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fighting the flood
July 8, 2009
Harlem lawmakers push for neighborhood-focused charter cap
Protestors at P.S. 123 yesterday applauded lawmakers pushing for limits on charter schools in Harlem. Eva Moskowitz, the C.E.O. of the Success Charter Network, was a particular target. (Photo screenshot from video below.)
The next front for the Harlem school wars could be Albany.
City Council member Inez Dickens yesterday proposed changing the state law to cap the number of charter schools that a single operator can open in a given school district.
She was speaking at a protest against the Success charter school network’s expansion into a traditional Harlem public school, P.S. 123.
Dickens said she had the support of state Sen. Bill Perkins, and Keith Wright, an Assemblyman representing Harlem, said he would introduce legislation to make that change on his side of the legislature.
A neighborhood- and operator-specific cap would add to what exists now, a cap on the number of charter schools across New York state at 200. There are 1,500 public schools in the city.
Such a cap would also squarely challenge the strategy the Success Charter Network has pursued of opening a large number of charter schools in a designated area; Eva Moskowitz, the network’s CEO, has said her goal is to open 40 Harlem charter schools in the next 10 years. A paper published last year by Democrats for Education Reform explains the strategy, which combines political and educational efforts with a goal of building public support for charter schools.
Charter schools now make up about 25% of public schools in Harlem, and that’s not counting schools opening in the fall. Debate about them reignited most recently after Juan Gonzalez of the Daily News reported that Moskowitz’s network had surprised P.S. 123 officials by moving into additional classrooms without warning. Moskowitz said in a statement that the Department of Education had turned over the rooms to her on July 1, but the DOE says she had not been given the go-ahead to actually move into them.
Joining the lawmakers at their protest yesterday were organizers from the group ACORN, which is an ally of the city teachers union and one of the community groups to which the union provides financial support. The union has opened two charter schools and represents some charter school teachers, but it supports capping the number of charter schools allowed to operate.
The executive director of the New York City Charter School Center, James Merriman, said he would oppose such a push in Albany. “It’s always a mistake to limit the growth of high performing schools whether charter or otherwise,” Merriman said. He also pointed out that Harlem has a “diversity” of charter school operators — not just the Success Network.
Update: “That seem clearly the wrong way to go,” Moskowitz said of Dickens’ proposal. “I find it odd that while president Obama has specifically come out against artificial limitations on high performing charters, local officials would be trying to limit them.”
Here’s a video from yesterday’s protest:
The video is courtesy of Ken Hirsh, who blogs for GothamSchools’ Community section and is a financial supporter of Harlem Success.
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July 8th, 2009 5:25 pm
Charter School cap is 200 … 100 in NYC and 100 in the rest of the State … I believe by September we will reach 99 charter schools in NYC … the legislation is a few years too late … there is pending legislation to force charter schools to have at least the same numbers of Spec Ed and ELL kids as in the District in which they are sited … currently Charter Schools are far below the “average” district school …
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July 8th, 2009 5:46 pm
How exactly would that happen Peter when charter schools are also forced to accept students by lottery? That’s not even something neighborhood public schools are forced to do, which allows them to be hugely segregated by race and socioeconomic status — just look at all the lilly white schools in Tribeca, the Village and Upper East Side. The charter schools have a better approach on admissions.
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July 8th, 2009 6:29 pm
Who are they calling pigs? The teachers? Or the teachers who became principals? Or the Harlem parents who choose the charters?
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July 8th, 2009 6:47 pm
Dissenter,
Skoolboy addressed this issue quite well, not that long ago.
Look up “Toward a new definition of creaming” in the search field on the top right of the page. It’s the third one down, from February.
It’s fairly easy for any school to try to disuade special education parents from applying, simply by playing down supports for special education children.
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July 8th, 2009 6:54 pm
Elizabeth,
I don’t buy your 25% figure. It’s literally true, but it is also misleading.
The fact that charter schools are around 1/4 of Harlem’s public schools should be presented in the context of the fraction of students that they enroll. If charter schools tend to be smaller — and at times radically smaller — than non-charter schools, the 25% figure is misleading.
Furthermore, if a sizable number of Harlem students go to public schools outside the neighborbood, it is even more misleading — especially if fewer students from outside Harlem go to schools located in Harlem.
The schools that I myself taught each enrolled students primarily from a single neighborhood (though different from each school), neighborhoods other than the ones in which the schools themselves were located.
So, the count of school principals — I can’t even refer to buildings — whose schools reside in a neighborhood is really not an accurate reflection of the place of charter schools in Harlem’s children’s education. And so citing such a figure might actually obscure the truth more than reveal it.
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July 8th, 2009 7:06 pm
Ceolaf
Harlem public schools are small … very small … Harlem has had a declining school age population for years … registration in a public school requires proof of address and I would suspect that schools in the surrounding neighborhoods check addresses carefully … Charter School enrollment data is NOT transparent … they advertise widely and attract applicants from a much larger cachement area … I would suspect that as charter schools grow out to full size their numbers will exceed 25% … it would much easier to investigate if Charter School data was transparent. For example, they have the option of using ATS … most choose not too.
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July 9th, 2009 7:13 am
No one appears to be making the point here that activists/city legislators are asking Albany to actually limit the choice families in Harlem have over where their children go to school.
Charter schools have long waiting lists, which has been the state’s barometer for demand. Is there another agenda here? If, magically, all of the charters decided to negotiate with the UFT overnight, would their opposition and allegations of creaming also magically go away?
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July 9th, 2009 9:37 am
KitchenSink,
1) I don’t understand your first point. Who is trying to limit choice, and how?
2) It’s not just that the state is using waiting lists as a barometer of demand, but that supports have used them as a proxy for quality.
3) My main problem with charter schools would remain. They are a structural reform, and we’ve seen for decades that structural reforms don’t actually significantly improve student outcomes. As long as we focus on them as the solution — or a big piece of the solution — we are not focusing on the sort of substantive reforms that actually would make a difference for children. Collective bargaining might help in that regard, but probably not very much, if at all. Certainly it would make no difference on creaming.
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July 9th, 2009 10:02 am
Ceolaf: Might more charter schools in Harlem lead to the substantive reform you’d like to see, especially if charter school accountability led to the closure of poorly performing charter schools and left the better schools to draw students? You are correct about the small percentage of students currently enrolled in charter schools, but might a sizable shift of students from district to charter schools put pressure on the district schools to improve? Capping the number of charter schools will ensure they never lead to substantive reform.
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July 9th, 2009 10:38 am
Gideon,
You raise two issues.
1) Arne Duncan recently said that the problem with charter schools is that we don’t shut down the bad ones. You seem to be repeating that defense. But it doesn’t really make any sense to me. Why is that a problem with charters, as opposed to schools generally? The problem with public schools is that we don’t reconstitute the truly dysfunctional ones. Someone has got to explain to me why this is particularly a charter solution, as opposed to a more general public school solution. Moreover, as long as charters are over subscribed, is it really going to be easier to shut them down than non-charter public schools?
2) People have cited both transfer of charter lessons to non-charter public schools and the beneficial effects of competition that will arise from the mere existence of charter schools. Each of those theories propose potential mechanisms for how charter schools might benefit nearby non-charter public schools. OK, we have a couple of theoretical mechanisms. The next step is to do research to see if these theories actually play out in reality. Researchers have been looking for strong evidence of each, and have not found it.
This is hard research to do, in large part because charters tend to arise in the presence of other reforms, as well. One has to be very careful in examining a district or locality to understand to what improvements might be fairly attributed. That takes serious on-the-ground qualitative research combined with more distant quantitative research. (That shouldn’t be a surprise. When looking at mechanisms and processes, qualitative research is really the only answer.)
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I think that this particular theory (competition from charter schools –> non-charter improvement) is much like merit pay. It presumes that teachers and schools leaders respond to market pressures like businessmen and entrepreneurs. I understand why such people advance such theories — after all, we have a natural tendency to think that other people are motivated by the same things that we are. But I don’t quite understand why others like this theory so much.
Does competition make parents better parents? Does competition make spouses better spouses? Does competition make churches better churches? I guess that comes down to what you think makes for a better X.
There was a recent story on Planet Money about how teacher ed programs in Israel compete with each other. As their prices are fixed by the government, they competed on ease, making their programs easier for their students. Has competition improved them, or had perverse effects?
Will competition lead to better lesson plans or important student outcomes? Or will it lead to better website, better tours, better flyers and better test scores? Even if one ignores the research itself that consistently fails to find evidence of this mechanism, I think that the theory itself is fatally flawed.
You see, the theory assumes either that educators are naturally motivated to do a better job than their neighboring schools — which has nothing to do with charters, and I think we all would agree has not been the case in the past — or that the new possibility of losing students (and perhaps revenue) to charter schools is some new motivation. This latter idea ignores the question of how/why families choose the schools they do for their children. In my view, it is far more likely that this dynamic would lead to improved marketing efforts and improved responsiveness to parents (i.e. shorter hold times, easier access to principals), rather than improved pedagogy or curriculum.
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Last, I am rather frustrated that charter proponents keeping moving the target and changing the standards. The idea behind the caps what that charters needed to prove themselves as a systemic reform before we went wild with them. But they have not done so. Their popularity — rather than their quality — has become the main argument for their expansion.
Can you explain to me why the cap on charter schools would interfere with whatever mechanism your believe in for how charter schools are a strong systemic reform? Wouldn’t the unevenness distribution of charter schools in the city provide a natural experiment to test that? (e.g. Though they only enroll 2-3% of the city’s children, they are more than 25% of Harlem’s public school.) (See, Elizabeth, I can do that, too.)
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July 9th, 2009 3:48 pm
Right now, test scores are the coin of the realm. You may not like it, I may not like it, but these are the particular sets of outcomes are we all being incented to improve, from NCLB on down.
They are a mere snapshot, but they do say something about how well a school is serving a community. At least, you can tell by looking at a school’s test scores whether the bottom is falling out.
On this measure, charter schools are routinely outperforming the district schools.
I hear your talk about creaming, but I don’t buy it and I haven’t seen evidence of it.
As for choice, if you have 250 or 1,000 or 5,000 parents signing up on a waiting list, they are saying with their signature that they want access to this choice. If you decide you’re going to place a cap on this one community’s access to charter schools, you’re denying all those other families the right to choose that other families have exercised. Am I missing something here?
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July 9th, 2009 6:36 pm
KitchenSink,
1) Actually, we see over and over again that charter schools are NOT outperform non-charter schools, when appropriate demographics — including peer effects — are taken into account.
2) If these test scores are not actually good proxies for meaningful education that truly prepares students for their futures, then competition of better test scores will actually worsen public schools, not better them.
3) How many first person accounts of the kind of creaming that Prof. Pallas explained do you need to constitute evidence? How many statistics about ELL and special education enrollment at charters vs. non charters do you need?
4) I want families — especially given our population density and public transit system — to have choices as to where they send their kids. I want them to have schools with different approaches, focused on different curricula and with a variety of pedagogies on display. I’m in favor of real choice that makes a difference for children. But difference in governance structure sold as difference in schooling for children? That’s not choice. That’s more like fraud.
There are lots of potential choices in schools that I would deny families. I would deny foreign-language only schools. I would deny one that teaches math in a base 8 system, instead of a base 10 system. I would deny them public schools that pay employees just the minimum wage. I would deny them racially segregated schools. I would deny them single-sex schools. I would deny them schools with homophobic rules and curricula. I don’t care how many parents would want to sign up for any of these, I would deny them THESE choices. But there are lots of other choices that are already denied them that I would like to offer. I want to expand choice, overall, in part by removing the false or misleading ones so that families can make substantive choices.
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October 3rd, 2009 8:55 pm
I’ve been in a Harlem Success Academy school and they are wonderful. I would send my own daughter to one if I lived in Harlem. They teach academics and provide amazing enrichment for children. They are extremely selective in hiring their teachers and every one I saw was fantastic. Their scores are showing amazing results, better than any other school in Harlem, where 58% of kids in 3rd grade (yes, more than half!) are not reading at grade level. Let’s be honest…this protest is all about the teachers’ union struggling to hold onto their membership. They are scared to death that they will continue to lose membership since the poorly performing schools will be replaced with high-performing charters. Harlem kids win, Harlem parents win. But, who loses? The UFT. This is not about the kids, but the adults. Parents in Harlem are voting with their feet, on their way to Harlem Success Academy and other high-performing charter schools. As far as creaming, that’s a joke. Refer to Stanford’s Carolyn Hoxby’s study of NYC kids who entered a charter lottery. She tracked results of those kids who applied and got in to charters vs. the results who applied, but didn’t get in and had to attend a traditional pubic school. The results: charters did much better with their kids. Yes, same economic challenges, same level of ELL, kids with special needs, etc. If public schools are so equal, why are 40,000 kids on charter waiting lists in NYC when only 30,000 currently attend a charter school? NYC needs more charters, not less.
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