CHARTER SCHOOLS ROCK Mike Effin Johnson I wanted the entire Success Academy family to see this powerful story in todays Daily News. You made your voices heard!!! ---------------------------------------------------------------- A lesson in political shenanigans Charter kids come to Albany, and learn about the politicians who dont care much about their success Errol Louis MARCH 6, 2014, 4:00 AM Politicians opposed to charter schools made a great show of outrage over the fact that thousands of charter school students traveled to Albany this week to plead for a cease-fire in the war on their future. One accusation, voiced by City Councilman Danny Dromm, who chairs that body’s education committee, is that the trip was purely political, with no educational value. I beg to differ. The kids in extraordinarily high-performing schools — who worked extra hard, learned everything put in front of them and grinded out high test scores to prove it — are getting a rich lesson in how the city actually works. And they also have the chance to learn some splendid vocabulary words. One of them: disingenuous. I’ll use it in a sentence. The politicians and union officials who are attacking charters are profoundly disingenuous. That’s because the pols, amply funded by the United Federation of Teachers, stare at the cameras and claim, with great conviction, “I’m not against charter schools” — then go on to explain their concerns and objections. Those objections, on closer examination, add up to a steadfast opposition to giving charters any space, anywhere. The problem, the critics say, is that there isn’t enough classroom space to accommodate the charters. The fact that Mayor de Blasio recently stripped more than $200 million from the capital budget that would have been used to build additional space for charter classes, say the crocodile-tears crowd, isn’t an attack on charters. In fact, there’s plenty of space to accommodate charters — and even more room to learn from their achievements, if only our leaders would have the guts to do so. Look closely at the spectacular performance of Success Academy schools — and the almost deranged attacks leveled at them and Eva Moskowitz, their founder and CEO,. Moskowitz, the daughter of two university professors, holds a Ph.D. and taught at a number of universities before starting the Success Academies, which currently enroll just under 7,000 students. Success students are in class 35 hours a week, compared with 27-1/2 in traditional schools. That isn’t sorcery: Experimentation outside of what’s normal is the whole point of charters. Building on an idea first floated by, among others, former UFT President Albert Shanker, charters experiment with different approaches to see what works. In this case, Moskowitz’s 27% longer school days quickly add up to more than one extra day of learning every week, and several additional days each month. Over the course of a K-12 career, that translates into more than three years of additional schooling for Success Academy students. That’s only talking about the amount of time spent learning — not the quality of instruction, which also sets Success Academy Schools apart from many other schools. Not surprisingly, this all translates into remarkable differences in student achievement. The fifth graders in one Success Academy Harlem middle school hit higher standardized math scores than any other school in New York State, coming in well above the average for New York City. Those results make anti-charter people apoplectic (there’s another vocabulary word, kids!). They accuse Success of secretly steering special-education students, kids new to the English language and other tough-to-teach pupils out of the schools. Moskowitz, they say, is cherry-picking top scholars — as if the 27% more classroom time has nothing to do with it. Last week, the de Blasio administration told the approximately 200 kids in the top-scoring middle school that they can no longer move into the school building they were supposed to inhabit next fall. Where will they go? Not de Blasio’s problem. Neither the mayor nor the members of his anti-charter Amen corner have explained how screwing up the lives of these 200 remarkable Harlem scholars and their families will help a single other kid in our city learn better or faster. I was born in Harlem to parents who were Harlemites, and knew how bad the schools were, because they’d been badly shortchanged in the 1940s and ’50s. So my folks first sent me and my three sisters to Annunciation parochial school, and eventually moved us out of the city to a suburban public district. More than 40 years later, parents face the same crummy choices. The main difference is that the city administration is now actively and publicly trying to block a proven path out of educational mediocrity. If New York went back to the original vision of charters, the Department of Education would compile a list of the most promising innovations pioneered by Success Academies and other great schools — ideas like expanding the school day, week and year. Then we’d have a citywide discussion of which changes we need to make, instead of the embarrassing spectacle of children begging their government to let them learn. Louis is political anchor at NY1 News
Posted on: Thu, 06 Mar 2014 21:32:29 +0000
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