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I have a story in this week’s Village Voice about the fight over how to improve struggling public schools. Should the schools be rescued from the inside or replaced?

I focus on P.S. 194 in Harlem, which school officials favor replacing with the fledgling Harlem Success Academy 2. Both the principal at HSA 2, Jim Manly, and the principal at P.S. 194, Charyn Koppelson Cleary, are trying to give Harlem’s children a radically different experience of school. Yet they have very different tools to work with.

Cleary’s world:

Before the school year began, staffers recall, she gathered her whole faculty, from the teachers to the security officer to the secretary, in what she called a “circle of change.” Each person talked about what needed changing at the school. “The good news,” Cleary told them, according to people who were there, “is that 94 or 95 percent of the stuff you guys are talking about, we can change.”

In some ways, Cleary was constrained in her efforts. She could not hire a staff of her own, since the bulk of the teachers were inherited from the school’s previous years. She could not ask the custodian to repaint the entire building, since his contract only permitted a certain percentage. But she did the best she could, asking for the neediest rooms to get fresh paint and finagling a handful of other educators she trusted onto the payroll.

She also only had last three months to prepare for her turnaround: She began the job last July.

Now, here’s Manly’s world: (more…)

In her first appearance before the City Council committee that she used to chair, controversial charter school operator Eva Moskowitz today warned members of the council about the dangers of what she called the “union-political-educational complex.”

Moskowitz was referring to what she has said is interference by the teachers union in the Department of Education’s bid to close low-performing schools and replace them with charter schools. Her Harlem Success Network of charter schools was set to replace two zoned schools in Harlem, PS 194 and PS 241, but the DOE said last week it would keep those schools open because of a lawsuit filed by the United Federation of Teachers and others that alleges that the school swap is illegal. Moskowitz said today the lawsuit shows that “the union wants to shut down the the competition rather than compete on the merits of what it offers.”

But her former colleagues on the council’s education committee weren’t quick to accept Moskowitz’s rhetoric. Several of them took used her appearance as an opportunity to lecture her about the divisive tactics employed by Harlem Success and the parent organization it operates, Harlem Parents United. In a withering press release, the organizations last week called for the neighborhood schools to be shut down. Elizabeth reported that a public hearing last month about using the PS 194 building to house a charter school was dominated by shouting and name-calling. Committee chairman Robert Jackson today said the hearing was “so volatile” that he feared it was more than the eight safety officers present could handle.

“Your arrogance about what the system should do and that charter schools are the answer is exactly what drives the conflict in the community,” said Maria del Carmen Arroyo of the Bronx. (more…)

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. (more…)

Steve Evangelista at his charter school, Harlem Link. (Photo courtesy of Evangelista)

Eva Moskowitz, the City Council member turned charter school operator, has for years been blunt about the forces that oppose her approach to improving education: other politicians, the city teachers union, and anyone else who has a stake in what she sees as the status quo. Last night, in a quiet conversation on 144th Street in Harlem, Moskowitz learned that she has a new critic, and he’s a little different from the others.

He’s Steve Evangelista, a Harlem charter school operator himself.

Evangelista approached Moskowitz with his concerns after a public hearing to discuss a Department of Education plan to install Moskowitz’s Harlem Success Academy 2 charter school inside a traditional public school building.

The Harlem Success school, along with another charter school that’s already in the building, would effectively replace P.S. 194, an elementary school whose low test scores and declining enrollment moved the DOE to phase it out of existence. The school has only 14 kindergartners this year, and about 70% of students in 194′s zone attend school somewhere else. The portion is even higher for kindergarten-aged students: 84%.

The swap reflects a goal that Chancellor Joel Klein and Moskowitz share: To replace district schools they consider failures with new, better schools — and to do so as quickly as possible. Moskowitz has set herself a goal of opening 40 charter schools in a decade.

Evangelista, who also runs a Harlem charter school, Harlem Link, came to watch the proceedings, and afterward he sought Moskowitz out to discuss her approach. When their conversation ended, he explained to me that his main concern is with Moskowitz’s dramatic ambitions. Aiming for such fast change requires her to adopt an antagonistic stance toward existing schools, he said. He worries that the attitude could ultimately doom her goal of improving public schools. (more…)