I PMed you.
There are lots of great choice schools in the DOE. Free, but require applications. People with babies come tour my school all of the time to plan for Pre-K. There are great public schools out there, but in certain parts of the city they are hard to come by using my standards.
xlizellx said:
I read that NYT article and the ones linked to it about segregated schools. As someone who taught in East Flatbush - with not a white person around - who now teaches in a United Colors of Benetton ad looking school in the East Village, I have seen both sides.I would not send my kids to many of the area's schools not because of race - but because of my philosophy on how to teach/treat children. I will not send my kids to a school with uniforms. Or a school that does test prep during the day. Or one where the kids have no agency. Or one with scripted curriculums based on billion dollar companies and not kids needs and interests. I won't send them to a school that doesn't encourage play. Or imagination.
And in my experience (4 schools in both districts 17 and 18) that is the rule, not the exception, of many schools in the area. I have friends who taught at PS22 (now closing) who tell similar stories of a non-democratic learning environment that stifles creativity.
I will be that "drop of cream" if I know the school holds similar educational beliefs as me.
dag i spoke to a kindergarten teacher at a charter school in brooklyn who expressed the EXACT same sentiment to me last night. not only are the kids not able to learn in a healthy environment, but the teachers are frustrated and burnt out...hence the high turnover.
xlizellx said:
I PMed you.There are lots of great choice schools in the DOE. Free, but require applications. People with babies come tour my school all of the time to plan for Pre-K. There are great public schools out there, but in certain parts of the city they are hard to come by using my standards.
xlizellx, could you please PM me as well? i'm currently researching elementary schools in and around CH. thanks so much!
DNA Info published an article today on charter schools coming to CH:
Hipsters aren’t the only ones competing over Crown Heights real estate this spring — schools have joined the bidding war, as the Department of Education mulls applications from four new charters vying for space in Brooklyn’s District 17.
KIPP AMP, Success Academy Brooklyn, Explore Envision and Achievement First-AF Aspire are all seeking new space or expansions in District 17 for the 2013-14 school year, according to the DOE. Only Brooklyn’s District 14 in Williamsburg and Greenpoint currently has as many applicants, and only that district has as many existing charters.
http://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20120516/crown-heights/charter-schools-crowd-into-crown-heights
Meanwhile those in the Success Network seem very good at getting a lot of revenue from private donors, as well as the DOE.
http://m.nydailynews.com/1.1101668
No matter who (charters of the traditional public system) provides our childen with education, it seems as if it is going to cost a lot of money. Are we willing to pay?
they get a lot of money because big business, and Bloomberg's DOE, are desperate to break the unions. i am not a particular fan of unions, and think the teachers union could do better. i'm just suspicious of any movement that purports to be about honest competition when it is actually, and quite clearly, premised on disabling the work force of the competitors.
so once they've broken the unions, and once these businesses have more useful places to get their tax deductions from, do you think these hedge funds and wal-mart millionaires will care about donating? probably not, and then we'll be left with paying to support 5 or 10 or 15 different shadow school systems, parents not working so that they can ferry their kids across brooklyn, or kids commuting by bus 2 hours per day, and at-risk, expensive-to-educate kids ever more concentrated than they already are at the community schools that must "take all comers." how is that an efficient or sustainable or wise use of public dollars, especially when charters on average perform no better than community schools? and where they perform better, it's at least partly because of the "creaming effect," the ability to counsel out, and no requirement to replace kids for attrition? and when, somehow, mysteriously, the DOE seems not to be able to close these "more accountable" schools, even when they fail to deliver on their promises?
i don't have a problem with "choice" in general, but at least in middle-class brooklyn, "choice" seems to be a thinly-veiled euphemism for "choice not to educate my kids with my disadvantaged neighbor's kids." re-segregation comes at a cost to taxpayers, and why should we be subsidizing that kind of "choice"?
success has a $24 million surplus. why do you think success is asking for more state money, when their fat bank account suggests that they don't need it? because they need huge dollars in order to continue to unfairly malign zoned schools through the media and to buy ads to get the high numbers of applicants they need...and moskowitz knows the "philanthropy" is not going to last. and why co-locate when they don't need to? so that the middle-class parents in gentrifying neighborhoods that they so desperately want will walk by their richly appointed classrooms and their iPads and smartboards and ignore all the other distasteful stuff that this school does and needs to continue doing in order to get that stuff.
and so...in addition to kipp and explore envision (which already have a presence here), coming soon to as many schools near us as the charter schools want, 3 success academy schools and 2 citizens of the world charters that will be targeting "diversity" and have been seeking not to have state mandated goals for recruitment of at-risk kids applied to them.
see: http://goo.gl/f5B9t
note that the DOE is looking at "contiguous districts" and split siting, and that means that every single school that has even a single classroom "available" (as the DOE decides it is) in D13 or D17 is vulnerable. what a waste.
Success often comes from being distinct, different.
If you are in the business of selling food, you are wise if you spend the minimum amount of cash and effort required to convince people it is "organic". Then, enjoy profit.
If you are in the business of selling education, do the same to convince people it is "diverse", or "earned".
As time passes, these words will lose their cache; It is important to stay up to date. The successful charters and public schools will evolve their language.
By making the zoned schools perform the prior role of MIS I, MIS II, and SIE VIII classrooms, will charter schools really change anything?
Are they really a threat to students, or just the education establishment?
yes, they really are a threat to students. see my post directly above. i don't care about the education "establishment."
My experience with public school "choice" as it is currently practiced is that there is so much parents can't figure out the good from the bad.
[Note: this discussion is specifically about high school] It used to be there was a clear understanding in NYC of "good" schools vs. "bad" schools. The good ones expected kids to come to school prepared to work and in exchange provided you with enough education to get into a college or get a job upon your graduation. The bad ones warehoused kids for four years before spitting them back out in the street. In between there were a ton of fair to middling schools that you could go to, simply by walking into school on the first day and showing that you lived in the neighborhood.
The differences were so clear, that kids who were self-motivated (or had a supportive adult like a teacher, guidance counselor, etc) could simply through word of mouth end up at a decent school in their borough, without having to shlep from one end of the city to the other. There were kids who affirmatively chose to do so, because they were smart enough to get into a specialized school, or because they had a particular passion for something, but being brilliant or passionate was not a requirement to get a halfway decent education.
Now, the public school system is so byzantine as to be impossible to navigate by a child who doesn't have the direction and support of an extremely savvy adult. Local large high schools have been shut down in favor of small boutique schools who all seem to share the same desire to make 14 year olds decide now what they want to be, so that they can be educated to a specific curriculum or set of goals. Very seldom, it seems, is the goal to turn out a well rounded kid capable of doing anything.
In my mind, charters aren't the threat to public education. What threatens public education is the view that its appropriate to build a school system that's navigable only by a very small minority of students who have parents that are 1)involved; 2)understand the system is rigged and 3) spend copious amounts of time jumping through the hoops erected to get their kids the education that even twenty years ago was taken as a given.
Homeowner-
Not to be too depressing, but I don't believe a system could ever be constructed that was able to be equally accessed/navigated by all members of our society: Some subsets will always be better at advocating for their kids than others.
In my view, the widespread advent of Charter schools may (...or may not...) make the "average parent" more able to pick a school that is right for their child. The answer would depend upon the other schools in the area, the nature of the neighborhood being served, and many other factors.
As someone who doesn't have a kid, I have the luxury of wondering whether being able to cream is a net gain to society.
Educators have long argued that by excluding some kids, the remaining students are able to learn. The speech has always made a lot of sense to me.
Somewhat ironically, the teachers seem to be changing their long held speech simply because non-union workers will be hired.
It is admittedly out of vogue (aka not politically correct) to state that society often gains from exclusion, but to a point, we do.
At what point have we excluded too many people?
To what degree can we exclude people before we actually create more of a hazard than we cure?
At this point, charter schools don't reach my definition of a hazard.
As they become more widespread, the future remains to be seen.
i should have been more specific above in that *the way NYC is carrying out the charter expansion thing* is absolutely harmful to students as a whole. some kids benefit, but in my view the cost to the whole is too great. that includes the problem homeowner points out, which in my view is made even worse when applied to elementary school in that parents of kids who are barely 4 years old have to jump through a million hoops at a very real cost to societal productivity and family harmony in order to secure said "choice."
if the NYC charters want to cream, and engage in the debate with full admission that that is what they are doing, that's a different story than the one they are telling. but instead they claim they educate the same students and get better results, which is patently false. if they started by correcting that lie, instead of by telling more lies, then the dialog would be different. but they can't do that, because if you leveled the field then you would no longer have as many convenient excuses to shut down public schools, blame the teachers, and replace them wholecloth with charters and their corporate promoters.
If we stop blaming the teachers, we have to give up just about all hope.
...because we have just about no control over the parents, and the students' lives outside school.
So, let's keep acting like the charter schools that succeed are due to the efforts of the teachers and not the schools ability to exclude the youth that don't have "involved, active" parents. ...the truth is too hard to bear.
That said, do I have to have my imaginary child go to school with theirs? Must my child be the one who is held down, in order to pull their child up?
In the current socio-political-cultural-race-class environment, Why would any school (charter or other) admit that is part of escalating and reinforcing a system which creates different educational tracks for different youth?
....surely they are smart enough to just say they are giving people what they want, "choice". Is there anything wrong with that?
Um.... Hot out today, isn't it?
Thursday, July 5, 2012 (I think that not having entries time-stampted creates ambiguity in the views presented, because it removes the context of occurring time)
"thelambchop" summarizes the hidden truth about charter schools, which any dedicated educator knows (or soon realizes); that they are charged with producing an excellent product (educated, motivated, questioning persons) with ABSOLUTELY NO CONTROL over the raw material that they receive.
The quality of education in NYC has failed largely because of several reasons, which in my opinion include, but are not limited to:
1. Lack of city government (politicians) allowing educators to run the process. The present mayor sees no need to mandate the chancellor having educational administrative credentials. This failure goes beyond the mayoral mandate, and as far back as the 1950's, when "white flight" and racist gerrymandering took place in the city's communities. Education was largely seen as a place to reward cash donors and provide patronage jobs.
2. NY State policies created and controlled by the upstate dominated Senate that underfunded NYC. This was finally proved in the CFE judgment in 1995 (Campaign for Fiscal Equity)
http://www.cfequity.org/static.php?page=historyoflawsuit&category=resources.
In spite of this judicial judgment, to date, state legislators are unable or unwilling to provide the funds that have been stolen from the city. The CFE case ran the duration of approximately 13 years; the time it takes a child to go from kindergarten through the twelfth grade of schooling, thus totally denying at least one complete cycle of NYC students proper educational funding. This is something that all NYC residents should be addressing with their NYS elected officials.
An example of unbalanced legislative practices can be seen in the lack of promotion of Emeritus Regent Adelaide K Sanford. Regent Sanford was a black, female educator from Bedford-Stuyvesant, who stewarded PS21K as principal, to be one of the top schools in NYC. Her student stock was largely drawn from the Brevoort Houses, which pretty much states her demographic. The current, award-winning principal of that school, was one of her students, drawn from the same Brevoort Houses. Regent Sanford is the ONLY Vice-Regent NOT to ascend to the position of chief regent. Despite her impeccable credentials, she was denied that position (imo) for three reasons: a) she is female, b) Black, and c) a down-stater. Prior to her tenure as a NYS regent, she attempted to run for the position of NYC Chancellor. While being interviewed on CBS news, she was ambushed with attack questions, none of which had anything to do with educational policy, but with political directives. It was evident as the interview took place that she was not aware that she would be interviewed in an antagonistic manner.
Any examination of the placement of school chancellors in NYC shows that politics and not educational qualifications/philosophy is the primary deciding tool of who gets the job of chancellor.
3. The creation of a class of education, "charter schools" is a blatant attempt by plutocrats to further remove education out of the purview of the people. Education, just like almost all parts of "the commons", is being further divvied up among the wealthy businesspersons who can benefit by the business of education. The politicians we are electing to office in our increasingly broken democracy are unable or unwilling to resist this seeming inexorable march. The corporate media continues to march all of us down an increasingly narrow path towards supporting the privatization of education, along with the rest of the commons. "No Child Left Behind" (NCLB), the flagship vehicle provided by President Bush (43), was the introit for the creation of charter schools.
An example of the change of education from "the commons" (a public service) to a commodity, follows.
The Bush administration, under an NCLB initiative, tricked (union based) educators in NYS into providing millions of dollars of scholarly research by offering educational grants to schools for scholarly research, the purpose of which was to win a grant to be used to improve their schools by implementing new teaching methods. After the research was harvested, the winners at best were told that they could not implement their solutions for improving education, but would be receiving half of the initial grant they had been promised as a prize. The grant would then be used to purchase an education package that would come from Texas, be administered from Texas, and the staff to be used would be provided from Texas. Most of the educators refused this trade. The Bush administration pocketed millions of dollars of educational research after perpetrating this ruse.
whynot_31, it is not a matter of blaming the teachers; there is enough blame to go around. A mobilized populace that demands proper application of funds and common sense along the entire chain of government (local, state, and federal) is a good starting point to get effective education in place.
I think the CFE decision serves as an effective example that change mandated by the judiciary often comes very slowly, if at all.
Brown vs Board of Ed. is another example.
Note: this does not mean that such decisions/victories should not be pursued.
While being in a wealthy district is seemingly best, and a poor district the worst, it also is hard to be in a local school that just lost its poor status:
More Schools Are Not Poor, Not Rich, Just Squeezed
By ELBERT CHU
Last Updated: Jul. 3, 4:17 PM ET
Students at Public School 9 Teunis G. Bergen in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, started the summer with the grim news that they would lose four teachers next academic year unless parents raised $160,000 — and soon.
The principal of the school, Sandra D’Avilar, told the parent-teacher organization last month that she would have to cut the teaching staff because the school now had fewer children officially designated “poor,” and so had lost $360,000 in federal Title 1 funding.
A school must have at least 60 percent of its students below the poverty rate, defined as eligible for free school lunches, to qualify for Title 1 money; P.S. 9’s rate dropped to 59.1 percent.
P.S. 9, with 600 students in prekindergarten to fifth grade, is not the only school coping with a loss — real or looming — of hundreds of thousands of dollars in Title 1 funding. Several dozen more schools are in the same fix: too rich to qualify for the federal aid and too poor to rely on parents to fill the gaps with extravagant fund-raisers.
The problem is partly a consequence of gentrification, when neighborhoods that feed into schools begin to attract more middle-class families. It’s also a consequence of something that many schools strive for: improvements in academics and environment that entice middle-class families to enroll their children there.
Like at P.S. 9, that tip in the student population’s poverty rate can undermine those very improvements — especially if a school is in the middle, with inadequate resources to make up the difference.
Altogether, about 87 schools in New York City are caught in a squeeze, where more than half of their students — but fewer than 60 percent — are considered poor, putting them just shy of qualifying for the federal money, according to the city’s preliminary budgets for 2012-13. The definition of poverty varies with family size; for a family of four, the city defines it as less than $29,000 in annual income.
Another 32 schools will be in the same boat as P.S. 9 by the 2013-14 school year, and will be scrambling to deal with a cutoff of Title 1 money for services like teachers, aides, literacy programs and basic supplies, which the federal program has sustained.
Schools like P.S. 11 Purvis J. Behan in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, have already experienced the loss.
Five years ago, the school’s poverty rate was roughly 70 percent. But the median family income jumped to $95,000, according to 2010 census data, from $68,000 in 2000. And when its poverty rate dropped to 58 percent for 2011-12, P.S. 11 lost its Title 1 funds.
At P.S. 9, Ms. D’Avilar said she was not shocked to learn about the loss in Title 1 assistance.
“The last three years, I watched the poverty rate go lower and lower,” said Ms. D’Avilar, who has been principal since 2004. “It wasn’t until going into the budget and seeing the money gone that it hit me.”
City officials say they give schools time to adjust to their changed status.
“We monitor all our schools,” wrote Marge Feinberg, a spokeswoman for the New York City Department of Education, in an e-mail. When schools dip below the 60 percent poverty level, they are allocated one additional year of Title 1 assistance.
“Grandfathering gives schools a year to transition and plan for aligning resources if funding is no longer allocated in the next year,” Ms. Feinberg said.
Still, the loss came as a blow to the P.S. 9 community. Parents began scrambling to make up the difference, as Gotham Schools reported last week. In an Op-Ed article in The New York Times, a parent wrote about the school’s conundrum.
Ms. D’Avilar said parents just don’t have the means to make up the difference; the median family income is roughly $50,000.
“It appears like our families are doing better financially, but they’re not,” she said. “They all feel the crunch.”
Nevertheless, parents sent out an urgent call for help. As word spread, hundreds of neighbors and community members donated, in amounts from $5 to $1,000. So far they have raised $48,000.
While impressive, it’s barely enough to save one teacher. And the parents at P.S. 9 know it’s not sustainable. Typically, the largest fund-raising event of the year is a silent auction that raises $20,000, roughly half of the parent-teacher organization’s total budget.
Meanwhile, the clock is ticking. The teachers whose jobs may be cut have started looking elsewhere for positions, Ms. D’Avilar said. “They don’t want to leave. We had a lot of crying and sadness,” she said.
In some ways, like many other schools that lost Title 1 money, P.S. 9 is a victim of its own success. As the school population’s poverty level slipped below the threshold, parents were able toraise money to upgrade the library and the playground. That and other changes made the school more attractive to more middle-class families.
“There’s a lot of families with small children coming into the neighborhood,” said Ivana Espinet, the mother of two children at P.S. 9 and a member of the school leadership team. “There’s people on the waiting list to get in.” Based on Department of Education records and prekindergarten enrollment projections, the school will have more than 650 students in 2012-13. Two years ago, it had 484.
To be sure, the Title 1 loss amounts to roughly only 7 percent of the school’s budget, but Faye Rimalovski, the mother of a rising second grader, said the repercussions were real.
“When you start losing teachers, that’s when it starts counting,” she said.
And parents, who say they already lost a dance teacher last year to budget cuts, say something is wrong with a financing formula that penalizes schools for being desirable and leaves them hanging at a critical time of growth.
“We shouldn’t have to raise money; every school should have what they need,” Ms. Espinet said. “We pay our taxes and we’re entitled to a good education for all our children.”
Ms. D’Avilar agrees.
“I heard about children going into their piggy banks because they want to help save our teachers,” she said. “They shouldn’t have to do that.”
Amy Ellen Schwartz, director of the Institute for Education and Social Policy at New York University, who has studied Title 1, said the way the funds are distributed in New York City is different from almost anywhere else in the country.
The federal government allocates Title 1 funds to the city based on the overall number of low-income students. The city then divides the pool among schools where more than 60 percent of the students are eligible for free lunches. In Staten Island, the cutoff is only 45 percent because the city uses average rates of poverty by borough. It’s a sore point for some principals left in limbo in the other boroughs.
Principals can use the money however they wish, with three requirements: 1 percent must be used in programs to engage parents, 5 percent to help teachers earn certifications and 10 percent for ongoing teacher training. Additionally, a portion of Title 1 funds is tied to individual students who are in the homeless shelter system.
Some say the all-or-nothing formula is unfair.
“The rich have enough money,” Ms. Schwartz said. “The poor we help. The ones in the middle genuinely have issues, and nobody much talks about it. It’s like there’s this middle that doesn’t exist, and it’s horrifying.”
A school spokeswoman wrote in an e-mail, “Per federal law, Title 1 funds should be directed to schools in most need.”
In Flushing, Queens, P.S. 165 Edith K. Bergtraum is sandwiched between a gentrified area and one that barely changed economically. To the west, one neighborhood has a median family income of $85,000. To the east, the median is $30,000.
Now that the poverty rate for P.S. 165 has dipped to 57 percent, the school will no longer receive federal dollars. Just two years ago, the Title 1 money amounted to $281,000 — equal to the salaries of roughly six entry-level teachers — of an $8 million budget.
What put the school below the Title 1 eligibility level was a shift of just 16 students, out of 599.
Some school officials say that given the small number of children who can affect the poverty rate, the problem is a bureaucratic one: the poverty level is set by responses to school lunch forms, which collect information about family income to determine eligibility for free lunches. It’s a large reason that schools make a big deal about seeing those forms returned every fall.
At P.S. 9, five children made the difference. Ms. Espinet said P.S. 9 has a 100 percent return rate for the forms, but most schools don’t.
At New Utrecht High School in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, one-third of the 3,000 students receive public assistance and automatically count toward the school’s official 59 percent poverty rate.
But Mitchel Kubiak, assistant principal at New Utrecht, said he believed that the actual poverty rate was much higher. Almost 30 percent of his students (920 to be exact) don’t return their forms, and each form is worth roughly $1,000 in federal funds, he said.
New Utrecht has seen its budget shrink by $2 million in the last two school years, he said, with another $500,000 endangered for 2012-13.
Schools like Baruch College Campus High School in Midtown Manhattan don’t have problems with forms. But the poverty rate there has gone down, and the $300,000 in Title 1 money that the school received over the last three years has evaporated, said Alicia Pérez-Katz, the principal of Baruch.
Her school now has a poverty rate of 58 percent. To save math and science teachers, Ms. Pérez-Katz increased average class sizes to almost 40 students, up from 25 four years ago. The school had bought computers, but now cannot afford to fix broken ones.
“Our school is like being in the middle class: You pay a lot of taxes, but we’re not quite making it,” said Johanna Van Straaten, a former PTA president at Baruch, whose son just graduated. “We spend more than we bring in.”
Ms. Van Straaten said Baruch’s PTA considers it a good fund-raising year if it brings in $20,000. This year it raised $15,000. So it dipped into its reserves to help the school pay $3,000 for printer toner and copiers, among other things.
After-school programs and arts and music classes have been cut. The school and the PTA used to rent a gym for student sports, because the building doesn’t have one. They’re not sure how they can pay for that now.
“That’s life and reality,” Ms. Van Straaten said. “In some ways children should see that not everyone has everything. And to help others fund-raise to be part of a community is one good thing that comes out of needing more. That’s a learning experience in itself.”
Not everyone is quite as sanguine.
“We were planning for extracurricular teachers in the fall,” Ms. Rimalovski of P.S. 9 said. “Now we have to take a huge step back just to save the teachers we already have in the school.”
She added: “You think in public education everything should be covered. It’s not. When we get hit for $160,000, it hurts all of our children.”
Elbert Chu is a student at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism and a former SchoolBook intern. Follow him on Twitter @elbertchu.
BTW, this website for NYC education policy and news isnt always updated, but is still pretty good: http://edvoxny.wordpress.com/
This was in my inbox. ...the charters keep coming. Emotions are high:
Dear xxx,I just wanted to let you know about an important issue facing students and parents in our community. Last week Council Member Tish James, parents and students from the Dr. Susan S. McKinney Secondary School of the Arts and special-needs students rallied to oppose the co-location of the Success Academy Charter School in their building. There’s a great article here highlighting the issues and concerns raised by the parents and students.
There was also an incident at the rally which one of the parents addresses in her statement which I’m forwarding to you now. The statement makes clear the kind of pressure the students and parents have been under and I think they deserve our support. Won’t you come to a hearing hosted by DOE about the issue October 31st, 6pm in the Dr. Susan McKinney school?
What: DOE Hearing on the co-location of K-5 Success Academy Charter School Brooklyn 5 at K265
When: Wednesday, October 31st, 2012, 6pm
Where: Dr. Susan S. McKinney Secondary School of the Arts, 101 Park Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11205
"Last week at a rally to save our school from being invaded against our will by Success Academy Charter School, a parent made a rally sign using the word "rape". That was in poor taste. We apologize for the phrasing in that sign.
"The parents, students and entire school community feel under attack and without options. The emotional toll this has taken on our beloved family is immense. We want Success Academy to find their own building and have space all to themselves, not come into our acclaimed school where they are not wanted and take away classrooms and resources from our students. It was in this spirit that this rally sign was hastily created”.
-- Marilyn Floyd, McKinney Parent--
Ede Fox
The charter schools keep coming:
most of the article discusses the three charters that were the genesis of this post. the two "prospect heights" branches they wanted apparently didn't work out for them. looks like they got crown heights north (which they're calling "prospect heights"), brownsville (which they're calling "crown heights") and navy yard (which they're calling "fort greene"). i sure hope hakeem jeffries is going to complain to this well-funded charter-school chain about their deceptive marketing. or maybe not?
Now that Mr Jefferies has been sent to Washington, as opposed to Albany, I expect less entertainment from him.
I've been trying, unsuccessfully, for over a year to get a meeting with the principal of PS 138 about the now-vacant lot owned by the DOE next to the school. It was used as a staging site for facade work being done for the school. It is now vacant and covered with several inches of crushed rock. I had written a letter to the principal last year offering to volunteer my time to facilitate a garden at the site. I recently enlisted the Assemblyman's assistance in the effort. So far, nothing.
My next door neighbor, who has a Master's degree in early elementary education and was raised in the community, spent one year teaching at PS 138 and left in disgust. She now teaches at a public school in Park Slope.
This site caters to the Education policy folks:
http://gothamschools.org/2012/11/29/group-launches-ed-research-site-to-guide-mayoral-candidates/
Needless to say, they have their work cut out for them.
GothamSchools can be a useful clearinghouse for NYC Ed Policy, but its advisory board is heavily skewed toward the so-called "reformers" - charter school operators, people who work for the NYC DOE, etc. - and it shows in what they choose to write about, and how. For example, one of their board members is the co-director of the Success Academies and one of the organizations that is targeting our area for more, ahem, "progressive" charters. Take it their editorial choices with many grains of salt.
Capt. Planet - I don't know anything about PS 138, and I have no idea of the quality of the school or its leadership. The DOE doesn't seem to be closing that school, but if it is not a good school, as you seem to be implying, then perhaps the community will be happy to have an additional choice. But to me, the fact that the charter school is trying to call their school "Prospect Heights" is pretty insulting to Crown Heights North, which is a different neighborhood with its own rich identity and doesn't exactly need Prospect Heights for name recognition! It's a totally crass and condescending marketing technique. The information on their website is also clearly trying to create the impression that the school is somewhere it just isn't. Are they trying to attract people to the school on the basis of the association with a more gentrified neighborhood? Are they completely ignorant of the actual neighborhood they're located in? Do they know anything about the community at all?
Speaking of sources of information that one should evaluate carefully, yet may be valuable.....
I give you this upcoming conference: http://www.whatworksined.org/2013/?utm_source=The+KIPP+Difference&utm_campaign=2854fbd072-November_201111_8_2011&utm_medium=email
Needless to say, the media runs lots of articles on Charter schools... CH in the news
This article on local charter schools includes a very good quote by State Senator Eric Adams:
“We fought hard to close prisons upstate. The only common denominator of those who are incarcerated is not ethnicity. It’s academic standing,” said Adams.
interesting, didn't know where adams stood on the issue. i understand that he may be running for borough president and it is obviously something that will be part of the landscape for a while.
there was a TON of resistance to success academy co-location at PS 138. i had not realized that the DOE moved a different charter from 138 after stating there was not enough space for it. there also seemed to be a lot of passionate support for 138 as its own institution. success academy in particular galls many people because the DOE has shown such consistent bias in its favor, giving it prime space in whatever building it asks for without regard to what is happening in the existing district schools. and then the DOE just disappears, purportedly letting the adults work out any resulting difficulties. but the financial and political imbalance gives this charter chain little incentive to compromise, and it really degrades and demoralizes the existing schools. check out the "inside colocation" blog to see what i mean.
the sad thing is that the DOE is shooting itself in the foot when it does stuff like this. they started a new zoned school, ps 705, down the street, and that school is getting some traction among local middle class families of diverse cultural backgrounds. and you can bet that both it and ps 138 will lose middle class families that otherwise would have tried out their zoned schools but are attracted to the glossy brochures and free t-shirts and the parlor parties that the charter can afford to give them.
The Village Voice weighs in on the arrival of Charter Schools in Brooklyn:
Chater School cynics will likely dismiss this article as propaganda.
"there is no way that parents could like a charter school"
Actually, they might:
huh? that article may or may not be propaganda, but it's not about charter schools. PS 9, PS 770 and PS 705 are all public (non-charter) schools. if anything, it reads as propaganda for *new* schools, which, yes, i am also skeptical about. it's good to be skeptical where anything is being marketed as some kind of miracle, especially where said miracle is being offered/marketed to *new* people while the non-miracle is all that the *old* people can access. (ps 705 currently doesn't take 4th or 5th graders - they remain in the old school, ps 770 is K-3 only. ps 9 takes everyone, although i have been told it is primarily open to zoned students at least at the lower grades.)
snake-oil notwithstanding, it must be said that ps 705 wouldn't have to be that amazing to represent a significant improvement over ps 22, which apparently showed pretty dismal performance and very low parent satisfaction (relying on public info here, so apologies if that interpretation is wrong). as long as 705 takes every kid in the zone that wants to go, and allows every family to participate in planning the school's future, i think it could be a terrific community asset even if it does seem to be marketing itself to gentrifiers at present. integration is good, for schools as well as neighborhoods, and it will be a good thing for crown heights if middle class families of all varieties feel like they have a viable, community-based elementary school option that allows them to commit to the neighborhood in a collaborative, non-entitled and constructive way.
My mistake, I made the leap that the new schools were charter schools located in existing public school buildings.
I momentarily forgot about the who "new, smaller, totally different school within the building" technique.
Here's a charter school article, to make up for the other one 
: http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/brooklyn/brownsville-academy-students-sue-block-charter-article-1.1262551
A recent report, in the never ending stream of contradictory reports, on whether charter schools are more successful than public ones:
http://www.cityandstateny.com/study-charter-students-ahead-of-public-school-kids-in-reading-math/
A collection of links from the WAGPOPS that came through my inbox yesterday:
Dear parents and school communities,
You may have been contacted by Citizens of the World Charter Schools recently to enroll your child in their lottery or help them spread the word about their schools opening in Crown Heights and Williamsburg.
We are concerned about the misinformation you may have received about Citizens of the World Charter Schools (CWC) and urge you to find out more before applying to CWC or offering them a platform to speak to your communities.
Hundreds of local parents have launched a lawsuit against the SUNY charter school authorizers to stop CWC from opening. Here's the paperwork on our lawsuit: http://www.scribd.com/doc/122236115/WAGPOPS-lawsuit-against-SUN
Every elected official in Williamsburg and Greenpoint, including US Congresswoman Nydia Velazquez, NYState Senator Martin Dilan, NYState Assemblymen Joe Lentol, City Councilmember Steve Levin, City Councilmember Diana Reyna, Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz, Community Education Council 14, District Leadership Council 14, and Community Board 1, oppose Citizens of the World Charter Schools.
As of two weeks ago, articles that criticized CWC became harder to find (unless you google "Citizens of the World" with "scandals" or "segregation"). Enrollment in the CWC lottery is approaching and CWC does not want parents to know the reasons why parents have been trying to stop them from opening.
The story of how CWC came to Brooklyn:
http://thewgnews.com/2012/09/the-demise-of-public-education-mr-mrs-moskowitz-push-more-charters-on-williamburg/
A Village Voice article about CWC and Success Academy:
http://www.villagevoice.com/2013-01-30/news/Eva-Moskowitz-Bloomberg-Charter-Schools/
NYC Public School Parents' take on CWC - exposing corruption, financial instability, management issues, and the impact on nearby neighborhood public schools:
http://nycpublicschoolparents.blogspot.com/2012/05/comments-on-applications-of-citizens-of.html
An interview and background on WAGPOPS!:
http://greenpointers.com/2013/01/31/charter-schools-and-wagpops/
Two articles about CWC relating to how their choice leads to our segregated schools:
http://ednotesonline.blogspot.com/2012/04/exposing-segregation-tactics-of-eric.html
http://nycpublicschoolparents.blogspot.com/2012/05/citizens-of-world-charter-parent-choice.html
An article from a Los Angeles parent fighting Citizens of the World Silver Lake
http://echopark.patch.com/blog_posts/blog-got-school with a follow up article from a charter school founder http://echopark.patch.com/blog_posts/blog-charter-school-founder-sounds-off-on-the-impact-of-charter-schools
We encourage you to consider your neighborhood schools. You'll find that even though your neighborhood public schools don't have fancy Powerpoint presentations or a marketing/PR budget of almost $150,000 (that's the CWC marketing/PR budget using our tax dollars), they do offer a constructivist curriculum, diversity in the classroom, arts/science/sports, balanced literacy, project based learning, and the opportunity to genuinely engage with your child's school.
Our lawsuit is pending. In the mean time, public school families in Williamsburg, Greenpoint, and across NYC rely on the support of other parents and community members to preserve the promise of public education to serve all of our children and ensure that every neighborhood public school is excellent.
Should you have any questions or want more information, please don't hesitate to email us.
Kind regards,
WAGPOPS!
Williamsburg and Greenpoint Parents: Our Public Schools!
Representing parents from PS31, PS34, PS110, PS414, PS84, PS147, PS380, PS132, IS318, JHS126, etc.,
http://www.facebook.com/WilliamsburgGreenpointParents
https://twitter.com/WAGPOPS
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