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shouting match

March 11, 2009

A divided house spars over charter schools’ growth in Harlem

by Elizabeth Green, at 7:33 pm
The audience at last night's hearing in Harlem.

The large auditorium at P.S. 194 in Harlem was filled to the brim for last night's meeting. Photo by Kyla Calvert.

Despite repeated cries for a calmer debate, including one from a City Council representative who said he was dismayed by the “divided house,” it was wagging fists, name-calling, and raucous shouting matches that ruled the day at a hearing last night in Harlem.

The crowd had gathered to discuss the city’s proposal to replace P.S. 194, an elementary school the city announced in December it plans to phase out, with a charter school founded by Eva Moskowitz. But they left late last night with no consensus on what to do next, aside from the resounding certainty that the move to add more charter schools to Harlem — which now has 24 charter schools, making it second only to New Orleans in market saturation — will not happen without a bitter fight.

Among those who spoke out against the charter school coming into P.S. 194 were Annie B. Martin, president of the New York chapter of the NAACP; City Council member Robert Jackson; City Council member Inez Dickens; a staff member of state Sen. Bill Perkins; and a representative of Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer. Jackson not only condemned the decision but said he is considering holding a hearing at City Hall to pursue the matter.

The dissenting voices often collided with equally passionate parents and teachers at the charter school, Harlem Success Academy 2, and the two camps found themselves in several shouting matches.

At one point, a P.S. 194 mother screamed so loudly into the microphone about her despair that 194 is shutting down that a Harlem Success mother stood up with her finger to her mouth. “Shh!” she said. When the woman did not calm down, the charter school mother took her twin son and daughter by the hand and pulled them out of the auditorium. “I don’t need my kids to see this,” another Harlem Success mother had said moments earlier, tugging her children out of the assembly hall. At other moments, emotional testimony led pockets of the audience to rise to their feet in anger. The shouting drowned out any words.

Many of those opposed to housing the charter school at 194 said they are concerned that charter schools — public schools that operate outside the regular district bureaucracy — are part of a larger gentrification of the neighborhood. “Tarzan and Jane are back again, swinging through Harlem: Not with vines, but with charter schools,” said a community activist who offered her name as Dr. K. Samuels. Samuels explained that by Tarzan she meant John White, the thin, long-faced DOE official who ran the hearing, and that by Jane she meant Moskowitz, the politician-turned-school operator who sat a few feet away from her and held her Blackberry in her lap. Samuels added, “Like Tarzan and Jane, coming right through the black community, and they were making everything better because the natives couldn’t do it.”

The colonial metaphor caused some Harlem Success staffers to shake their heads. In fact, though the school’s principal is white, 53% of the full-time teaching staff are not. The principal of P.S. 194, meanwhile, is black. Her staff includes a mix of races.

Opponents of the proposal said they worry that some students at 194 will end up displaced. While the city has promised to give students zoned for 194 priority in the lottery that determines who gets into Harlem Success, they cannot promise every student in the neighborhood a spot. Others accused charter schools of excluding some students. “I can’t tell you how many of our students come right back to us because they are kicked out of the charter schools,” P.S. 194′s chapter leader, Dana White, said.

That accusation inspired a wave of anger among Harlem Success teachers. One Harlem Success teacher, Amy Althoff, stood up to invite any family in the audience into her classroom. “Every child who started the year in my classroom is still at Harlem Success,” Althoff, a kindergarten teacher, said. “I don’t care if you’re special ed; I have special ed children in my classroom. I don’t care if you’re ELL; I am certified to teach English language learners.”

Another fight erupted after a P.S. 194 teacher testified saying, “Please, Board of Education, save our jobs!” Several minutes later, a Harlem Success parent, Sharawn Vinson, stormed to the stage and pointed her finger at a section of the audience crowned in matching white UFT snow caps. Her words were drowned out by an immediate screaming response from the teachers, but she described what she said afterward. “They are out here, they arguing, they got hats, they got buttons,” she said, and then asked why they hadn’t fought before. “You wait till the last minute, when they want to give you the boot, to come out here and fight.”

While the chorus of opposition could lead the DOE to back off its plan to move Harlem Success inside the P.S. 194 building, it is unlikely that community members will get another wish they’re after: To keep P.S. 194 open. Though the decision on where to house the charter school is not final — the DOE calls it a proposal — the decision to close P.S. 194 is. That news came in December, when school officials used a history of pitifully poor performance to argue that the school should phase out. Last year, only 38% of students at the school could read at grade level, and fewer than 48% of students could do math at grade level. The phase-out means that kindergartners and first-graders at 194 will have to find a new school next year, while second, third, fourth, and fifth-graders will finish out their time at P.S. 194.

P.S. 194 parents and teachers pleaded with the city to keep their school open, pointing to their new principal, Charyn Cleary, who they say has reshaped their school. After Cleary came last July on a turnaround mission, they said they began calling it “the new P.S. 194.” Cleary ordered the janitor to re-paint all the walls, ordered new furniture, brought in as many staff she trusted as possible, taught the teachers how to use new DOE technology to track data points on students, and won the trust of parents, who had despised a line of previous principals.

Cleary testified herself at the hearing. “I didn’t come here to close a school,” she said. “I came here to rebuild a school.” She said she runs her school “like a charter school,” adding, “Eva Moskowitz and I are no different in this regard: We believe in academic excellence, and we believe in choice.” But she pleaded that she get a shot at continuing the work she started. “We should not be at each other’s throats,” she said. “We just need to help you find a home. Becuase I’ve found a home, and it’s here.”

Several speakers echoed her call for cooperation. “I am sick and tired of parents being pushed against another set,” Dickens, the City Council member, said. “This is not about fighting one another. This is about our schools and what we need.”

CORRECTION, CLARIFICATION: The original post incorrectly identified the NAACP’s New York president. I also updated this post to include more specific figures on the racial makeup of the teachers at Harlem Success Academy 2.

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  • http://www.classsizematters.org leonie haimson

    This is an excellent description of the battle between PS 194 and Harlem Success Charter School. I have witnessed these charter school hearings before. They are the most heart rending experiences one can imagine. Shame on the DOE for throwing crumbs before starving parents.

  • ceolaf

    I am generally in agreement with Leonie on this topic. Leaving the community out of these discussions is problematic, doing it in violation of established norms is worse, and doing it in violation of the law is simply a heinous act.

    But I would like to try to argue the other side the larger issue. First, let me explain what I think that larger issue is.

    We’ve got a whole bunch of public schools out there, some of which are doing quite poorly. We also have a bunch of charter schools out there, with more on the way. Leonie has done a great job of reporting how it appears that decisions about which poor performing schools are not being made purely on the grounds of their performance or their prospects of improvement. Rather, she reports, their facilities appropriateness to house new (charter?) schools seems to be a big factor.

    Being a charter school skeptic, I’ve got to say that I agree with Leonie that that is a big problem. Heck, closing any school is a major decision, and should not be done lightly. I generally think that it should be done simply based on the school’s prospects for improvement, not outside factors. But, as I said, I want to try to advance a counter arguement.

    *******************************

    * We know that there are lots of public schools out there performing way below average. Heck, there are quite a few for which even a typical below average would be an improvement. Among our 1400 schools, there really are a bunch of bad ones.

    * We don’t want to close schools simple for the sake of closing them. Rather, we close them because we want to give their students and the community a better education/experience than they would get there.

    * If we do not have a new school ready to take the place of a school we are closing down, we are not reall helping. Rather, we are shutting down options and making things harder at other schools, which will not have to take on more students than they have the capacity for.

    Therefore, this argue suggests, the availablity of new schools to go in their space SHOULD be taken into consideration. And the lowest performing schools should not necessarily be closed down, at least not until a better option is ready to take their places.

    Now, whether that new school should be a charter school or a new DOE school is a different question. I think that morally, if new DOE school is not possible that a new charter school is the right answer. On the other hand, if given a choice between the two, the arguements for charter are underwhelming. And if someone is stacking the deck in favor of charters for political reasons, well obviously that is NOT moral.

    *********************

    Leonie,

    Can you comment on this wider issue, of closing down schools because new schools are available to take their place? Does this argument sway you at all, or is there something that it misses. Or, am I misunderstanding your position entirely?

    (And this is not to say that there are not other wider issues, as well. The rule of law IS a wider issue. Community involvement is decision-making IS a wider issue. I am just trying to tease out one of the wider issues from the others that are tangled together in this particular case.)

  • http://www.sinksalive.blogspot.com KitchenSink

    I agree with just about everything Leonie and ceolaf say on this one. It’s a really complicated issue. Accusations of colonialism aside, the brutal facts are that as ceolaf says, there are a lot of schools that have been doing an awful job for a long time. It’s how we end up talking about “underserved” communities. (And in my cameo as hack for the Klein administration, I think a lot of that inequity has to do with the budgeting practice of allowing schools to have more veteran teachers without making other financial sacrifices; now that money follows the child instead of the teacher, schools that have had trouble retaining veteran teachers are at least on an equal playing field budgetarily.)

    Further, as someone who has watched this situation from afar and spoken to some of the key players, I can say that Ms. Cleary has done a whole lot more than paint the hallways and instill a culture of data. She seems to have revolutionized the way the staff thinks about instruction, and made some changes in personnel that cast aside the prior culture of failure. Unfortunately she’s a victim of a long negative track record for the institution that she wasn’t really given a full and fair chance to “turn around.”

    Boy, if Harlem Success ends up in that school, I hope the community takes advantage of the scrutiny allowed by the SUNY charter school process–there are public reports annually on the SUNY website about each SUNY charter school (beginning in the second year). And the renewal decision happens after the fifth year. That’s going to be a doozy and could go a long toward either affirming community concerns or, we should all hope, alleviating fears.

  • http://www.classsizematters.org leonie haimson

    What do I think? The DOE should work to improve low-performing schools. Bloomberg was asked about this in his radio interview, and he claimed that they put alot of effort into “turning around” low-performing schools before closing them, but I have seen absolutely no evidence of this anywhere. Can anyone provide me with an example?

    I have ideas about how this could occur, as to many others. If the Klein administration doesn’t, they should resign. I told this to Chris Cerf when he said they don’t believe in “inputs.” I asked him, why s anyone who doesnt believe in inputs in the field of education?

    Many educators have an ideas about how to do this. I have strong views, as you probably suspect. If the Klein administration doesn’t, they should all resign. It is their moral and professional responsibility. And yet they no longer believe that they have any responsibility in this area.

    Instead, they are eager to replace some low-performing schools unilaterally w/ new regular public schools or charters. (They have no objective standards for which schools to choose, by the way. They don’t seem to operate from the SURR list, or the school grades, by the way. But their decisionmaking remains as opaque and apparently arbitrary in this area as many others.)

    In any case, the elementary and middle schools are often replaced with charter schools. High schools are usually phased out, and gradually replaced w/ Gates-funded small schools.

    In both cases, the new schools often appear to succeed better in large part because of two factors:

    1- they are able to recruit students more apt to be higher performing than the pre-existing school — with far lower numbers of ELL and special ed students, our highest need populations. In the case of middle and high schools, their students are also apt to have higher grades, test scores, attendance records, etc. etc.

    2- DOE provides them iwith financial subsidies and privileges including the ability to cap enrollment at lower levels, allowing them to reduce class size, as well as more tax levy funding and the ability to further supplement spending through foundation grants and their own private fundraising efforts.

    Often times, DOE facilities people immediately repaint their hallways, provide them with new equipment and furniture, etc. etc. — and if the new school is sharing the building with another pre-existing school, that one is ignored, and remains shabby, overcrowded and in disrepair.

    Now, charter schools are more able to recruit higher performing kids than zoned elementary schools — for obvious reasons. The new small high schools use a variety of methods to screen and recruit higher performing students.

    DOE should not and by law can not replace a zoned elementary school w/ a charter w/out community approval, because then many of the existing kids in the neighborhood will have nowhere to go to school. See New Orleans for a perfect example of how the take-over of much of the school system by charter schools has led to horribly separate and unequal school systems, with the neediest kids dumped into the remaining traditional public schools and provided w/ the worst conditions.

    Bill Gates himself has admitted that their efforts to transform large high schools through creating academies and the like have been even more unsuccessful than their attempts to open new small schools in the place of larger schools. Guess why? though he would not admit this, this prevents those running the schools from ridding themselves of the highest need students in the building — or drastically lower the total number of students in the building — which are the two primary reasons that many of the small schools have succeeded.

    In essence, if they are forced to educate the same bunch of students and are unable to reduce overcrowding and class size, their strategies to create “smaller learning communities” with advisories etc. are totally ineffective.

    I hope I have answered your questions. If not, let me know.

  • http://www.classsizematters.org leonie haimson

    Kitchen sink: there are no reports that I can find on the SUNY website about Harlem Success Academies. Those schools have been allowed to expand rapidly, despite the disapproval of the Regents, and without any proven results.

    By the fifth year there will be thousands of kids in these schools. There is no way the state would deny them renewals, because it would mean total chaos in trying to serve those kids in the regular system.

    Moreover, the city and state report cards have almost no information about charter schools. You literally have to be an investigative journalist and spend days to get any information about their student body, management or finances.

    What do you suggest?

  • http://www.sinksalive.blogspot.com KitchenSink

    I have to oppose your “obvoius reasons” and notion that charters select higher performing students. You want to talk to Carolyn Hoxby, who has studied this issue for years by tracking who enters the lottery, who goes to charter schools, and how they compare to the district population.

    Have you ever entertained the “obvious” hapenstance that parents who are desparate to get their kids out of a district school BECAUSE THEIR KIDS ARE FAILING THERE turn to charter schools in the hope that they will find something different? When I was teaching in a large, dysfunctional elementary school there were always students who were proficient and succeeding despite the school and my teaching, not because of it – and those parents were HAPPY with the school because their kids were DOING WELL. They didn’t need to look for an alternative.

    Now the situation may be very different for middle and high school, as you point out. I don’t know – my reference point is elementary school. Hoxby aside, there ought to be a study, and we have enough data here in NYC that someone should be able to do it.

    What do you think about the NYC Charter Center and the UFT both putting up money to an independent external consultant to study the issue? The same idea as Hoxby–who enters charter lotteries, who gets in, who stays in charter schools, and how do these cohorts compare to the surrounding district public school populations? I’m certain that 99% of charter schools would participate in such a study, to show that they serve the same representative group despite unfounded opinions to the contrary.

  • http://www.sinksalive.blogspot.com KitchenSink

    I believe the first HSA was a DOE charter school – and they don’t publish annual reports as SUNY does. The others are SUNY but are too young for reports. So as for your other question, our posts crossed, I would suggest attending a board meeting. They are public and subject to the NYS Open Meetings Law. There must certainly be strategy discussed there and justification for growth!

  • http://www.sinksalive.blogspot.com KitchenSink

    There’s nothing on their website about board meetings – but the SUNY Charter Schools Institute should know when and where they are.

  • http://www.sinksalive.blogspot.com KitchenSink

    And finally (and then I really have to get back to budgeting…), why not take up the offer of the teacher mentioned above and visit her classroom??

  • http://www.classsizematters.org leonie haimson

    I would be in favor of any study or audit that objectively reported on the percent of special education students, including those seriously disabled, as well as ELL students in NYC charter schools. All the data I have seen on this (mostly from SED) continue to show much lower percentages of these students in NYC charter schools.

    I would also like to see studies that report on the average class sizes, staffing levels, space provided per student, and spending per student in charter schools and new small schools, including both private funds and tax-payer subsidies, compared to the regular public schools.

    I would also like to see data on comparative attrition rates, of both students and teachers.

    Right now the DOE refuses to provide this sort of information, but perhaps the state or city comptroller could demand it.

    Hoxby’s studies and many others do not provide this background information. and I shouldnt have to tell you how controversial many of Hoxby’s studies have proven to be. Have you ever heard of her “stream” studies?

  • note

    I believe that was Annie B. Martin, not Hazel Dukes. Dr. Martin is president of the NY NAACP; Ms. Dukes is former president of the national NAACP.

  • http://www.classsizematters.org leonie haimson

    check out the study of Chicago charter schools –released in February 2009
    The Charter Difference: A Comparison of Chicago Charter and Neighborhood High Schools

    from the Collaborative for Equity and Justice in Education at the Univ. of Illinois at Chicago

    “In this present multi-year (2006-2008) study, charter high schools are found to enroll
    fewer low-income and limited-English-proficient students, and significantly fewer special
    needs students than Chicago Public School neighborhood high schools.”

  • Pingback: School Stories | Reporting on Education in NYC

  • Pingback: The Business of Educating Harlem Students | The Charter Explosion

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