Student discontent and high attrition at Success Academy; hearings next week about their intent to ditch three planned high schools in Brooklyn

 The following post is by Brooke Parker of NYC Kids PAC.  Public hearings will take place next week, Sept. 29 and Sept. 30 on Success Academy's request to revise their charter by eliminating three previously planned Brooklyn high schools.  In this post, Brooke speculates about the real reasons for this charter revision below.  The images are screenshots taken from the Instagram account @survivors_of_successacademy.  and include comments of current and former Success students and staff.

While most New Yorkers may not know what goes on behind the blue doors of  Success Academy charter schools (more on that later), their relentless demand for more space and expansion definitely rings familiar, including many well-publicized events when Success Academy closed all of its schools to have their students and parents lobby in Albany for expansion and more space in public schools.

Any public school advocate will tell you that Success Academy almost always wins their fights for space. Eva Moskowitz, the firebrand CEO of Success Academies has Governor Cuomo’s ear, and the organization has access to boat loads of money. [Note from LH: not in this one case though --where DOE wanted to give them the entire PS 25 school building  in Bed-Stuy without going through the legal process required – assuming their attempt to close PS 25 would go through, before a judge blocked this closure.]

In 2014, Success Academy held multiple press conferences and sued the city, demanding public school space for three of its schools while granting space for five other of its schools. Mayor de Blasio explained that these three would mean displacing disabled D75 students.  The city ended up renting and paying for private space for these schools at great expense.  In 2017, Success launched a $5M television ad campaign for more middle school space in DOE buildings.

Success Academy’s argument has always been that they just don’t have enough room for the huge wait lists of families clamoring to be in their schools. We must open more!  [And yet studies show that half of the students accepted at the school never enroll.]

Yet now Success has quietly requested revisions to their charter authorizer, SUNY, with announced hearings on Sept. 29 and Sept. 30 , to cancel the opening of all three planned high schools in Brooklyn: Success Academy Williamsburg, Success Academy Cobble Hill, and Success Academy Bed Stuy 2.  [You can sign up to speak or attend these online hearings here.]

Last June, they requested that their total planned high school enrollment from these schools be eliminated, and instead 118 additional students be added to Success Academy Harlem 1, located in the Norman Thomas building on E. 33 St. in District 2 this fall.  Success Academy’s ostensible reason for the closing of the three planned high schools in Brooklyn is “due to facility constraints.” Yet as far as we can tell, they never requested more space from DOE, so this excuse seems questionable. 

Moreover, because of a state law passed in 2014, the city is required to help pay the rent for private space of any new or expanding charter school if they are not provided with space in a public school.  As detailed in this report issued last year by Class Size Matters, DOE spent $2.9 million in FY 2019 alone, leasing nine buildings for Success charters.  In addition, they spent $2.2 million that same year for two Success Academy charter schools to rent space in the Hudson Yards complex on the west side of Manhattan, even though the Success Academy charter management organization owns the space. Not to mention that Success CMO enjoyed a huge surplus in 2018 of more than $60 million according to the IRS data  and $12 million for the charter schools themselves.  In 2019, they received an additional $9.8 million to expand and open new schools, including  a new high school. 

Revising their charters and moving students around  isn’t new to Success Academy. In recent years, they’ve changed planned enrollments at their middle schools  and shuffled students from one area to another. What is notable about this hearing is there will be NO Success Academy high school in Brooklyn in spite of having five Success Academy middle schools in the borough.

Given what we know about Success Academy, and their promises to families that they will continue to offer high school seats to all graduating 8^th graders, combined with their relentless push for space in public school buildings regardless of community opposition, we were curious why Success Academy didn’t just ask for more space for their high schools in Brooklyn or go out and rent space that the city would have to then subsidize.

Success Academy opened in 2006 with just one school and 83 Kindergartners. They now boast 47 schools serving 18,000 students. The charter chain doesn’t admit students from outside their system after 4th grade, so middle schools and high school entry is exclusive to students who have been enrolled in their elementary schools. 

 

Gary Rubinstein has written about Success Academy’s attrition, calculating the rate per year at 17% after 4th grade when there is no more back-filling of students. Rubinstein analyzed the graduating class of 2020 and found: 

“…there was a combined 353 students in the cohort [2nd grade].  By 6th grade, they were down to 263 students and by 9th grade it was 191.  In 10th grade they were 161 students and in 11th grade, 146.  And now, according to the New York Post article based on a Success Academy press release, they have 114 seniors.  So only 32% of the students who were there in second grade made it through their program.  And even more startling is that of the 191 9th graders that had been at Success Academy for 10 years, only 59% of them are on track to graduate three years later.”

Still, given the network’s rapid expansion, one would anticipate enough rising 8th graders for a Brooklyn high school. That is, unless you look at Bed Stuy 1, where the 2019-2020 8th grade class of 75 began as a 5th grade class of 105. That’s a 29% attrition rate within one cohort. They just can’t seem to hold onto their students.

So far Success has only two high schools, Harlem 1 and Harlem 3, both housed in the Norman Thomas
building.  For the last three years, at Harlem 3, the 9^th grade enrollment first increased from 106 to 152, but then fell to 137, an increase of only 31 students over that period, according to the DOE’s demographic snapshots. At Harlem  1, the 9^th grade cohort has declined from 192 in 2016-2017, to 134 in 2017-2018, stayed at 134 the following year, and then dropped to only 114 last year – a decline of 78 students over this period, despite all the middle school students they enroll.

This year, with the planned addition of the 118 students coming from the three proposed Brooklyn high schools, we should expect Harlem 1’s 9th grade class to hover around at least 232 students. 

Strangely, we could not find out how many students are in the 9th grade at Harlem 1 this fall. After numerous requests, the DOE refuses to share the enrollment numbers. They have them, but they will not release them. Could it be that Success Academy couldn’t even get those planned 118 Brooklyn students?  If the Harlem 1 high school enrollment numbers were high, Success Academy would use those numbers as political muscle and advertise them, not conceal them.

The information about enrollment at Harlem 1 is critical to the upcoming hearings SUNY on September 29 and 30th. Even without having confirmation of decreased enrollment, there doesn’t seem to be enough interest in Success Academy to garner a high school in Brooklyn, and no matter how much they quietly declare to SUNY that they can’t find the “adequate facilities,” it looks like what’s really happening is that they just can’t keep their students. 

What could be behind the exponentially decreasing interest in remaining at Success Academy through high school? 

Public school advocates have always struggled to get information about Success Academy and their board meetings are rarely made public. But there is some information that we have been able to glean from public data when it’s available. We know that their teacher turnover rate was the highest of any charter at 42%.

We know that they enroll hardly any English Language Learners (ELLs) in areas where their neighboring public schools have ELL percentages in the double digits. We know about the inequities of any public school that is cursed with being co-located with a Success Academy charter school.  We know about the harsh punishments and zero-tolerance policies for children as young as 5 years old.  We know about the continual and flagrant violations of student privacy, which is how the Success CEO Eva Moskowitz retaliates against parents who go public about the abuse their children suffer at her schools.

Moreover in recent years, Success Academy has had mainstream media coverage of truly disturbing practices in their elementary schools, from the NY Times video footage of a teacher verbally abusing a first grader, to the infamous “got to go list”  -- for which the families of the students who were pushed out recently received a settlement of $1.1 million in damages before even going to trial.  There have been countless other  lawsuits, outlining a range of abuses towards children.

In 2018, Success Academy high school students staged a series of protests against their school with a

list of grievances, ranging from draconian punishments for petty issues to excessive student homework. In the fall of the following year, only 20 out of the 67 high school teachers returned. 

In  August 2018, Chalkbeat published an in-depth expose of the many problems that had arisen in their high school, with students rebelling against the school's abusive policies.  In November and December, Gimlet media ran a series about Success charters for their popular Start-up podcast.  The episode about Success high school students protesting the school's rise in suspensions and their practice of sending students back to earlier grades for minor issues was especially shocking, including reporting on a decision by Eva Moskowitz to ban head scarfs. Here is a quote from the narrator:

And Eva kept shifting the school's policies — tightening enforcement, changing the punishment. She added dress code violations and misbehavior at dismissal to the list of offenses that were punishable with a holdover. Kids and teachers, their heads were spinning. As more and more students were told that they might have to go back to the previous grade, the student body grew increasingly frustrated... 

Though the NY Post touted the fact that the 2020 high school class had an 100% college acceptance rate, they failed to mention that  one third of the students in that class had left Success Academy after their junior year, and the school had lost roughly one-seventh of their seniors during their final year, according to an analysis by Gary Rubinstein.

Staff and student anger against the racist aspect of the school's practices and policies became even more explosive with the Black Lives Matter protests over George Floyd's murder.  In June 2020, a new Instagram account was created, called  @survivors_of_successacademy described as  "A place for current and former Success Academy employees, students, and families to share their stories” with the hashtag #insidesuccess.

Three days later came this single post: “Over 200 current and past employees, students, and parents have shared their stories with us.” A little later that same day, “For those attending Eva’s town halls today: Don’t let them ignore you! Demand that they answer your questions. We don’t want to hear talking points; we want change.” #evamustresign.

On June 16, the account posted a disturbing photo taken three years previously at a Success charter school, of black children’s headless bodies hanging upside down from a tree below the cheery phrase, “Hang in there… It’s almost summer!” 

Less than a week later, after fielding a barrage of complaints from students and staff of racist practices at the school, and the refusal of Eva Moskowitz to put out a statement in solidarity with Black Lives Matters, Liz Baker, who worked in Success Academy’s Public Relations office, publicly quit, writing:

““I am resigning because I can no longer continue working for an organization that allows and rewards the systemic abuse of students, parents, and employees… As the organization’s press associate, I no longer wish to defend Success Academy in response to any media inquiries,” the letter continued. “I do not believe that Success Academy has scholars’ best interests at heart, and I strongly believe that attending any Success Academy school is detrimental to the emotional well-being of children.”

Since then, the @survivors_of_successacademy Instagram page has ramped up their posts, revealing more discontent and  devastating truths about Success Academies, from racist policies to emotional abuse of children to regularly shaming children and parents.  Many of the comments come directly from middle and high school students, who also launched a different account: @sa.vanguards. As of this writing, the Instagram account has almost 6,000 followers.

There has never been a platform like this for charter school students, parents and staff to speak out and share their experiences. Within the comments you can read both outrage and relief from feeling heard. Let’s hope that SUNY is listening. 

How our loss in court today ironically provided evidence of how shallow de Blasio's education policies have been

Today at the NY Supreme Court, a hearing was held on our lawsuit vs the redactions of 2015 City Hall decision memo which discussed and memorialized the decision of the Mayor and his top aides to reject several recommendations of the Blue Book working group on how to revamp the school capacity formula.  In particular, the Mayor rejected the group's proposal to align the formula with smaller classes -- which would be important if he or any subsequent mayor decided to significantly reduce class size as de Blasio had in fact promised to do when he first ran for Mayor.

On April 10, 2016, I submitted a Freedom of Information request for the decision memo from the Mayor's office about their decision to accept or reject the thirteen recommendations of the Blue Book Working group . This working group, appointed by the Chancellor and co-chaired by Lorraine Grillo, the head of the School Construction Authority and then-CEC 2 President Shino Tanikawa, made several recommendions in December 2014, including that the DOE should align the school capacity formula to the smaller class sizes in their original Contract for Excellence class size reduction plan

The City sat on these recommendations for more than six months, and finally in July 2015, in the middle of summer, announced that they would accept seven of the 13 but reject six others, including what several members said was the most important one: the one related to the goal of reducing class size.  There were several articles about this rejection, including in Chalkbeat and WNYC Schoolbook , DNAinfo, and on my blog here  and here.

It took more than two years after I had FOILed it, but in August 2017 I finally received the decision memo - 8 pages long and almost completely redacted.  See below. Interestingly, it was signed by all the Mayor's top staff except for the DOE Chancellor Farina or the President of the School Construction Authority Lorraine Grillo.

Because it was the middle of summer I missed the statute of limitations for an appeal, but at my request, fellow Kids PAC member Brooke Parker FOILed the memo as well.  When she received the same document with the same eight pages of redactions, she then appealed the redactions to the Corporation Counsel without success.  Finally, she filed an appeal in court, on July 17, 2018, with the help of Laura Barbieri of Advocates for Justice.

Generally speaking, inter-agency materials are exempt from FOIL; but according to the NY Public Officers Law they are FOILable if they  reflect a "final agency policy or determination" as this memo did; or include "statistical or factual tabulations or data."  I imagined that in eight pages of discussion of issues as technical as school capacity, utilization, class size, how many cluster rooms to allot to each school, etc. that at least one or two facts must have been mentioned.

This afternoon in court, after a brief discussion during which Laura explained  what the Blue Book was, and why the decision to reject the proposal to align the school capacity formula with smaller classes was a matter of importance and public interest, Judge Arthur Engeron of the State Supreme Court heard from the City's attorney who argued that this document was not a "final agency determination" but a "predecisional memo"  because the Mayor could have rejected the decisions within it - even though the Mayor did not.  He also claimed that there were no facts or data cited in the eight pages of discussion that were blacked out.

The Judge then asked for a copy of the unredacted memo and went back in his private office with his law clerk and intern to peruse it.  When he came out about a half hour later, he said he would reject our claim, because the memo did not necessarily reflect a "final agency policy or determination" but simply the advice of his top staff.  Moreover, he reported that there were no facts or data included in the memo's eight pages, but only opinions related to politics and discussion of how the public would react to these decisions.

This was quite astonishing and in my mind, an indictment in itself.  Even as the state's highest court ruled that NYC students' constitutional rights depended on a sound basic education which in turn, would depend upon smaller classes, and even as one would assume decisions on a school capacity formula would rely on analysis of data, the Mayor's staff did not even mention any facts or figures in their deliberations, but merely political considerations.

This is further evidence of just how empty of substance many of the education policies of this administration have been and should give potential supporters of de Blasio's Presidential campaign pause.

Parent sues City Hall for refusing to release unredacted decision memo on class size

Decision memo p.2

Update: Tomorrow, Wed. May 15 at 2:30 PM at the NY Supreme Court, 60 Centre St., Rm. 418, Judge Arthur Engeron will hear arguments in this lawsuit vs NYC for redacting nearly the entire City Hall decision memo on why the Mayor rejected the Blue Book Working Group recommendations to align school capacity with smaller classes.

For immediate release: July 17, 2018

For more information contact: Leonie Haimson; leoniehaimson@gmail.com; 917-435-9329.

On Monday, July 16, 2018, Brooke Parker, a NYC public school parent, filed a lawsuit against the Office of the Mayor of the City of New York, challenging the almost complete redaction of a City Hall Decision Memo that contained a discussion of the reasons for the city’s rejection of several recommendations of the Blue Book Working Group, including a proposal to align the school capacity formula with smaller class sizes.  She is represented in court by Laura D. Barbieri, Special Counsel of Advocates for Justice, a pro-bono law firm.

Brooke is also a member of NYC Kids PAC, which had sent a candidate survey to Bill de Blasio when he first ran for Mayor.  In June 2013, his campaign returned the survey, in which he promised to  “Reform the blue book formula so it more accurately reflects overcrowding and incorporates the need for smaller classes.”

In February 2014, his newly-appointed Chancellor Carmen Farina appointed a working group to come up with proposals to improve the accuracy of the formula used to devise school capacity and utilization. The working group contained administrators, teachers and parents, and was co-chaired by Lorraine Grillo, the President of the School Construction Authority and Shino Tanikawa,  a parent leader and then-President of the Community Education Council in District 2 in Manhattan.

As explained by a NYC DOE spokesperson, “"Over the last decade, communities across the city have been cut out of decision-making processes that undermined the voices of educators and families. That approach is now gone—and we're replacing it with one that reflects a genuine desire to engage with communities.  With new leadership that will listen, it's a new era for our system. Families and educators need to know that we're going to seek their feedback and engage with them as much as we can."

The Blue Book Working Group made its first round of proposals that were accepted by the DOE in June 2014, including that trailers would no longer be counted in estimating school capacity.  In December 2014, the Working Group proposed thirteen more changes to the formula, including that the DOE should align the school capacity formula to the smaller class sizes in their original, state-approved Contract for Excellence class size reduction plan.  This would require a formula that assume no more than 20 students per classroom in grades K-3, 23 students in grades 4-8 and 25 students in high school, to ensure adequate space to lower class size to those levels. 

On July 28, 2015, without explanation, the City sent an email to reporters, in which the seven recommendations that were accepted were noted, as well as three proposals it would “study.” The email omitted any mention of the three proposals it had rejected outright, including the one that several members of the Working Group said was the most important: to align school capacity with smaller classes.

As Lisa Donlan, a member of the BBWG and the President of the Community Education Council in District 1 said at the time, “Certainly for me and for many of us, the class size issue was the biggest issue that we felt would have the greatest impact on bringing us to painting an accurate picture of reality and making sure that all kids got access to an adequate education — hands down.”

When reporters asked why the City had rejected the proposal on class size, the only answer offered by a Department of Education spokesman was that schools would "continue to work toward this critical goal" of reducing class sizes.

Following up on an earlier Freedom of Information request by Leonie Haimson of Class Size Matters, Brooke Parker filed a FOIL request in on January 24, 2018 seeking “The City Hall 2015 decision memo about which proposals of the Blue Book working group to accept or reject, with the reasons for this decision included.” 

On February 2, 2018, the Mayor’s office sent in response an eight-page document entitled “Decision memo” that was almost completely blacked out, with no mention of the proposals rejected and no information provided on why certain proposals were accepted and others not.  The rationale offered for the redactions was that the items redacted were “inter-agency discussions” and thus exempt from FOIL, pursuant to Public Officers Law § 87(2)(g).  

Yet this law also states that any “final agency policy or determinations” are not exempt from FOIL, as this memo certainly was.  It also makes clear that any inter-agency materials that contain factual data or instructions to staff that affect the public are not exempt, and it is extremely unlikely that no data or facts were cited in the discussion of these decisions. Ms. Parker appealed the redactions to the City, and on March 15, 2018, Henry T. Berger of the Mayor’s Office responded, “Your appeal is denied because I have determined that the redactions were proper.”  Thus, she had no further option but to file an appeal in court.

As Ms. Parker points out, “The decision made by the Mayor’s office to reject the recommendation of the Blue Book working group to align school capacity with smaller classes was terribly unfortunate, and will make it far more difficult to achieve the smaller classes that NYC children need to receive their constitutional right to a sound basic education, according to the State’s highest court in the CFE case.  But then to suppress any of the reasons for this decision and black out the entire discussion explaining the reasons for it makes the original decision even worse.“

Leonie Haimson, Executive Director of Class Size Matters, adds: “When he was running for office, the  Mayor promised parents that he would reduce class size and align the school capacity formula with smaller classes.  He also promised to bring more transparency and community involvement to decision-making, especially when it came to our schools.  He has so far failed at all three.  Hopefully, the Court will agree that his administration can no longer hide their damaging decisions in a flurry of redactions, but will have to spell out the reasoning behind them.  New York City parents and other stakeholders deserve no less.“

The verified complaint is posted here.

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Brooke Parker exposes the sham of Century Foundation report on "diversity by design" & Citizens of the World charter schools

Here is a column by Brooke Dunn Parker, Brooklyn parent activist, about a recent controversial report by the Century Foundation, which identified 125 charter schools that are supposedly “diverse by design” – though on the whole, most analysts find that charters have  had a segregating effect, according to the AP, NBC News, and the UCLA Civil Rights Project.

Moreover, this list of 125 schools was selected from 5,692 charter schools – only a tiny number.  The methodology is also questionable.  The authors identify these schools by analyzing their enrollment, websites and survey responses from school leaders.  Though the Century Foundation sent their survey about diversity to 971 charter schools, only 86 responded – which means that nearly 40 schools were put on the list even though the school leaders couldn’t be bothered to answer their survey.  

Several Success Academy charter schools were included on their list, including Success Academy Upper West, which has had multiple civil  rights complaints lodged by parents against it.  Finally, the report was financed by the Walton Foundation, the largest private funder of charter schools, who no doubt would like to whitewash their poor record of civil rights abuses.  Please read  the Network for Public Education and Schott Foundation report on how many charter schools violate students’ civil rights.

Check out Brooke’s dive into the issue, informed by her experience with one of the supposedly “diverse by design” charter networks highlighted in the report, Citizens of the World Charter Schools. Brooke has previously written about these schools on our blog, here and here.

I’m always disappointed and baffled when self-described “progressives” support charter schools. These same people and organizations often implicitly understand the serious problems related to privatizing prisons or the military yet offer their unquestioned support to privatizing schools.  They rarely hear, let alone seek out, voices that might contradict that support. The Century Foundation is, sadly, a perfect example of this disconnect as shown by their recent report, “Diverse by Design Charter Schools ” that claims that charter schools, with their lack of regulation or “flexibility,” are ideally positioned to create integrated schools.

The “Diverse by Design Charter Schools” report describes a growing movement of intentionally diverse charter schools that the researchers, Halley Potter and Kimberly Quick, believe are leading the charge to school integration in our nation’s segregated school districts. Much like the promise that charter schools will share their academic best practices with neighborhood public schools, they argue that “diverse by design” charter schools will show us all how to undo segregation. Leaving aside that public school students, parents, teachers, and taxpayers are still waiting for those charter schools whose “best practices” aren’t marketing, creaming, suspending, or cheating their way to high profits and test scores, the Century Foundation’s report on integrated charter schools is poorly researched and its policy recommendations are irresponsible.

Notably, the only data that the Century Foundation gathered was the “racial and socioeconomic demographics of schools, school leader responses on a survey, and analysis of charter schools’ websites.” Can you imagine if one tried to assess the safety and efficacy of a pharmaceutical drug by a select sample of users, the website of the drug manufacturer, and the CEO’s responses to a survey?

In contrast, a recent report by the New School, “How School Choice Divides New York City Elementary Schools” (see also this NY Times article about its findings) supports what many others have found: the overall pattern of choice (public and charter) in NYC increases segregation and concentrates the effects of poverty in zoned schools that would otherwise be less segregated had parents enrolled in them.

The “Diverse by Design Charter Schools” report was followed up with separate studies on four individual “diverse by design” charter schools and/or networks.  The study of Citizens of the World Charter Schools (CWC), was truly rankling. My community’s experience with CWC bears witness to the gross inaccuracies of the Century Foundation’s report and the hazards of believing in the claims of charter schools, rather than listening to on-the-ground voices and other research that may contradict the story they want to tell.

The author of the report, Haley Potter, relates how CWC charter network staff, headquartered in Los Angeles, “began meeting with a group of parents in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn,” but the truth is a lot more complex.  In Williamsburg and Greenpoint, gentrification was gradually desegregating our schools, but instead, charter school carpetbaggers attempted to exploit some of the fears of white parents moving into an area with public schools composed of mostly Black and Hispanic students.

In early 2011, Eric Grannis, husband of Success Academy Charter School’s CEO Eva Moskowitz, ran a real estate website called “School Fisher,” which described itself as helping “parents find great schools in affordable neighborhoods.”  He began soliciting advertising from landlords and developers, and said, "Anyone who has something for sale or rent in the zone of one of these schools is our target.” Real estate brokers are prohibited by the Fair Housing act from explicitly steering clients to certain neighborhoods based on their schools:

Discussions about schools can raise questions about steering if there is a correlation between the quality of the schools and neighborhood racial composition--or if characterizations such as “a school with low test scores” or “a community with declining schools” become code words for racial or other differences in the community. Similarly, making unspoken distinctions by promoting a school in one district while keeping silent about the quality of another school can have the same effect. These become fair housing issues.

Yet brokers could advise clients to refer to Grannis' website for the same purpose. When someone plugged in rental figures, certain neighborhoods and local schools would pop up with school grades, based on their test scores.  Rather than controlling for the background of the student, as the DOE school grades attempted to do, the grades were solely determined by the raw test scores, which would tend to steer parents to schools with white or Asian students and wealthier socio-economic backgrounds.  Grannis explained the system on Fox News.
His website also had a special page promoting charter schools , including his wife's Harlem Success Academy charter,  calling it  an "incredible school", and Girls Prep charter, on whose board he sits, without disclosing his personal connection to either. (The site went defunct sometime between March 2012 and June 2013 according to the Wayback Machine.)

Grannis also formed an organization called Tapestry Project, to bring more charter schools into NYC.  He began posting on a local neighborhood listserv for Williamsburg parents of young children, inviting them to be a part of an opportunity to create a “progressive” new public school. He brought in CWC network staff, who met with families in baby boutiques, yoga studios, and in new luxury condominiums along the waterfront.  The announcements for these meetings were made on a private listserv.  If you weren't part of a particular network of parents, you would never know about them. That’s how it started.

Grannis himself lived in the Upper West Side of Manhattan and had never visited any of our schools to assess whether we needed a new one. We already had several neighborhood “Blue Ribbon” public schools, some of the best in New York City, that were slowly becoming more integrated, as white families were moving in.  Still, most of our schools were under-enrolled because there had been a sharp decline of about 3,000 in the number of children under the age of five between 2000 and 2010.

CWC claimed that there was a need for their “diverse” charter model in Williamsburg because the community was majority white, and our schools didn’t reflect that. This was implied in their proposal to the SUNY charter institute, one of the two charter authorizers in New York state.  Their proposal included a graphic showing that the neighborhood was 55% white, though the schools were only 8% white, and then added: "We hope to offer families a public school option in CSD 14 that more closely mirrors their neighborhood composition."

While it is true that our schools are less white than the overall population of Williamsburg, this was due to two factors: a large Hasidic Orthodox Jewish community that isn’t interested in enrolling their children in public schools, and many young single “hipsters” without any kids at all.  If CWC had achieved its goal of 55% white students, this would have drawn so many white parents out of our public schools to make them even more segregated.  We also were aware that there were not enough students of any background to open two new charters without hurting enrollment and thus funding at our neighborhood public schools. It just wasn’t smart planning.

Considering that the Citizens of the World network at that point had only a single charter school in Los Angeles for one academic year, we questioned why they were trying to expand across the country so quickly.  They didn’t have any record of success to build on. And though CWC boasted of “a progressive learning model, including project-based learning, a focus on social-emotional development, and a robust arts program”, when we looked at the proposed curriculum in their charter application, our public schools were using similar programs and curriculum.  The plan for the CWC charter wasn’t any more progressive; they just had a larger marketing budget to try to convince parents that it was.

In May 2012, our parent organization, Williamsburg and Greenpoint Parents: Our Public Schools (WAGPOPS) sent a detailed letter to the SUNY board, urging them to reject the CWC application. We brought up many of the points made above.  Among the questions we asked were how important diversity could be for the charter network, if, as the packet given to new parents at their proposed Hollywood charter school at the time said:  “CWC depends on significant support from families to sustain our program of small class sizes, teachers’ assistants for every class, art, music and p.e. CWC asks all families to pledge at whatever level they can. CWC depends on an average family contribution of $1,300 a year per child recognizing that some families have the ability to give substantially more and others are not able to make a pledge of this size.”

Precious few public school families in Williamsburg at that time could have contributed anything near $1,300 a year per child to their public school.  In the end, CWC was only approved by SUNY to open one school in Williamsburg, and another one in Crown Heights, Brooklyn.  Both schools were designed to share an Executive Director and a Board of Directors. A diverse group of public school parents from across the district launched a lawsuit in January 2013, ultimately unsuccessful, to prevent SUNY from authorizing CWC. When the schools we send our children to and love are under-enrolled and underfunded, why should the state require the city to expend additional resources to open a charter school?   We also pointed out that its proposed co-location with JHS 156 and Northside Charter School would deprive the other institutions of resources and space.

In our lawsuit, we cited Education Law section 2852, which requires the charter authorizer to consider the demand for charter schools in the community when deciding whether to approve new schools, and yet SUNY had ignored how little demand there was in our district.  In fact, SUNY had completely ignored the overwhelming opposition to this charter school among public school parents, community-based organizations and all our elected officials.

We further questioned the sincerity of CWC’s interest in desegregation after we discovered their recruitment and enrollment plan. For all their talk of diversity, their internal leaked “marketing plan” identified their primary targets in Williamsburg as “Middle/Upper income/predominantly White” and in Crown Heights, “middle/upper income" parents.

We started to investigate who these CWC charter people were, and, armed with Google, we quickly found seemingly serious problems with CWC and their board. Kriste Dragon, the CEO of the Citizens of the World charter network, and Board member Chris Forman were involved in the Wonder of Reading, an organization that had been contracted to renovate public libraries in the Los Angeles public schools.  Yet Wonder of Reading hired subcontractors were found to have engaged in kickbacks, leading to huge cost overruns. It also appeared that when Wonder of Reading closed, they funneled all its money and resources into CWC. Both organizations used the same address and were run by the same executives and board members. Yet none of these problems were mentioned by Potter in the interviews with Dragon that make up the bulk of her reporting on her schools.

There were many former employees and CWC families who were concerned about questionable practices by the Board and neglect of students within their Los Angeles schools.  They sought us out, some risking violation of the non-disclosure agreements that CWC had made them sign. (Seriously. why would any school need NDAs?) We soon discovered that Dragon had planned to expand the school to targeted cities from the beginning and to become a franchise operation.  

CWC registered as a charitable corporation in California  and promised that they would  facilitate the creation and operation of  nonprofit  charter schools through planning, fundraising, academic support” and “to provide its services at no cost.“ Yet as soon as their non-profit status was granted, they quietly pushed through an exorbitant “licensing agreement” that would enable millions of dollars to flow directly into the hands of its California corporation.

Almost immediately after registering as a nonprofit, in November 2012, a leaked document shows they had specific plans to expand to expand to four districts across the country between 2012 and 2017, with four schools in each district, including NYC (with two schools listed as “public” and two as “private”, whatever that means), Nashville, Los Angeles and Washington DC.

Each planned school was listed as a “high ADA”, “marginal ADA” or “low ADA” – with the acronym presumably standing for Area Development Agreement, which is a term used for the fees paid by franchises of a commercial operation.

NYC was the one district listed as providing a “high ADA” or management fee charged per school, starting at 8% in 2013, declining to 6.5%-7% in 2016 and to 1.5% in 2017.  In contrast, the Citizens of the World CMO intended to charge their schools in Los Angeles a “Low ADA” ranging from 1.7% to 1.3%, depending on the year.  They planned to charge their four DC charter schools a “Marginal ADA” ranging from 5% to 2.5%, and their Nashville schools a “Marginal ADA” with a management fee of 5% declining to 1.5%.

In all, the corporation was projected to receive a total of about $5.6 million dollars by 2016, with more than half of these funds to be provided by NYC taxpayers. 

Why the fees would range so widely from own district to another is unclear; perhaps these were the fees they felt they could get away with from their authorizers.  What is evident from this document that NYC was projected to be the “cash cow” for the entire franchise operation, with by far the largest percent fees per student, multiplied by the greatest per student amount that NYC allocates to charter school students.

In October 2013, the Citizens of the World Charter Management Organization subsequently raised these projected fees in NYC for year five in their licensing agreement with the schools’ local  boards. Instead of charging fees of only 1.5% of revenue in year five, the fees would remain at 5.5% per student, for a total of nearly three million dollars flowing from their NYC franchises over five years alone.  

How did they get away charging such exorbitant fees?  Perhaps a clue is the fact that Hillary Johnson, the “Founding Chief Learning Officer / Chief Academic Officer” of the CMO, had previously worked as a consultant for the SUNY Charter Institute, their authorizer in New York”, according to her Linked in profile.  (After leaving the CMO in 2016, Johnson continues to work for SUNY CSI as a consultant, evaluating schools for their charter renewal recommendations and reports.)

In short, the CWC push for establishing schools in New York City seems less about encouraging diversity, and more about amassing revenue that would accrue to their network. By July 2013, we had discovered enough incriminating information on CWC that Congresswoman Nydia Velazquez sent a request to the IRS to investigate their finances.  

When their charter schools did open in NYC, they had trouble attracting enough parents.  Most students who attended their Williamsburg charter school lived outside the district, with the city, again, paying the bill for their busing. The schools’ under enrollment put CWC on probation with SUNY, with a deadline for improvement that was continually pushed back.  Yet they continued recruiting without telling any of the parents that they were at risk of closure.

In 2014-2015 school year, CWC Williamsburg suspended 5% of their students, more than twice as high as the district average, and CWC Crown Heights suspended 10% of their students, five times as high as the district average, according to figures compiled by the United University Professions from state data. Note that these two charters schools only had enrolled K-2^nd grade students at that time.

As Potter relates, CWC was able to open another charter school in Kansas City in the fall of 2016.  In  March 2017, they also applied to open a charter school in DC.  A few months later, in June 2017, the DC Public Charter School Board rejected their application, explaining  that the network’s “growth plan” was excessively “aggressive,” there was “inadequate support from the school management organization,” no “history of strong academic results with student populations … in NY and Kansas City,” and no “consistency in instructional approaches and implementation of the CWCS 'diversity by design' model."  The Board also found that CWC had an inability to articulate the “non-academic benefits of this model.

The DC charter board recommended that before re-applying, Citizens of the World  should have “demonstrated indicators of improvement in CWC New York and success in CWC Kansas City.”  Even more critically, the board wrote:

DC PCSB also had concerns about CWC DC’s governance structure. Based on the proposed governance structure, CWCS, CWCDC’s management organization and sole member, would have significant power over the local school that does not strike the right balance between local board authority and necessary control by the school management organization to ensure fidelity to the model. After submitting the application, CWCDC agreed to certain revisions to its governance structure that would afford more power to the CWCDC board. Had DC PCSB approved CWCDC’s application, such approval would have been conditioned on CWCDC agreeing to these and other revisions to its governance structure.

Finally, in December 2017, five years after opening their doors in NYC, CWC was told by their authorizer, the SUNY Charter Institute, that they would not recommend the renewal of their NYC schools.  CWC decided not to fight SUNY’s recommendation. Let’s be clear: CWC New York schools did not “decide to withdraw their charter renewal application,” as Potter puts it, out of generosity to the parents or the children they promised to serve. Their schools were forced to close. Despite all the promises that CWC would be a superior school, based on their “model” leadership, skills, and supposedly progressive curriculum, test scores at both New York City schools were abysmal.

According to Potter, Kriste Dragon claimed the poor results were because their NYC local staff “did not fully implement the CWC model, in large part because they struggled to hire teachers and leaders with experience in project-based learning.” Yet what were those millions of dollars in licensing fees meant to accomplish, if the fault of the schools’ dismal performance lay with an inexperienced NYC school staff?

Potter glosses over the “sobering” experience of the CWC experiment in New York, claiming that “network leaders learned from that challenging experience and have shown a promising start to their second attempt at expansion, in Kansas City, Missouri.”

What Potter doesn’t mention is that their Kansas City charter school was started with the help of a cool million dollars donated by the Walton Family Foundation, which also helped paid for the Century Foundation report.  Neither does she report that one of the main reasons the Citizens of the World application for a charter school in DC was rejected was because of the inconsistent implementation of its “diverse by design” model, and the questionable relationship between the proposed DC charter school and the charter management organization, headquartered in Los Angeles.

In the wake of their failed NYC experiment, hundreds of Citizens of the World students had their lives disrupted, and millions of city tax dollars were funneled out of our neighborhood public schools into their California organization.  Unless someone stops them, more CWC charter schools will likely open throughout the country, with the story of their NYC experiments hidden from view, just as our community’s voice was ignored when we correctly warned that these schools would fail our children, while allowing the CMO to financially profit from them. Instead, this Century Foundation puff piece will be used to promote the network’s further expansion.

In a related report by the Century Foundation, “The Good Kind of School Choice: When Public Schools Integrate by Race and Class,” Richard Kahlenberg refers to the “good” charters that seek to end segregation through “a commitment to school integration by race and socioeconomic status.” Kahlenberg claims that these “diverse-by-design” charters demonstrate “small but important efforts are sprouting to show that it is possible to create integrated environments in public schools that provide what the authors of Brown (of Brown v. Board of Education) called “the very foundation of good citizenship.”

In other words, CWC, along with other examples that Potter and Quick profile, are “good” charters. I have to doubt their judgement about the other “good” charters if they consider CWC one of them.  I’m also concerned that if the Century Foundation is truly a “progressive, nonpartisan think tank that seeks to foster opportunity, reduce inequality, and promote security at home and abroad,” as they advertise themselves, why do they insist on promoting the privatization of education. There may be a small number of “good” privatized prisons, but one example doesn’t justify the existence of the rest. After all, as many of the parents of CWC New York charter schools have learned, a “good” charter school may be merely a matter of marketing and hype.