Students and families protested today in Harlem against the NAACP's involvement in a lawsuit against school closures and charter school co-locations with district schools. (Chris Arp)

About 2,500 people rallied in Harlem this morning, calling on the NAACP to withdraw from its lawsuit with the teachers union against the city Department of Education. That lawsuit seeks to stop the closure of 22 schools as well as the placement of several charter schools in district school space.

Speakers at Thursday’s rally included charter school parents and teachers, Harlem Children’s Zone president and CEO Geoffrey Canada, and the actor Seth Gilliam from “The Wire,” whose child is a on a waiting list for a charter school. Speakers and attendees denounced the NAACP’s participation in a lawsuit they said would harm charter schools primarily serving students of color.

“Ms. Dukes, turn your back on this lawsuit,” said Kathy Kernizan, the parent of a student at the Uncommon Schools charter network, referring to Hazel Dukes, president of the NAACP New York State Conference.

A letter to Dukes with signatures from charter school advocates was circulated through the crowd asking the organization to withdraw from the suit. A spokesperson for the New York City Charter Center, which helped organize the event, said that more than 2,000 signatures had been collected this week.

“We gotta demand quality education,” Canada told the crowd. “We have to be prepared to fight for that.” The city Department of Education’s proposal calls for two of the charter schools associated with the Harlem Children’s Zone, the Promise Academy charter schools, to be co-located inside district schools.

The charter center spokesperson said the protest, held outside the Harlem State Office building at 125th Street, was not the work of any one organization. But at least two groups appear to have taken leading roles: the charter center, an advocacy and support organization for charter schools in the city, and the Success Charter Network created by Eva Moskowitz. Many of the families at the rally had children at one of the Success network’s nine schools. (Seven of the network’s schools are named in the lawsuit.)

Click here for a slideshow of photographs from the rally.

A representative from the New York City Charter School Center distributed flyers with excerpts of the NAACP’s mission statement to people entering the rally. Center officials argued that the lawsuit contradicts the NAACP’s mission to “ensure the political, educational, social, and economic equality of rights of all persons and to eliminate race based discrimination.”

In a telephone interview, Kenneth Cohen, the regional director for the NAACP’s Metropolitan Council, said that the lawsuit supports the organization’s mission. Fighting co-locations of charter schools inside district schools, he said, challenges the unequal distribution of resources to district schools. ”We do want alternatives for our parents in those communities,” Cohen said, “but the bottom line is that it doesn’t mean you neglect the public schools also.”

Earlier this week, Dukes told GothamSchools that she would meet with parents who want to meet, but criticized plans for a rally.

It’s not clear what the exact consequences would be for the 18 charter schools named in the lawsuit if the NAACP and the teachers union are successful. The charter center spokesperson said that new charter schools, deprived of space they were counting on, could be prevented from opening, while existing charter schools could be evicted from their current spaces or prevented from enrolling new students.

Charter schools are publicly funded but operated by private boards and regulated by the state. New York education law does not grant charter schools funding for facilities. Arguing that the lack of funding is inequitable, the Bloomberg administration has offered some charter schools district space. The alternative for charter schools is to raise private funding to pay for leases or constructing new facilities.

At the rally, many parents described the lawsuit as an attempt to close charter schools. A flyer handed out to families at Harlem Success Academy 1 to organize the rally, obtained by GothamSchools, endorses that characterization. “WE NEED TO FIGHT TO KEEP OUR SCHOOLS OPEN,” the flyer says.

Charles Moerdler of Stroock & Stroock & Lavan LLP, the firm representing the UFT in the lawsuit, would not directly comment on the spokesperson’s characterization. Moerdler repeated the lawsuit’s claim that the proposed co-locations challenged by the suit violated decrees from the state education commissioner. ”How the court addresses that is up to the court at the end of the day,” Moerdler said.

Cohen also disputed the claim that the suit was aimed at closing charter schools. “There might be a misconception there,” Cohen said. “We’re not fighting to close any school.”

Charter school parents and students, many of whom held signs calling on the NAACP to drop the lawsuit, made up the bulk of attendees. Parents from several Success charter schools said their children’s classes were starting later than usual to allow children to attend the rally.

Tracey Edwards, who attended the rally with her daughter Saniah Delrio, a first-grader at Harlem Success Academy Charter School 4, said she felt emotional about the rally. She praised her daughter’s school, saying it had allowed Delrio to read at her grade level and spurred her imagination. “I don’t understand why a school like this should be bothered with, want to be shut down at all when the kids are excelling,” Edwards continued.

Majella Dominguez, a third-grader at Harlem Success Academy Charter School 1, expressed enthusiasm for her school and for Thursday’s rally. “I think it’s great,” Dominguez said, “ ’cause they’re fighting for our school to get more space.”

Dominguez said one of the things she liked about her school was that it offered instruction on Saturdays for students who need it.

Zelda Owens said she learned about the rally only five minutes or so before it began. Owens, whose child attends Future Leaders Institute in Harlem — not one of the charter schools named in the lawsuit — said the issues raised in the rally affect all parents.

“As a lifelong Harlemite, I do recognize the fact that charter schools have given parents incredible options in educating our children,” Owens said. “And I believe that any option, one that adds tremendous demonstrated value, is something that all parents should fight for whether they’re in charter schools or not.”

Many charter school parents disputed the NAACP’s argument that charter schools located inside district space hurt district schools.

One parent at the rally, Julius Tajiddin, represented a district school, Frederick Douglass Academy II Secondary School, which is slated to be co-located with a Harlem Success school. Tajiddin, who said he is the chair of the school leadership team at Frederick Douglass, said the lawsuit is motivated not by a desire to limit choice, but to protect the needs of district school students.

He said that co-locations often force classes at district schools into hallways and stairwells. “It’s about resources,” said Tajiddin.

Parents supporting P.S. 9 and Brooklyn East Collegiate at last night's PEP meeting

A contentious plan to move a charter middle school into Brooklyn’s P.S. 9 was one of six co-locations approved at last night’s school board meeting.

P.S. 9 parents came to the Panel for Educational Policy meeting with a plan of attack against the city’s proposal to move Brooklyn East Collegiate Charter School into the building. One by one, parents took their allotted time to point out specific aspects of the plan that they said were impractical for both schools. They also drew attention to P.S. 9′s own bid to expand into a middle school.

Their expansion plan, however, was not up for consideration and the panel, which has never rejected a co-location proposal, voted to move forward with the space-sharing plan.

Marc Sternberg, the Department of Education’s deputy chancellor for portfolio planning, argued that Uncommon Schools, the charter organization that runs Brooklyn East Collegiate, has a strong record with middle schools.

The vote had the most dissenters of the night, with four panel members voting no, and Chancellor Dennis Walcott suggested that P.S. 9′s middle school bid is not completely off the table. “I’m firmly committed to considering a P.S. 9 expansion,” he said.

While the P.S. 9 vote was the most divided, some panel members also voted against the placement of Democracy Prep charter school in M.S. 197 in Manhattan. Panel members unanimously approved KIPP STAR in Manhattan and VOICE in Queens.

The expansions, with vote counts, were:

• Metropolitan Lighthouse into X093: 10 yes – 0 no – 1 abstaining
• Brooklyn East Collegiate into K009: 7-4-0
• Explore Charter School into K002: 9-0-2
• Democracy Prep into M197: 7-3-1
• KIPP STAR into M115: 11-0-0
• VOICE into Q111: 11-0-0

The logo of Teacher U, whose founders will create a stand-alone graduate school of education called Relay.

The founders of Teacher U, the nonprofit organization that developed a novel way of preparing teachers for low-income schools, will create their own graduate school of education, following a vote by the Board of Regents last week.

The new Relay School of Education will be the first stand-alone graduate school of education to open in New York since 1916, when Bank Street College of Education was founded, and the first in memory to prepare teachers while they are serving full-time in classrooms. The new institution will open its doors next fall; current Teacher U students will remain enrolled at their partner school of education, the City University of New York’s Hunter College.

The Regents’ decision inserts a new model for preparing K-12 teachers into New York’s education landscape. Unlike alternative certification programs such as Teach for America and the New York City Teaching Fellows, Relay will not rely on existing colleges to provide its teachers with coursework required for certification; the new graduate school of education will design and deliver all of those courses itself. And Relay will likely take teachers who come into the school system through alternative programs like TFA.

Meanwhile, unlike most traditional schools of education, Relay will make training teachers its sole priority and will make proven student learning gains a requirement of receiving a Master’s degree.

The new school has already generated opposition from several existing schools of education, including from a top official at CUNY. In formal responses to the Teacher U group’s proposal, leaders of existing schools cited concerns about quality and the fact that, as officials at Fordham University put it, a new graduate school of education would be “duplicative in a market with sufficient program offerings,” according to a summary of concerns(PDF) made public by the Regents.

The Board of Regents approved the proposal with a unanimous vote and one abstention last week nevertheless, said Tom Dunn, a spokesman for the state education department. He added that State Education Commissioner David Steiner, who helped form Teacher U in his last job as dean of the school of education at Hunter College, recused himself from discussions about the application.

During recent visits to Teacher U’s current program, instruction topics ranged from how to tailor reading discussions to the racial and class backgrounds of students to how to write on a white board without covering your face with your writing arm. Much of Teacher U’s curriculum is devoted to passing on lessons learned by teachers at the charter schools that founded Teacher U, such as those collected by Uncommon Schools managing director Doug Lemov in his book Teach Like a Champion.

Teacher U also breaks students into groups arranged by subject matter and grade level to study what Atkins termed “pedagogical content knowledge” — the specific kind of knowledge needed to teach particular academic subjects. The term draws from the traditional academy; Stanford professor Lee Shulman coined it.

The new Relay model is in line with a push by Steiner and Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch to rethink university-based preparation programs. In 2009, Steiner announced that the state would consider giving alternative preparation programs the authority to certify teachers.

Teacher U CEO Norman Atkins, who will be the president of the new graduate school, said that Relay students will have to prove that their own students have made at least a year’s worth of improvement on standardized assessments in order to graduate. To do this now, Teacher U students use a mix of New York state assessments and, for grade levels and courses that are not tested by the state, select outside assessments to prove their effectiveness, Atkins said.

Response to the Teacher U program and the new graduate school reflects divided views about how to improve teacher education programs — and, in some quarters, about how much change is actually needed. Reaction also reflects contentious opinions about the founders of Teacher U, three charter school networks with impressive student achievement records but which operate outside traditional school districts: KIPP, Achievement First, and Uncommon Schools.

Locally, the new graduate school’s entrance has already generated resistance from traditional colleges and schools of education, including Teacher U’s current host, CUNY.

“We welcome alternative approaches to teacher preparation,” CUNY’s executive vice chancellor and provost, Alexandra Logue, wrote in a letter to state officials last December. “However, New York City already offers a rich set of alternative approach programs, and so adding another player right now seems unnecessary given what is already a highly crowded field.”

Atkins said the program needed to become independent in order to innovate and achieve financial sustainability. As a certified graduate school, Relay can charge tuition and its students can receive federal student loans; neither is possible as a 501(c)3 nonprofit.

The Teacher U team did address one concern before receiving Regents approval. The team had wanted to call its new school the Teacher U Graduate School of Education, but existing education schools complained that the letter “U” might cause the mistaken idea that the school is a university. It will actually be only a graduate school.

The founders — led by Atkins, board chairman Larry Robbins, and KIPP co-founder David Levin — selected Relay School of Education.

“In this race to close the achievement gap, we believe the baton of learning must be passed from master teachers to as many other teachers as possible,” Levin said in a statement. “Relay is designed to ensure that every teacher has the opportunity to be that excellent teacher.”

Steiner played a role in creating the program as dean of Hunter’s education school, and Hunter has continued to adopt some innovations led by Teacher U into its own separate program. One of these is the practice of giving teachers portable video cameras to use to record their teaching — and then have faculty members study the video results and respond with feedback.

CUNY raised concerns about the program nevertheless, urging the Regents to take “extreme caution” in considering the Teacher U group’s application.

“What TUGSE is proposing is essentially a similar educational model as the existing Teacher U/Hunter College partnership program, except that TUGSE would lack the depth of intellectual and other resources that a university brings to a partnership,” Logue wrote in the December letter.

Atkins described his organization’s relationship with CUNY’s Hunter College as solid. “We’ve loved working with Hunter College and continue to feel that Teacher U can continue to do terrific work in partnership with Hunter,” Atkins said. “At the same time, the founders were eager to develop an independent institution of higher education that could push on innovation and become financially sustainable.”

Logue’s letter went on to criticize Teacher U for having “no track record of successful teacher preparation as an independent entity” and for basing its program on “the presumed superiority of charter schools in securing great pupil learning and achievement gains.” But, she wrote, “data on charter school successes are mixed.”

As evidence of Teacher U’s effectiveness, Atkins cited the student achievement reports that Teacher U’s first class at Hunter College compiled in order to graduate. Seven out of 110 teachers did not receive Master’s degrees because they could not show that their students had made at least a year’s worth of academic progress. Of the 103 who graduated, 52 percent demonstrated that their students made at least one-and-a-half years of growth, Atkins said.

Teacher U has received praise at the national level, including from a group that has defended traditional schools of education in the past: the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education. James Cibulka, the president of NCATE, submitted a letter to the Regents endorsing the Teacher U team’s application, citing a recent report by NCATE that cited Teacher U as an “exemplar” of needed efforts to “turn teacher education in the United States ‘upside down.’”

A partnership of three local charter school networks — KIPP, Uncommon Schools, and Achievement First — produced Teacher U three years ago. The groups’ decision to create a teacher training program represented the next step in a learning curve that traces its roots to the founding of Teach For America 20 years ago. Whereas Teach For America, which trained many of the charter schools’ founders, began by offering vague summer training to its corps members, the program has concluded that more support is necessary.

Teach For America teachers are now among the students at Teacher U, which builds in more than 300 hours of classes taught by experienced teachers, many of whom still work full-time in the classroom.

Relay faculty include Levin and both charter and district school educators, such as Julie Jackson, the principal of the North Star Elementary School in Newark, New Jersey, and Jodi Freidman, a teacher at P.S. 63 in Chinatown.

The Relay School of Education intends to prepare teachers to teach in both charter and district schools, Atkins said. While most of the program’s first class of graduates taught in charter schools, 18% taught in New York City public schools.

The BetterLesson profile for sixth-grade Roxbury Prep Charter School teacher and BetterLesson celebrity Jason Armstrong

The most popular member of a new social network is neither Lady Gaga nor Ashton Kutcher, though Kutcher is a fan of the website.

The distinction goes to Jason Armstrong, a sixth-grade teacher in Roxbury, Mass., who has more than 6,500 total views and more than 1,100 downloads on a new website for teachers called BetterLesson.

BetterLesson’s circle of about 7,000 teachers are downloading Armstrong’s math lessons, grouped into six units: whole numbers, decimals, fractions, percents, geometry, and a year-ender called extensions and review. They can also download his quizzes and tests and become his “colleague” (the equivalent of a Facebook friend).

Armstrong’s former colleague and roommate, Alex Grodd, created the site — which Kutcher recently promoted in a Tweet, a stroke of generosity devised by a BetterLesson staffer. Grodd first came up with the idea for the site when he joined Teach for America in 2004.

Assigned to teach third grade science during his summer institute training at a Houston elementary school, Grodd went online to hunt for ideas. Surely one of the other hundreds of third grade science teachers in the world had come up with a smart way to explain his assigned topic, the solar system. Why should he have to reinvent the pedagogical wheel? The last remotely relevant class he’d taken was Harvard’s notoriously science-light “Natural Disasters.”

Hours of Googling later, Grodd came up with nothing. “This was 2004, it wasn’t, like, 1994,” Grodd told me today. “The Internet had been around for a while.”

BetterLesson is not the first attempt to solve the problem of teacher isolation, but it’s already catching on more quickly than many efforts. Those 7,000 users are up from just 200 in June 2009, when the site launched to a small group, and Grodd won backing from NewSchools Venture Fund, the philanthropically financed new-idea incubator.

Fueling the site’s success so far is its effort to learn from other attempts to bring teachers and their ideas together that have not caught on. These range from internal teacher-sharing sites launched by groups like the New York City Department of Education to public sites like Curriki, a Wikipedia for lesson-making.

Unlike New York City’s ARIS, BetterLesson is accessible to any teacher in the world who signs up. Unlike Curriki, BetterLesson’s curricula are structured intuitively — not as isolated documents but with an architecture to  distinguish units from lessons and a separate place for related documents like worksheets to hand out or a video to upload. Teachers can also tag lessons with relevant state standards that they meet.

The site also blends content-sharing with the social advantages of networks of real schools; teachers form networks and add “colleagues,” and the result — the site hopes — is that the teachers with the best lesson get their just reward.

Armstrong, for instance, regularly gets his students to produce top-notch sixth-grade test scores, and his teaching is recognized in Uncommon Schools director Doug Lemov’s book, “Teach Like a Champion.”

A quick browsing through the site today indicates its users are relatively active despite the summer holiday. Armstrong’s last activity, for instance: August 1. He added a colleague: another sixth grade math teacher, from D.C.

Maltese taught for 36 years in the Abington, Penn., public schools just outside of Philadelphia (also the town where I was born!). He argues that the importance of attention works in reverse, too: Just because you have students’ eyes and ears doesn’t mean they’re learning.

Maltese describes a teacher he had in college:

Dr. Green was a medieval history prof at my undergraduate university.  We said that Dr. Green had a sport jacket pocket which knew everything about medieval history because he always spoke into it.  He mumbled.  “The most important point to remember about the shift of power in the 9th century was (and his head would tilt toward the pocket of his jacket) mmmm  hhhmmm  hhhmmmm.”

“Dr. Green, would you please repeat that?”  Dr. Green was a nice person.  “Certainly, Mr. Maltese. The most important point to remember about the shift of power in the 9th century was (and the head dropped again), mmmm hhhmmmm hhhmmmmm.”

We would get to class early and fight to be in the first row to hear Dr. Green because all his tests were on his notes.  He had our rapt attention…was he a good teacher?  I don’t think so.

The full press release is below. The most interesting part that I see is the disclosure that the Uncommon Schools network plans to expand to operate 33 schools by 2014, 20 of them in New York City. The network now has nine charter schools in the city, by my count.

The Success network’s plan, which has been reported before, is to expand its current crop of four schools to 40 in the next 10 years.

Only Uncommon Schools is said to be planning to use the money to invest in facilities.

The full press release:

Broad Foundation Awards $2.5 Million in New Grants to
Expand Premier Public Charter Schools in New York City

Uncommon Schools and Success Charter Network to triple number of schools in next five years

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Thursday, April 9, 2009
NEW YORK – Two of New York City’s highest-performing nonprofit, public charter school management organizations – Uncommon Schools and the Success Charter Network – will receive a total of $2.5 million to fund schools that provide a high quality public education for thousands more city students, The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation announced today.

Broad Foundation Founder Eli Broad joined New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein, Success Charter Network Founder Eva Moskowitz, and Uncommon Schools Managing Director Brett Peiser to make the announcement after the group toured one of the Success Charter Network schools:  Harlem Success Academy 2 on 140th St. and Frederick Douglass Blvd.

“In this day and age, we all need to ensure that our dollars are invested as wisely as possible,” said Eli Broad, founder of The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation.  “And the smartest investment a foundation can make is to replicate the very best public schools in a model city of reform like New York.  These charter schools are proving that when public schools extend their school days, offer a challenging curriculum, and customize instruction, their students thrive, and parents demand more.”

The $2.5 million in grants will be distributed as follows:

Uncommon Schools will receive $1.5 million over three years to support the opening of new schools in Brooklyn, New York, to provide a capital investment for school facilities, and to support home office operations.  By 2014, Uncommon Schools will grow to operate 33 schools, 20 of which will be located in New York City.
Success Charter Network will receive $1 million over two years to support its existing four Harlem Success schools and to help open new schools in the New York City area.  The network plans to open 40 new schools over the next 10 years.
“Charter schools like Uncommon Schools and Harlem Success Academies not only prepare their students for successful futures, they also prove that every child can learn and that public education can be excellent,” said Chancellor Klein.  “With such terrific results, it’s no wonder that 30,000 students are on waiting lists for charter schools across the City.  I want to thank Eli Broad for this generous contribution, which will allow many more families to send their children to these great schools.”

Schools across the Uncommon network consistently outperform their neighboring district schools and rank among the top schools in their cities and states.  For example:

On the 2008 New York State math and English language arts exams, Uncommon Schools’ students – 99 percent of whom are Black or Latino – collectively closed the “achievement gap” in grades three through seven, out-performing the state’s white students.
In addition, 96 percent of Uncommon’s New York City students across four schools scored advanced or proficient on math exams, besting the overall state average by 15 percentage points and the white student average by eight percentage points.
On English language arts exams, 80 percent of Uncommon students scored advanced or proficient, exceeding both the state average the state’s white student average.
Based on 2008 New York City Department of Education Progress Reports, Uncommon’s Excellence Boys Charter School of Bedford Stuyvesant is the highest-ranked public elementary school in the city.
Across Harlem, where Success Charter Network schools are currently located, only 42 percent of third graders can read, a figure that drops to 31 percent by eighth grade.  In contrast, Harlem Success Academy students on average performed at least one year above their grade level in reading in the 2007-2008 school year.  That same year, Harlem Success kindergartners on average performed at a second grade level in mathematics.

As a result of the success of the Uncommon and Success Charter Network schools, parental demand for seats has grown steeply in recent years.  Last year, some 5,000 students sought admission for just 600 spots in Harlem Success Schools.  Today, over 4,000 students sit on wait lists to attend schools across the Uncommon network.

“Uncommon is thrilled to receive this support from The Broad Foundation which will enable us to meet the urgent and growing demand for high-quality public schools in the neighborhoods of Brooklyn,” said Evan Rudall, Uncommon Schools CEO.  “This funding will ensure that we can best support our leaders and teachers as they prepare thousands of low-income students to succeed in school and go on to graduate from college.”

Both Uncommon Schools and Success Charter Network schools share operational and instructional elements proven to be successful in preparing low-income students for academic and college success: a highly structured learning environment, a longer school day and a longer school year, standards-based instructional models, and proven curricula that are data-driven and informed by ongoing assessments.

“Our students and their families are extremely grateful for this chance to serve even more of our neighbors, without sacrificing the educational quality that students in Harlem need and deserve,” said Moskowitz.  “Every year, thousands more parents in our community want something better for their children.  This new support will help us meet that demand.”

Success Charter Network, founded in 2006, is a 501(c)(3) charter management organization that seeks to prepare its students to graduate from college and succeed in life and to tangibly improve educational outcomes for all public school children.  Success Charter Network aims to open schools where excellent teachers want to teach and where parents choose to enroll their children and play a greater role in their children’s learning and in the larger effort to reform public education.  The network’s elementary schools provide students in high-need neighborhoods with a broad, rigorous curriculum in order to prevent achievement gaps from arising between low-income children and their more affluent counterparts.  In addition to challenging academics such as writing, social studies, geography, arts and inquiry science five days a week, the schools offer crucial developmental activities like chess and play that focus on developing the “whole child.” For more information, please visit www.harlemsuccess.org.

Uncommon Schools is a nonprofit organization that starts and manages outstanding urban charter public schools that close the achievement gap and prepare low-income students to graduate from college.  Uncommon builds “uncommonly great schools” by developing and managing regional networks that are philosophically aligned and highly accountable.  Based in New York City, the organization has created a home office providing management services that allow school leaders to focus on instructional leadership.  Uncommon manages eleven schools in New York City, upstate New York, and Newark, New Jersey and has two associate member schools in Boston, Massachusetts.  The organization ultimately will encompass more than 30 schools, serving more than 11,000 K-12 students.  For more information, please visit www.uncommonschools.org.

The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation is a national venture philanthropy established by entrepreneur Eli Broad.  Born in New York City, Eli Broad has provided nearly $30 million to date to support reform efforts in New York City public schools.  Based in Los Angeles, The Broad Foundation’s mission is to dramatically improve K-12 urban public education through better governance, management, labor relations and competition.  The Broad Foundation’s Internet address is www.broadfoundation.org.