What the Chancellor said on class size and raising the charter cap; & Mayor proposes to cut school budgets next year once again

 1. Last week, state education budget hearings were held, where many groups, advocates and organizations inveighed against the Governor's proposal to expand the cap on charter schools. Chancellor Banks also testified and was non-committal, saying it was up to the Mayor weigh in, But under questioning from Sen. Liz Krueger, he admitted that the city’s Office of Management budget had estimated the cost to the DOE of raising the cap was $1.3 billion - though he didn't mention how it could also deprive our public schools of the space needed to lower class size.

When questioned by Sen. John Liu, however, about the new class size reduction law, Banks complained that this would cost the DOE about a billion dollars. Liu pointed out that the DOE was receiving more than this amount from the state a result of the settlement of the Campaign for Fiscal Equity case, so that it was hardly an unfunded mandate.

The Chancellor admitted that it would be difficult to meet the class size goals starting year three of the five-year phase in. He said that he would form a working group to help develop a class size reduction plan, something we’ve long proposed. Hopefully this group will include some of the many advocates, parents, and elected officials who have pushed for smaller classes, rather than the handful who opposed it.

2. I also submitted testimony, pointing out the many ways in which the DOE has undercut its ability to meet the benchmarks in the law, by cutting school funding, slashing the capital plan, and refusing to lessen enrollment in our most overcrowded schools. Contrary to the claims of the DOE, the Mayor's preliminary budget for next year would reduce school budgets once again – if not as radically as this year. Yet NYC schools should be receiving more funds, not less, to help them lower class size and restore services, especially as DOE is due to receive $568 million in additional CFE funds, and the IBO projects NYC will end fiscal year 2023 with an $4.9B surplus.

As for increasing the number of charter schools, you can join our email campaign urging your legislators to reject the proposal, or pass a resolution here.   I’ll be presenting the charter issue to CEC 15 tomorrow Thursday at 6:30 PM, and you can watch by logging into Zoom here.   If you’d like a similar presentation for your organization, please let me know.

thanks, Leonie

Call to Action! Keep the cap on charters!

 The Education Council Consortium (ECC) invites all stakeholders to make a Charter Cap Call to Action. Please find more information in a letter from the ECC to the community, below: 

Dear fellow advocates of public education and concerned families,

We need your help. We advocated hard for a cap on the number of charter schools that could operate in New York City, and we won—but now, the charter school industry is lobbying hard to remove that cap. Even though they could easily open charter schools in other parts of the state, and even though NYC has over 80% of the state’s charters, they still want more in NYC. StudentsFirst, a pro-charter political lobbying organization formed by Michelle Rhee to pass state laws facilitating charter school expansion, has released results from their poll claiming NYC Democrats want more charters. Parent advocates don’t have lobbyists or market research firms to game the system, but we have our voices and our elected representatives. 

Phone Banking

Please reach out to 10 or more friends—SLT and PTA members, grandparents, really anyone you know, and ask them to call or write their state legislators. We are aiming to have 50 calls made in each community school district, surpassing 1,500 calls.

The Charter Committee will hold a virtual phone bank on TONIGHT, Thursday, May 27th at 7pm. Please register in advance for this event. 

Letter Writing 

You can also send a letter to your elected officials here. The letter writing site has a sample letter and it will look up your legislators, so that all you have to do is sign your name! Please do it today and share with others.

Merryl Tisch, the State Education Dept and their epic fail when it comes to charter expansion

Merryl Tisch, chancellor of the Regents, has proclaimed in recent days that she believes in expansion of charter schools. On a Nov. 16 radio show, she said: “I personally am a great believer in charter schools ... I believe in opening them aggressively…I’d like to push more charter schools.”  She added that rather than support the Mayor’s preference for improving struggling schools rather than shutting them down, ”If we do not see movement on these schools, these lowest-performing schools, in terms of their ability to retool their workforce, by the spring, we will move to close them.”

The most recent Quinnipiac poll from November 19 revealed that 48 percent of NYC voters believe that the Mayor should freeze or reduce the number of charter schools in NYC, while only 43 percent think that the number should be increased  – despite millions spent by the deep-pocketed charter lobby on marketing and television ad campaigns. Fifty percent of voters believe charters should pay rent if housed in a public school vs. 41 percent who oppose this.  Sadly, both the authority to decide whether charter schools should expand and whether they should pay rent have been taken out of the Mayor’s hands, as the power to determine the number of charters rests with the Governor and the state Legislature. 

Moreover, the Governor already pushed through a new law last spring which obligated NYC to provide free space or pay their rent in private space for any new or expanding charter going forward – the only district in the state saddled with this burden, where we already suffer from the most overcrowded public schools and the highest real estate costs.  And now Cuomo, Tisch and their Wall St. buddies are working hard to raise the cap – especially in NYC, where we already have 197 charters, with 31 approved to open over the next two years, and 28 remaining under the cap. We are already paying $1.3 billion per year for these privately managed schools – and will likely be spending hundreds of millions of dollars more for their rent.  

On a subsequent radio show, Tisch said that the remaining open slots in the rest of the state should be shifted to NYC “where we are eager to have them.”  (See this radio interview, at about 32 minutes in. )  One wonders who is the “we” referred to here.  Is it the royal we, or does we mean the Wall St. pro-charter crowd with whom she socializes?  Clearly, it does not mean NYC voters or public school parents. 

 

Last spring, the hedge fund/charter lobby spent $5.95 million on ads to pressure the Mayor and the legislature to give free space to charters.  This fall, they spent another $4 million on TV ads to elect a Republican majority in the State Senate that would support raising the cap, without ever mentioning the word “charter schools” in their ads – because those words don’t go down so well in the swing districts of the candidates whose campaigns they were supporting. 

Today, there are only 51 charter schools in the rest of the state, and more than 100 slots remain under the cap outside NYC.  Suburban districts have mostly managed to resist the charter onslaught, but not here in NYC where the wealthy oligarchs have more influence with the Regents and the SUNY board than the hundreds of public school parents who appear at hearings in opposition. 

Last week, apparently as part of Tisch’s “aggressive” stance towards expanding charters, the Regents approved a Rochester charter school founded by 22 year old “Dr.” Ted Morris Jr., who lied about his resume, claiming he had degrees from a high school, college and even graduate schools that he had not attended and/or graduated from.  The State Education Department and the Regents did not do even the most minimal fact checking, as Morris’ resume in his charter application did not match his Linked-in profile, nor did it align with earlier charter applications he had submitted to NYSED, starting at the age of 18.  After his lies were discovered, “Dr.” Ted Morris resigned from the charter, but Tisch said that the school would be opened anyway, with a board recruited from Craig’s List. Subsequently, the approval was withdrawn, but only after bloggers and the media did the minimal research that NYSED had failed to fulfill in the first place.

At the same meeting, the Regents approved the Harlem charter application of Dr. Steve Perry, who runs a magnet school in Connecticut, even though his school enrolls far fewer poor students , those with disabilities, and English Language Learners than the other high schools in Hartford.  Perry is a controversial figure who has compared teachers to cockroaches and his bullying of parents led the Hartford Board of Education  president to call for an investigation against him. Now Jonathan Pelto has called for a new investigation – this time, into the fact that Perry admitted using Hartford district employees to prepare his charter application and to develop the educational programs to be implemented at his Harlem charter school.

Also at the same Regents meeting, NYSED released college-going statistics for districts and schools that were shown to be wildly inaccurate by Superintendents and principals throughout the state. 

A recent report, summarizing the audits of NY charter schools, concluded that millions of dollars have been wasted and/or improperly spent  by them, and there was “probable financial mismanagement in 95% of schools examined. “ Another just-released report from the National Association of Charter School Authorizers found that NY is the 18th lowest out of 21 states for strong charter accountability laws.

Four years after the previous NY charter law was amended, that barred any charter school from being re-authorized or allowed to expand or replicate that has not enrolled equal numbers of at-risk students as the public schools in their communities, the state has failed to release any data that would allow one to assess their student attrition rates.   We know from the data that does exist that the student cohorts at many NYC charter schools, including Success Academy, lose many students along the way.  According to  Peter Goodman,

In the spring of 2013 a number of regent members asked the commissioner for a report on attrition: were the charter schools dumping low achieving and discipline problems especially before the state tests – a year and half later – no report.

Clearly, NYSED and the Regents have failed to be responsible for the charters that they have already authorized, have proven themselves incapable of performing minimal due diligence in authorizing new charters, and are certainly unable to provide proper oversight for the additional numbers of charter schools that Tisch wants to so “aggressively” expand.   It is time that the State Education Department and Chancellor Tisch stop recklessly throwing away taxpayer money in their campaign to privatize our public schools.  One has to wonder where the accountability is for them.

Tsunami of pro-charter opinion in the dailies

Before the state raised its cap on charter schools last month, New Yorkers were inundated with a flood of TV, radio and internet ads from the hedge-fund privateers: Democrats for Education Reform and Education Reform Now, both groups trying to disguise themselves as parents, educators and community members.

We were also overwhelmed by a tsunami of editorials and opeds from the newspapers, all in unison purveying the same flawed statistics and arguments, trying to bully the Legislature into submission.

I had my intern, Ann Fudjinski, count all the editorials and opeds in the NY Post, the Daily News, the NY Times and the Wall Street Journal between March 1 and May 29, when the final vote on the cap occurred.

The resulting tally (in excel) is quite astonishing.

In the NY Post, there were 21 separate editorials and 21 opeds for raising the cap in less than three months; sometimes several on one day. Nine were written by charter school authorizers, operators or paid lobbyists. (And this doesn't count the obviously slanted coverage of some of the reporters.)

In the Daily News, there were 25 editorials and opeds, for raising the cap; with only one leaning against (by Andrew Wolf). Eleven were opeds; three by a regular columnist (Errol Louis) and five by charter authorizers, operators, or paid representatives of the charter industry.

The volume was decidedly smaller in the NY Times and Wall St. Journal, but similarly one-sided. One pro-charter editorial and one pro-charter oped appeared in the Times; and one pro-charter editorial and two pro-charter opeds in the WSJ. In all, 99 percent of the editorials, opinion columns and opeds were in favor of charter schools.

Traditionally, opeds are supposed to provide balance to offset the views expressed by the editors and/or the regular columnists.

I emailed the oped editor of the NY Post, Adam Brodsky, to ask him why their coverage was so overwhelmingly lop-sided, but got no reply.

I did get a response from Josh Greenman, the oped editor of the Daily News, who wrote me that balance was less important than the "strength of argument, timeliness, vibrancy, newsworthiness and value added to an important debate."

Which begs the question why the only pieces he thought were sufficiently vibrant, newsworthy and valuable to the debate were those that agreed with the frequently reiterated positions of the Daily News editors.

Gotham Schools: Why the charter cap bill should not become law

Reportedly, Speaker Silver, the teachers union and Howard Wolfson, the mayor's political operative are right now negotiating the charter school cap.

Where are the parents? Nowheresville as usual.

But we're not keeping quiet.

Mona Davids of the NY Charter Parents Association and I published a piece in Gotham Schools today, exposing the lies and disinformation of the charter school lobby, Why the Charter Cap Bill Should Not Become Law:

As parents and advocates, we are convinced that the bill being promoted by the charter school lobby to raise the cap on charter schools would seriously harm the city’s children who attend both district and charter schools.

Check it out!

More impotent advisory councils in exchange for lifting the charter cap?

According to a NY Post article, Pact to boost charter cap closer, the state, city and teacher union are negotiating to lift the cap on charters.

Rather than granting parents a real voice on whether charter schools should be co-located in public school spaces, by giving this authority to parents at the existing school and/or Community Education Councils, instead the proposal is to create "an advisory council that would assess the impact of sharing space with traditional public schools. But the task force would not have the power to block a charter school from moving into a building. "

How many advisory councils do we already have? 32 CECs and the Citywide Council on High Schools.

How many times has the Bloomberg administration listened to their "advice"? Never.

How many more impotent "advisory councils" do we need in this city? Zero.

Vote No! to raising the cap on charter schools

A new bill was introduced in the State Senate on Friday, April 30, which would more than double the number of charter schools, without allowing audits by the State Comptroller, without giving any voice to parents on controversial co-locations, and without barring profit-making enterprises from making money off our kids. This is an open invitation to abuse and fraud and to the further overcrowding of our public school system.

Without more rigorous protections of the rights of all parents, students, and taxpayers, financial corruption and abuse of power will continue to flourish, and the education of our NYC children will suffer grievously as a result.

Please sign our petition now, urging the state legislature to Vote No on bill number S7678. The website will automatically send a message to your legislators, and allows you to make any additional points about the numerous inadequacies of this bill, the full text of which is posted here.

Many parents have reported getting calls over the weekend from representatives of the charter school industry, asking to connect you to legislators so you can express your support for the bill, and saying that if it passed, this would allow NY State to get $700 million in extra federal education funds.

Please be aware that if NY State did get this federal funding, which is not guaranteed, the state would have to use it for specific purposes outlined in the grant, many of them quite questionable, and that it could not be used to plug holes in the education budget, either to prevent increases in class size or the loss of valuable programs.

Please sign our petition now! And if you have a moment, also call your legislators today or tomorrow to doubly make your voices heard. Their contact info is available when you plug in your address here.