More charter schools in Harlem?
There is a story in today’s NY Times about the controversy concerning all the charter schools being placed in Harlem.
This is an important subject; unfortunately, the reporter skipped over nearly every important point:
- With most of these charter schools being put into existing school buildings, they are increasingly squeezing them for space, and in many cases, leading to larger class sizes. We saw this already, in the controversy over where Eva Moskowitz’ charter school would be placed, whether PS 154, where it would lead to larger classes, or elsewhere – apparently, now in PS 149 in D3.
- In grades higher than 3rd, class sizes remain unacceptably large in many low-achieving schools in the neighborhood.
- See for example, PS 242 in District 3 – which shares space with Future Leaders Institute Charter School and Harlem Link Charter School – and where classes in 3rd and 4th grade have 28-29 kids on average, according to the DOE figures.
- At MS 195 in D5, which, according to Inside Schools is a SURR school, with “a high number of students receiving special education services and new immigrants”, there are 30-31 children per class in 7th and 8th grades. This school should have reduced these class sizes years ago, and could still, if it weren’t sharing space with a KIPP charter school.
- Most importantly, despite what Chancellor Klein claims in the article, there is no evidence that competition with charter schools will improve regular public schools in Harlem, or anywhere else in the country, for that matter.
- If competition worked, all our public schools would have smaller classes, since almost every NYC charter school, like most of the parochial and private schools, provides smaller classes, and advertises this to parents as their most attractive selling point.
- See, for example, Carl Icahn’s charter school in the Bronx, which boasts that all classes are capped at 18, according to a recent article in the NY Sun. Classes run to 4 PM, with Saturday help for those kids who need it. (In regular public schools, the Saturday classes end after the child has taken her standardized tests – as we know, these test results are all that matters to the people at Tweed.) So if competition worked, I suppose other schools in the Bronx will soon have 18 per class? Don’t hold your breath.
- Take Harlem Children’s Zone, which runs several charter schools and was subject of a recent show on “60 minutes.” According to this report, the Children’s Zone raises $36 million in private funds per year. “Classes have a ratio of one adult for every six kids as well as state-of-the-art science labs, a first-class gym, and a cafeteria that looks more like a restaurant .” If competition worked, why aren’t all schools in Harlem like this?
- Now, Bloomberg and Klein would probably say they can’t afford to make the same sort of improvements to our schools, and are waiting on the CFE money to do so. This is a poor excuse when the city has a $5.5 billion surplus, and all they want to increase education spending on this year is for more cops in our schools, and more money for, you guessed it, charter schools.
- In fact, in the five years that they have run our schools, they’ve refused to spend an extra penny to reduce class size, and according to the State comptroller, have misused hundreds of millions of dollars of state funds that are supposed to devoted to this purpose. (Check out this, for more on their flagrant violations of law as regards class size)
- Even when they receive all those promised CFE billions, do Bloomberg and Klein want to spend it on capping class sizes at 18? No, of course not. In fact, they don’t plan to reduce average class size in any grade higher than 3rd, and in K-3 only to 20. So I guess competition only takes you so far.
- Now, if only all charter schools, like the Icahn school, were encouraged to find their own space instead of having it provided for them in existing school buildings, their increased numbers wouldn’t lead to other students being deprived of the same conditions that they enjoy, and in fact, this might actually help relieve some of the overcrowding elsewhere.
- In its applications to become a charter school, the Ross school, founded by the extremely wealthy widow of the former chairman of Time-Warner, Courtney Ross, said that it could indeed afford to lease its own building – but then class sizes in grades K-12 would have to rise unacceptably high -- to 24 students per class– depriving their students of the individual attention they need in classes of 20.
- So DOE decided to put them in the NEST public school building, on the Lower East side, so that the Ross schoolchildren could have smaller classes, to the detriment of the children at NEST.
What I’d like to know, if it’s so important to ensure the right to smaller classes (and I do think it’s a right) for the students at charter schools – why not for all our other children attending public schools in this city?
Sorry to go on so long about this, but I get really ticked off not only about this administration, but also how the NY Times so often fails to use its tremendous opportunity to inform readers of the real issues involving education in this city.
