail by the NYC Department of Education (DOE) which assigned rising populations of the highest-needs students and an increasing enrollment to Banana Kelly, yet allocated the school a declining budget. This year, the school was placed on NY State's list of Persistently Lowest-Achieving schools.

My public middle school in South Los Angeles was labeled as a "failing school" almost 12 months ago making what is already a tough job even more difficult due to the Los Angeles Unified school District corporate inspired reform program called Public school Choice.  In short, if you are deemed a failing school, any organized group can submit a plan to take over your school and as a result, many public schools have been converted to charters in the last two years.  Brand new multi-million dollar buildings were handed over to corporations such as Green Dot and ICEF, and my school is on this dread list.

A few weeks back, the Indiana Department of Ed opted to intervene in seven schools across Indiana. Six of the schools are in Indianapolis and one is in Gary. Of the seven, the Indiana Department of Ed is taking over five, and contracting with three different external operators to take the lead on these schools. The lever was provided by Public Law 221, which allows the state superintendent to bring in external turnaround school operators for a school that has received the state's lowest grade for six consecutive years. The operators are Edison Learning, EdPower, and Charter school USA. (The other two schools will remain under the auspices of the local school district.)

"Public schools achieve the same or better mathematics results as private schools with demographically similar students, concludes The Public school Advantage: Why Public schools Outperform Private schools, published in November by the University of Chicago Press. The authors are Christopher and Sarah Lubienski, a husband-and-wife team of education professors at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Central to the controversy is their suggestion that vouchers, which provide public funding for private school tuition, are based on the premise that private schools do better-an assumption that is undercut by the book's overall findings."

"John King is leaving his job as commissioner of New York State schools commissioner to become a senior adviser to U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan, with the "roles and responsibilities of the deputy secretary," according to the Education Department, which issued a statement giving King high praise for his work in New York. Some in New York think otherwise. Here's a piece by award-winning Principal Carol Burris of South Side High school in New York, who was named New York's 2013 High school Principal of the Year by the school Administrators Association of New York and the National Association of Secondary school Principals, and in 2010, tapped as the 2010 New York State Outstanding Educator by the school Administrators Association of New York State. Burris has been exposing on this blog King's troubling record in implementing school reform program in New York."

Despite being promoted as a viable alternative to traditional public schools, privately owned charter schools in Texas have higher attrition rates for black students than comparable urban public schools, says a University of Texas at Austin study. Dr. Julian Vasquez Heilig's research shows that, although many privately operated charter schools claim that 90 percent or more of their students go on to college and many, such as the Houston-based KIPP chain of schools, spend 30-60 percent more per pupil than comparable urban school districts, more black students drop out and leave charter schools.

Charter schools were created to change things. A bold and controversial concept when they came to New York City in 1999, charter schools have had remarkable success in creating choices for families, raising students' academic achievement, and experimenting with innovative ideas for education. Today, New York City's charter school sector is higher-performing and more vibrant than any in the United States, and has grown from two schools in 1999 to 136 schools educating 47,000 students today. The accomplishments reflect the hard work of dedicated school founders and educators, the support of public officials, and, of course, the commitment and trust of the families who have chosen to enroll in these independent and autonomous public schools.

Students attending a cluster of Los Angeles schools overseen by the charter operator Green Dot significantly increased their test scores and persistence in school, and took more challenging courses than comparable peers, a newly released study has found. The schools were part of what was originally Alain Leroy Locke High school, an academic low-performer located in an impoverished neighborhood in the south part of the city. With permission from the Los Angeles Unified school District, Green Dot took over the school in 2007 and began its transformation into a series of smaller charter schools.

The Philadelphia school system announced in late April that it was on the brink of insolvency and would be turned over to private operators, dissolving most remnants of democratic governance. Specifically, if the city's leaders have their way, 64 of the city's neighbourhood public schools will close over the next five years, and by 2017, 40 per cent of the city's children will attend charter schools. These are are privately run schools that use public funds. Perhaps most disturbingly to those who value democracy and doubt the wisdom of corporate elites, the city will have no oversight of its own school system. schools will instead be governed by "networks", control of which will be auctioned off through a bidding process, and could be bestowed on anyone - including a CEO of a for-profit education company. The situation in Philadelphia, which has received amazingly little attention from the national media in the US, offers a disturbing window onto what the US elite is planning for the rest of our public schools - disturbing because Philadelphia's experience has already demonstrated that turning public education over to private entities will ultimately lead to its destruction.

That sense of immediacy, what the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. called "the fierce urgency of now," gave rise to the charter school movement. Charter schools are public schools that operate under separate management, giving them the freedom to innovate, to refine, and to tailor approaches to specific groups of students. Many charters have longer school days, weeks, and years. We have seen urban charter schools that perform better than their traditional public school counterparts, making up ground that students have lost in traditional schools. They are a right-now education solution for children who need a high-quality education.

Hundreds of students, parents and teachers from the Teaneck, N.J. Public school system rallied in the high school gymnasium Wednesday against a virtual charter school proposed for their town. As the school board was first told by the state, the diversion of taxpayer dollars to the virtual charter could mean the loss of as much as $15.4 million to the public schools. "Ultimately public schools will be losing 40 to 50 per cent of their budgets after a couple of years," said Shelley Worrell, co-president of the P.T.O. Council.