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I.S. 195 has a high esl and special education population. The DOE has targeted this school because it is in up and rising neighborhood and politically connected KIPP charter is up stairs. Chancellor Klein visited the school last year in the beginning of the school Year. He applauded the school before axing its budget and ezxeaaing dozens of teacher in the end that same school year that he visited. KIPP has been dying to expand without having to waste any money and even filed a proposal for more space. The peer schools do not such high needs kids. Black will close this school eventhough the numbers do not add up.

KIPP has taken the most motivated kids with the most motivated parents. To find an application, fill it out, bring it back on time and await a lottery takes time. How many parents are willing to put in this effort? The more educated parents will make it through. I.S.195 accepts any students and cannot turn any away just count all the 17 years old in J.H.S. that came from other schools. Will KIPP take the severely disabled or non-english speaking students I.S.195 takes in great quantity? Will KIPP take homeless, foster care children? What happens to a behavior problem? Are they counseled out to I.S. 195?

I know and deeply respect a lot of teachers at IS 195. They’re clearly hard-working and competent and they’ve been doing a good job for a long time. However, they have the severe misfortune of being situated directly above a KIPP school. Don’t get me wrong–KIPP Infinity is excellent and very well-managed. It deserves to expand. But IS 195 doesn’t deserve to be dismantled just so KIPP can grow.

What did the chancellor do and say when she visited Friday?

The superintendent visited a couple of months back and all she did was say all the extra resources they gave the school. They even counted programs that existed on paper. They went back 10 years with the programs they had provided to the school. A funny fact is that the housing project that is right on top of school was sold by the federal government to a private company. Since then the company has been evicting and pushing out low-income residents. These new residents need a higher functioning school so that has exasperated the situation.

Is it any wonder that a “failing” school (notice how it’s always the schools and teachers that fail, never Bloomberg’s DOE) happens to share valuable real estate with a charter, and in particular a fast-growing chain? Care to guess who will be given control of that site?

As Harlem and other neighborhoods continue to gentrify, these charter schools will be used to initiate the eventual (and faster than people can imagine) privatization of this valuable real estate. That is an unspoken part of what’s going on here, since it’s impolite for reporters in places like the New York Times or Gotham Schools to bring it up.

Here’s a likely scenario: Geoffrey Canada (whose HCZ is sitting on over $100 million in assets) KIPP, Moskowitz, Uncommon Schools and the other chains, acting as fronts for their hedge fund and oligarch patrons, offer to buy “underused” public school facilities from cash-starved localities.

Government at all levels is in financial crisis because of the success of these very same people at having their taxes cut over the past thirty years. Governor Cuomo pulled this move just the other day, eliminating a tax surcharge on high income earners, while attacking public workers as a “special interest” that is causing the state’s financial problems. His solution to New York State’s budget crisis? Among other things, a constitutional convention to eliminate pension safeguards for public sector workers.

Neo-liberal economics frequently demands sales of public assets as a way of “solving” budget crises caused by the insatiable (or to use Bill Gates’ term, “infinite”) greed of the Big Money people who caused the economic crisis in the first place. Meanwhile, they fund (through endowed university chairs, think tanks, etc.) the neoliberal economists who “prove” that this is all part of the natural order of things. It’s a perpetual motion machine for redistributing wealth upward, controlling policy and privatizing what’s left of our democratic system.

For these players, it’s a win-win situation: not only do they gain control of budgets that were once democratically controlled, the terms and conditions of employment, curricula, assessment and  their lucrative accompanying materials, they get the real estate, too.

To use a term that was popular in the years leading up to the financial crisis, it’s an ideal from of synergy, but it should also go by another, less euphemistic name: looting.

To Allie, don’t you mean the “selected” residents of Harlem? No offense, the school is great, but they do not service Harlem’s high-risk students. What happens when the “troubled” students get kicked out of KIPP or any other charter school? Where do they go? They can’t come to us anymore!

Michael M.,

You are correct: starving the public schools of resources, flooding them with needy students from closed and reorganized schools, and pushing the staffs to distraction with aggressively-enforced, lunatic demands for “accountability,” is one of the privatizers main tactics.

Meanwhile, charter schools receive preferential treatment, immense private subsidies, coordinated PR campaigns and media coverage that accepts their distorted/dishonest statistics at face value..

I also like your analogy about medical patients and organ donors. My only quibble might be that the people lined up for organ “donations” are themselves in need, whereas charters are being pushed by and for people who have no concept of “enough,” and will commit social vandalism on a grand scale to satisfy their insatiable appetites.

Once the students and communities being marketed to (with multi-million dollar ad and PR budgets) by charters have served their purpose of providing the pretext for destroying public education and taking over the infrastructure, they too will be abandoned to the social darwinist jungle, just as public school students currently are.

Nyc is the most expensive city for the middle class and permanent underclass is hard to live in. I.S. 195 is getting the shorthand of the stick. Their being picked on to expand charter schools in neighborhoods that are gentrified. Notice how charters are concentrated in poor, low politically active neighborhoods?