GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

Sabrina Tan, a lawyer for Advocates for Justice, describes the firm's suit over a new charter school.

Backed by a law firm that has battled the Department of Education in court repeatedly over the past year, a group of Cobble Hill parents announced today that they are suing to stop Eva Moskowitz’s Brooklyn Success Academy 3 from moving into their neighborhood.

Fifteen public school parents signed onto the suit, which Advocates for Justice said it would be filing today.

The suit claims the city and Moskowitz circumvented state education laws when they abruptly changed plans for the school late last year. BSA 3 was originally approved for either District 13 or District 14, but the city revised its proposal in late October and announced the school would instead share a building with two high schools and a special needs elementary school in District 15.

Opposition to the plan quickly mounted and reached a climax when protesters clashed with Moskowitz at a meeting she hosted for prospective parents in November. The city’s Panel for Educational Policy approved the co-location plan two weeks later.

It’s the second time in as many years that a Success school has been the subject of a lawsuit from the surrounding community. Last April, parents on the Upper West Side filed suit against the city’s plan to site a Success school on the Brandeis campus, charging that the network was not serving the needy student population that was written into its charter. The suit was dismissed just weeks before the school was slated to open. (more…)

The city is “sympathetic” to — but not ready to embrace — charter parents’ desire to win spots on district parent councils, officials said today.

On Tuesday, more than 1,200 charter school parents traveled to Albany as part of Lobby Day. Their main ask was that legislators set aside seats for them on the city’s elected parent councils. The councils, known as Community Education Councils, frequently discuss charter schools but have no formal authority over them.

A Department of Education spokesman told me on Tuesday that the city’s position on the request had not changed since 2009, when officials argued that seating charter parents on CECs would represent an inappropriate conflation of charter and district school management.

As it turns out, that’s not quite true. The city hasn’t actually made up its mind about whether to support a bill introduced by two legislators — Assemblyman Peter Rivera, a Bronx Democrat, and State Sen. Marty Golden, a Republican from Brooklyn — that would reserve one of the 11 seats on each council for a charter school parent.

I heard today from Micah Lasher, the city’s chief lobbyist in Albany, who said that the city had taken a deeper look at the issue on request from charter advocates and found merit in their argument. (more…)

Soon after Department of Education officials informed administrators at Peninsula Preparatory Academy Charter School Monday that the school would close in June, Lisa George’s phone started ringing.

As a co-president of Peninsula Prep’s parent-teacher organization and a member of its board of trustees, George knew parents would want help figuring out what will happen to their children.

The city says the general plan for Peninsula Prep’s 350 students is for them to return to their zoned elementary schools next year.

For George’s son, a third-grader, that means P.S. 215 — one of the 19 schools the city said this year had performed so poorly that they should be phased out.

School officials said they would help families zoned for P.S. 215 and several other neighborhood schools that received D’s on their city progress reports to find other options. But choices might be hard to come by: Almost all of the public schools in Far Rockaway post state test scores that are lower than Peninsula Prep’s — one reason that the school has a waiting list longer than its roster of enrolled students.

Far Rockaway’s bleak school landscape has people familiar with Peninsula Prep confused about how it landed on the chopping block. (more…)

A charter school network that’s under investigation by the state attorney general likely won’t have any schools in its portfolio after this year.

On Monday, the city Department of Education announced it would close Williamsburg Charter High School, the flagship school in the Believe High Schools network. Today, the State Education Department announced today that it intends to revoke the charters of the network’s two other schools, Believe Southside and Believe Northside.

In each case, the authorizers cited significant management and financial improprieties. The schools did not have functioning boards of trustees, the management unit for charter schools, according to revocation notices the state sent to the schools today.

The assault on Believe’s management seems sure to doom the organization. But the closures would also force well over a thousand students in Williamsburg to find new high schools. Students will submit applications through a second-round admissions process designed for students who are not accepted to any school in the regular process, DOE officials said. The first-round process is already well underway.

The revocation notices mark a final stage in a series of attempts to bring the schools’ management under control. All three schools were placed on probation last fall and required to take a series of steps to improve — including dissolving the relationship with Believe, in the case of WCHS. Both the city and the state said the schools had fallen far short of meeting the probation requirements.

There is still a slim chance that the schools, which together enroll more than 1,500 high school students, could remain open. The schools can seek a hearing with members of the state’s Board of Regents to make their case for continued existence. (more…)

Department of Education announced today that it is moving to close two low-performing charter schools, including one whose network head earned nearly half a million dollars last year and is under investigation by the Attorney General.

The city announced today it would close Williamsburg Charter High School.

One of the schools, Peninsula Preparatory Academy, will close at the end of the year when its charter expires. The 346 students at the school, which has gotten four straight C’s on its city progress reports, will be dispersed among other Far Rockaway elementary schools.

“We have had some struggles but I think the school was definitely on a positive trajectory,” said Ericka Wala, Peninsula Prep’s principal.

The department is taking an even more drastic step with the second school, Williamsburg Charter High School, and revoking its charter midway through the five-year term. Unless the school completely cleans up its management within 30 days, it will close at the end of the year and its students will have to apply to other high schools.

In a letter sent to the chair of WCHS’s board today, the head of the city’s charter schools office, Recy Dunn, paints a picture of massive mismanagement and corruption.

Most of the charges center on founder Eddie Calderon-Melendez, who earned $478,000 last year as the CEO of the Believe Charter Network, which has run Williamsburg and two other high schools.

Citing financial and board improprieties, the city placed the school on probation in September. Chief among the terms of the probation was that the school’s board would sever its relationship with Believe. It did so in November, begrudgingly, but then hired Calderon-Melendez to join the school’s staff earlier this month, according to the letter, which said the school had met just one of 10 probation requirements.

Now, state auditors and Attorney General Eric Schneiderman are investigating the school’s relationship with Believe under Calderon-Melendez’s leadership. (more…)

Protesters opposing Department of Education proposals brandished hand puppets before the Panel for Educational Policy.

In the start of what has become an annual ritual, the Panel for Educational Policy Wednesday night listened to hours of rowdy public comments opposing the city’s policy of placing charter schools inside existing school buildings, then signed off on plans to do just that.

The panel gave the go-ahead to a Success Charter school co-location in Cobble Hill in Brooklyn, an affluent neighborhood where many parents and elected officials have said the school is not wanted.

Panel members Gbubemi Okotieuro, of Brooklyn, and Patrick Sullivan, of Manhattan, each raised issues about the co-location plan for the Success Charter school, which did not originally apply to open in the area.

Marc Sternberg, the Department of Education official in charge of new schools, said the department had determined the neighborhood had experienced an “explosion of kindergarten enrollment” and needed more elementary schools.

“It was made clear to us by SUNY that the charter school could be opened in District 15,” Sternberg said, referring to the state organization that authorizes charter schools, which approved the Success Academy school for nearby District 13 or 14.

Sullivan was the only panel member to vote against any of the plans, casting a “no” vote on the Cobble Hill c0-location and abstaining from several other votes.

The panel also approved plans to open a charter high school in the old Boys High School building and a second Success charter school in P.S. 59, both in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. It also signed off on a plan to expand Esperanza Preparatory Academy, a dual-language school in East Harlem that shares a building with a citywide gifted school, TAG Young Scholars, whose parents had opposed the change. (more…)

The standing-room only audience at New York French American Charter School's meeting for the board of trustees and parents.

Parents at a Harlem charter school that’s on probation got what they wanted Tuesday night: The chair of their board resigned.

The resignation took place just minutes into a meeting of the Board of Trustees for New York French American Charter School, the year-old the city put on probation last week because of “serious violations” of its charter and state law. It drew cheers from the standing-room only audience.

Many of the roughly 50 parents who packed a small classroom on the school’s second floor said they had never been to a board meeting before but were anxious about how the board would resolve the school’s administrative woes. Those woes included a lack of communication among board members, parents, and school staff.

Now, parents say they expect communications to improve after the board elected Fabrice Rouah, a financial analyst, to be acting chair.

“He looks at everything with a fresh pair of eyes,” said Claire Zaglauer, who was recently elected president of the school’s brand-new parent-teacher organization. Zaglauer said the board appears poised to add multiple new members in the coming weeks.

Celestin’s resignation “sent a strong signal that the board is willing to take responsibility for the current crisis,” Rouah said in a statement today. “The board’s commitment to the school is stronger than ever, as is our resolve to get the probation lifted.” (more…)

Parents at the Harlem charter school placed on probation last week are staging a revolt against members of the school’s board of trustees.

About a quarter of parents at the year-old New York French American Charter School have signed on to a letter demanding that board chair Johnny Celestin resign, according to a parent who has been active in organized the protest. The parents plan to present the letter to Celestin at a board meeting tonight and have already alerted him to their plans, according to the parent, Jenna Chrisphonte.

The letter accuses Celestin and a second board member, Sochenda Samreth, of neglecting board duties and failing to support the school’s finances and operations. Parents told GothamSchools that the board members rarely visited the school, did not communicate with parents, blocked new members from joining, and made some decisions privately, in violation of open meeting laws.

When it placed the school on probation last week, the city Department of Education cited the board’s approach to informing the community about approaching meetings as one of several “serious violations” of state law and the school’s own charter.

Claire Zaglauer, a parent who is set to join the board after being elected last week to lead the school’s parent-teacher organization, said she thought some of the problems cited in the probation report had been resolved since the city’s May visit but the board did not inform DOE officials. For example, she said, the school actually asked parents to sign off on the city’s own discipline policy in September, yet the DOE was not told that a discipline policy was in place.

“I believe that the main reason the DOE has gotten an unclear picture is because of the lack of communication from the board,” said Zaglauer, who teaches kindergarten in bilingual French class at another public school.

The conflict illuminates a tension in charter school governance: Unless board members have broken the law, the only tool authorizers have to address their activity — or lack thereof — involves putting the school’s very existence in jeopardy. (more…)

What happens inside New York City charter schools is more important than their ideological affiliations in determining academic success, according to a new paper.

The paper, which did not undergo peer review, is based on a detailed analysis of 35 city charter schools by two Harvard University researchers, Roland Fryer and Will Dobbie. Fryer is a MacArthur “genius” award winner who has conducted experiments and studies in New York City in the past, often in order to test his theories about the impact of incentives.

For the newest paper, “Getting Beneath the Veil of Effective Schools: Evidence from New York City,” the researchers conducted in-depth case studies at self-selecting charter schools that received $5,000 for supplying required information. By interviewing principals, teachers, and students; analyzing test scores and lesson plans; and videotaping classroom activity, Fryer and Dobbie built a database of “the inner workings of schools” and compared them.

They wanted to find which traits of city charter schools appeared most closely linked with academic success. They also asked whether schools with a particular philosophy, such as the “whole child” approach of providing wraparound services or the “no excuses” approach typified by KIPP charter schools, did better than others.

The researchers conclude that teacher credentials, class size, and per-pupil spending did not account for test score differences across the schools, but that five other features did. Those traits — frequent teacher feedback, high rates of data usage, “high-dose” tutoring, more class time, and a culture of high expectations — are features of many charter schools. Without them, schools that adhere to particular philosophies don’t outperform other charter schools, according to the analysis. (more…)

The six charter schools the Department of Education deemed so weak that they could be closed won’t be shuttered — for now.

But the department put a seventh school, New York French American Charter School, on probation for what it said were “serious violations” of state law and its own charter that could have left students unsafe.

The notice of probation sent by the DOE’s Charter Schools Office to NYFACS’s board yesterday lists concerns about the school’s financial stability, discipline procedures, teacher certification, academic instruction, and safety practices. It notes that the school is already late in producing audited financial statements for the last year.

“The school has no established financial controls and operational policies; the termination of one Operations Director and the hiring of a replacement has left the school in operational disarray,” reads the report, which also notes that the school has few books and that a parent volunteer with keys to the building had reportedly taken to sleeping in the school overnight. (more…)