Council Education chair Rita Joseph and her colleagues urge Legislature -- don't raise the charter cap!

See letter below from Council Education Chair Rita Joseph and nine of her colleagues on the Council Education Committee, urging the leaders of the Legislature not to succumb to pressure from Governor  Hochul and the charter lobby to raise the cap on charters.  Below that is a press release with quotes from many education advocacy groups, including Class Size Matters.

Meanwhile, it has been revealed that charter-loving billionaire and former NYC Mayor Mike Bloomberg has secretly been spending millions backing a new shadowy organization called "American Opportunity," run out of the Democratic Governor's Association, that is buying deceptive TV ads and sending mailers, urging people to contact their legislators to accept Hochul's budget, without mentioning the word "charter" since it might scare away those he is trying to lure into her camp.

Hochul and the charter lobby are pushing this proposal despite the fact that their enrollment is falling.  More than half of all NYC charter schools lost enrollment over the past three years, not including charters that opened or closed during that time; and 45%  lost enrollment this year, including the most aggressively expansionist Success Academy, down 7.7% despite spending over $13 million per year on marketing and recruitment.  

Success Academy is so desperate to recruit more students that according to an eyewitness account, they have hired people to hang out in playgrounds to hand out flyers and beg parents to enroll their children in their schools. 

We have a briefing on the history of the charter cap and why it should not be lifted; you can also send a message to your legislators here.

Charter cap raised: more overcrowding ahead!

Legislation to raise the statewide charter school cap from 200 to 460 was approved on Friday; with 114 more charters planned for NYC.

The bill passed 93 to 42 in the Assembly; the only NYC votes opposed were AMs Inez Barron and Jeffrey Dinowitz of the Bronx; Deborah Glick of Manhattan; and Alan Maisel, Felix Ortiz, and Annette Robinson of Brooklyn. In the Senate, it passed 45 to 15; the only NYC Senators who voted no were Marty Golden of Brooklyn and Frank Padavan of Queens.

There are some good things in the bill; including barring profit-making operations from running charters; allowing audits by the state comptroller; mandating that that all schools, including charters, have parent associations; and requiring that charters demonstrate efforts to recruit and retain special needs children and English Language Learners.

But, and this is a big but, the Chancellor will continue to be able to unilaterally decide where to locate charter schools, including in district school buildings, with parents being denied any voice on these critical decisions.

Expect even more overcrowding; the continued loss of student access to libraries, gyms, art rooms, and intervention spaces; and the continuation of bitter battles that have already divided too many communities.

(More on this at GothamSchools, Times, WSJ, and Daily News)

Last night, State Senate voted to continue to keep profit in public education, 45-15

Last night, the NY State Senate approved the expansion of the charter school cap last night by a vote of 45 to 15, without any of the necessary accountability and transparency provisions and without protection of parent and student rights. Check out how your Senator voted here.

As the NY Post reported this morning, “Privately, they [the Senators] conceded that passing the measure was an attempt to derail a threatened big-ticket political campaign against them by Mayor Bloomberg and other prominent charter-school supporters that could cost them their razor-thin majority in the November elections.“

As the Daily News reported, “charter school advocates… have threatened to spend $10 million to unseat opponents.”

Now only the Assembly and Speaker Silver are standing in the way of this unprecedented move to privatize our public school system and force more charters into our already overcrowded school buildings. On Monday, Assemblymember Karim Camera of Brooklyn introduced an identical bill in the Assembly.

Sign our petition now, to send a message your elected leaders that they need to stand up for the rights of public school parents, children and taxpayers, rather than the charter school lobby and the hedge-fund managers who appear to have determined the outcome in the Senate.

As of this morning, after less than two days, our petition already has more than 800 signatures, but it needs even more if we are going to get across our message strongly enough to rival the millions that the charter school lobby is willing to spend to achieve their goal of putting more profit and unregulated greed into the running of our schools. The petition is posted here.

Political pull by charter school operator exposed

Some parents have asked me why I am involving myself in such a controversial issue as charter schools, seemingly unrelated to class size. But I don’t think it is.

District public schools that have a higher concentration of high-needs students are losing classrooms, libraries and intervention spaces to charter schools, which is neither equitable or good policy.

This is especially damaging, given the fact that only three out of 13 district schools slated to lose space next year to charters have reached their mandated class size reduction targets. For more on this see here, my comments on the charter co-locations that were voted on by the PEP last night.

Yesterday, on Good Day NY, when asked why the Chancellor seems biased towards charters, I said I didn’t really know, but that I suspected that many of the charter school operators are receiving preferential treatment because of their political connections.

A perfect example is revealed in today’s column in the Daily News by Juan Gonzalez, and in the emails he FOILed between Eva Moskowitz and Chancellor Klein.

Not only did the Chancellor intercede repeatedly with his own staff to get her chain of charter schools more space, when she had already received more than the formula would allow, helped her recruit parents for her schools by giving her access to their names and addresses, and also appeared at numerous fundraisers and helped her raise a million dollars from the Broad foundation, explaining how politically useful she was in organizing thousands of charter school parents to support Bloomberg, the continuation of mayoral control and raising of the charter school cap.

As Klein wrote to Dan Katzir of the Broad Foundation, “she’s done more to organize parents and get them aligned with what our reforms than anyone else on the outside.”

In her emails, Moskowitz repeatedly refers to her “army of parents” and many of them were indeed at attendance last night in the PEP meeting, along with their kids, cheering and chanting in support of their expansion into district buildings – all of which were approved, except for one.

Click on the email above, and check out the others on the Daily news website here. You'll be amazed.

You can also check out my appearance on Democracy Now .

Senator Craig Johnson, charter school supporter -- that is for NYC, not his constituents!

Excerpt from today's NY Post oped by Sen. Craig Johnson, Democrat from Port Washington LI, who broke ranks with his party by supporting the Governor's bill that would raise the cap charter schools statewide with no input allowed from parents about where they would be placed:

“While there are no charters in the district I represent, I'm not blind to good they've done elsewhere.”

Is he also blind to the destruction they have caused here in New York City, where the charter school wars divide parent from parent and are undermining the strength and stability of our public schools?

Lucky for his constituents that they don’t have to deal with charter schools invading the school buildings that their kids attend; I wonder how they would feel about legislation that denied the parents of Port Washington the right to have any input into these sitings – as did the bill which Johnson supported.

Here is Johnson’s email: johnson@senate.state.ny.us

Here are the name and addresses of Port Washington's school board -- which here in NYC, we also don't have the right to elect. Instead our school board is controlled by the mayor. Feel free to copy them and let them know how you feel.

While you're at it, let Governor Paterson know how you feel about his bill that refused to let parents have any input into unchecked charter school expansion.

Charter school expansion without parent input blocked

Yesterday, the NY State Legislature refused to pass the governor’s proposed doubling of the charter school cap, without including a condition that no charter school could be forced into a school building without the approval of parents whose children already attend school in the building. The mayor and the charter school lobby refused to accept this condition, so the charter school expansion was not approved.

This expansion was proposed, not so that public education in this city would be improved, but so that NY State's chance for federal "Race to the Top" funding might be enhanced. (For our earlier coverage of the flaws of the Race to the Top, including how it ignores the findings of research and the priorities of parents, see here , here and here.)

As Speaker Silver said, “Unfortunately, Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein were willing to sacrifice the creation of 200 more charter schools rather than accept any limitation on their unchecked power to ignore the voices of parents and displace traditional public schools from existing classroom space.”

Thanks to all of you who called your legislators; NYC parents won a big one yesterday!

Juan Gonzalez writes about why having parent input in charter school sitings is so important, in today’s Daily News. In case you’re keeping track, the only Democratic State Senators who signed onto the governor’s bill for charter school expansion with no parent input allowed were Ruben Diaz Sr. of the Bronx and Craig Johnson from Long Island.

For more on what happened yesterday, see Gotham Schools and Times.

Contact your legislator today about raising the cap on charter schools!

In the next few days, the NY State Legislature will vote whether to raise or eliminate the cap on charter schools. A recent study from the UFT found that charter schools enroll fewer immigrant, ELL, special education and poor students than the citywide average, and much fewer needy students than the districts in which they are located.

Charter schools also tend to have more resources and provide smaller classes than our regular public schools, because they are allowed to cap enrollment and class size at any level they want. Here is an oped from today’s News by Diane Ravitch that explores these issues.

Currently, 70% of the 99 NYC charter schools are located inside of DOE buildings, sharing space and sometimes squeezing space from our regular public schools. Many more are supposed to be co-located or expanded in public school buildings next year. This is leading to an inequitable and unsustainable crisis in this city.

Whether you support the creation of more charter schools or not, I hope you agree that all NYC children deserve the smaller classes that the state’s highest court said were necessary if there were to receive their constitutional right to an adequate education.

Currently, charter schools are approved in Albany with no thought of where they will go – often with deleterious effects on our regular public schools, where enrollment is rapidly rising, and class sizes are increasing at an unprecedented rate.

Please call your legislators today – and urge them to:

1- require that any new charter school must specify in advance the facility in which it will be located before it is approved;

2- ensure that a charter school cannot be placed in any building where at full scale, it will prevent the existing schools in the building from reducing class size to the mandated city goals of no more than 20 per class in grades K-3, 23 students per class in 4-8 and 25 in high school.

Click here to find the name and/or contact no. of your Assemblymember and State Senator. Calls are best, then faxes, and finally emails.

Also, please remember to come to our emergency citywide conference on Saturday on school closings and charter school sitings.

When: Saturday, Jan. 16, 2010 from 9:30 a.m. - 1:00 p.m.

Where: School of the Future, 127 East 22nd Street, NYC. (take the #6 to 23 St.)

A flyer you can post or distribute in your school is here.