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There nothing wrong with this, of course. Established charter networks with proven track records ought to get first dibs on available space. There’s less risk for everyone involved.

As usual, Sir Whitney Tilson completely misses the point…..He blabbered; “Winerip’s latest column, which I assume will appear in tomorrow’s NYT. Instead of his usual smears against all charters, this time he goes after the biggest charter networks in NYC, especially Eva Moskowitz and the Success Charter Network, for supposedly benefitting from favoritism relative to one-off charter schools in the city”

It’s actually very hard to justify the rapid expansion of most charter networks.

SCN, for example, hasn’t successfully demonstrated that it can run a single K-8 school yet–none of their schools are at full capacity.

Additionally, the leaders of new SCN schools seem to have less and less teaching and leadership experience in each successive wave of new schools–this seems to be in part due to SCN’s reluctance to bring in experienced leaders from outside their network (and the inexperience of most SCN employees).

Meanwhile, the DOE routinely denies traditional district schools’ requests to expand, i.e. a pre-K-5 school with three As on DOE Progress Reports was denied the opportunity to expand to middle school grades.

Appreciate the article, as someone who works with the “mom and pop” charters its pretty clear to me that, at least in terms of resources (financial and political), that we are seeing a stratification of charter have and have nots. This moves beyond the issue of contributions– but maybe more importantly revolves around the resources that folks can get out of DoE– typically incubation space. If one looks at who is getting space and who is not, and who DoE will fight for or give up on. that really is where the greatest initial disparity takes place, which starts the tipping of the playing field from Day 1. We had a dual language school set to open this year, started by a woman who was subjected to DoE’s early efforts at serving ELLs, and came back to do it right, that school’s space was pulled by DoE in March, while other more well heeled or connected players will get space and in many cases not serve those kids. DoE needs a transparent and participatory way to allocate space, and that should take into need of the operator as well as the representativeness of the students to be served. Currently DoE may be the ones who contribute most and most consistently to the disparities.

The reason for the funding disparities between mom-and-pop charters and the chains is that the little guys are being used as a cat’s paw/Trojan Horse to undermine the public schools, giving a (largely false) small-scale, localized appearance to the smash-and-grab policies upon which oligarchic support for charter schools are based.

Once they have served their purpose – which, in the minds of the Bloombergs, Gates, Broads, Rhees and their ilk, has nothing whatsoever to do with educating minority children – these schools will either be deemed failing and closed, or merged with the chains. It’s what the ed deformers and malanthropists funding charters mean by “scaling up.”

Why do you think it’s the chains that are given preference in co-locations (which are nothing but the initial move in evicting the public schools from their own buildings, and privatizing the infrastructure as well as the management of the schools)?

Let’s hope the teachers and administrators in the small charters are enjoying their brief day in the sun, since it won’t be long before they too are being attacked by the very people whom they thought of as patrons or potential supporters.

Then they might have an inkling of the injustice and intentional demoralization public school teachers are facing right now.

for-profit charters are banned in New York.