Subject: [SocialistWorker.org] The charter school invasion of Harlem
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http://socialistworker.org/2009/09/14/charter-school-invasion-of-harlem
Analysis: Emily Giles and Bill Linville
======== THE CHARTER SCHOOL INVASION OF HARLEM ===============================
New York City teachers Emily Giles and Bill Linville describe how the drive
to spread charter schools affected one public school in Harlem--and how
teachers, parents and the community are organizing an opposition.
September 14, 2009 | Issue 706
P.S. 123 is one of New York City's "well developed" schools, according to
Department of Education (DOE) standards.
Also called the Mahalia Jackson Elementary School, it was so successful that
the DOE approved a proposal to add 7th grade classes for the 2009-2010 school
year--and according to a teacher at P.S. 123, more than 600 students applied.
But P.S. 123 doesn't have the space to accommodate those students. Teachers
at the school are dismayed at the loss of two science labs, the United
Federation of Teachers (UFT) lounge, a parent room with computers for parent
GED prep classes, half the library and the social studies room.
As a matter of fact, the "well developed" P.S. 123 lost an entire floor for
this school year. Strangely enough, as the school was given DOE approval to
grow, the very same DOE took away classrooms and program space.
That space was given to a charter school called the Harlem Success Academy II
(HSA II), the second such academy founded by former City Councilwoman Eva
Moskowitz, opened inside the P.S. 123 building one year ago.
Initially, HSA II was scheduled to move this school year to P.S. 194, another
public school in the area that already houses a different charter school. But
after a pushback from P.S. 194 teachers and parents, HSA II remains inside
P.S. 123.
And not only is it staying--it's growing.
Like P.S. 123, HSA II submitted a proposal to add new grades and increase
enrollment this year. Both schools were given permission to add classes, but
HSA II gained space while P.S. 123 is losing it.
Thus, according to a P.S. 123 teacher, HSA II now has two science labs for
1st graders and Kindergarten students, while P.S. 123 science teachers are
sharing one science lab for elementary and middle school science classes. And
keep in mind, the teacher emphasized, that P.S. 123, and not HSA II, teaches
science for /grades that face high-stakes standardized tests/.
What's most alarming about the P.S. 123 story is that it isn't unique. The
same pattern of new charter schools moving into community public schools is
happening across Harlem, where the charter school invasion is at its
fiercest, and now across the city, where two dozen new charter schools opened
across the city, and more are on the way.
What is unique about P.S. 123, however, is the way that teachers stood up to
the activities of Eva Moskowitz and HSA--a struggle that gained momentum this
summer and will continue into the new school year as HSA II continues to
operate inside P.S. 123.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
MOSKOWITZ MADE the first move at the beginning of this summer. She hired
private movers to come into P.S. 123 classrooms, pack up teachers' belongings
and put them in the gymnasium, so HSA II could begin its takeover--all
without even notifying P.S. 123 staff.
The movers came in and attempted to break into teachers' rooms, but many
teachers stood their ground. "I told the other teachers to sit in front of
their doors and don't move," one teacher said. "And don't let anybody touch
you. If anybody touches you, it's on. You're not coming and breaking and
entering with the person right there."
After New York City police and the DOE were called, the move was stopped. But
on a walk-through of the school some days later, Manhattan Borough President
Scott Stringer found "a whole lot of boxes that are unmarked--people's
supplies and resources moved into spaces of the school," he said. "No marking
of what classroom they came from, no teacher's name on the boxes. They were
basically packed up and pushed out. That's what's all over the school."
When students returned to school last week on September 9, materials were
/still/ piled up in classrooms, thanks to HSA's dump and run--and the refusal
of teachers to clean up after them. Meanwhile, say teachers, HSA II's
hallways inside the building have new lighting, remodeled bathrooms (with
potpourri!), and every classroom has brand-new air conditioners.
This arrogance provoked protests throughout the summer, and the first day of
school was no exception. Beginning at 6:30 a.m., more than two dozen
demonstrators gathered outside of the HSA II entrance to the building.
When Moscowitz showed up, she claimed to the media that the protesters were
scaring the children--and even had children up outside the building (which
they normally don't do) to make it look like the picket line was blocking
their entrance.
As parents from P.S. 123 came to drop off their children, parent leaders
gathered them together and spoke about the conditions inside the school. The
parents tried to enter the building to see for themselves, but were prevented
from doing so by the principal. Yet later in the morning, reporters from the
right-wing /New York Post/ showed up and claimed that the schools chancellor
had given them permission to enter.
After the first week of classes, some of the effects of HSA II's growth at
the expense of P.S. 123 began to emerge: a class that lost its room to HSA
was meeting in the basement, but had to be relocated after the children and
teachers were having difficulty breathing; the former library is now a
combination of several classrooms, and students and teachers have difficulty
hearing each other because there are no barriers between the classes; a
special education class with 12 students and seven adults is crowded into a
half-classroom with no closet space.
One parent told a reporter, "I feel like my child is being raped."
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
THIS SUMMER saw a flurry of protests in Harlem in response to charter school
takeovers and encroachments of public school buildings.
At P.S. 123, there were three rallies in July drawing between 30 and 50
people, among them parents, teachers and some students, along with community
members and teachers from elsewhere in the city.
William Hargraves, a P.S. 123 parent, compared the situation to injustice of
the fake separate-but-equal doctrine used to justify segregated schools under
Jim Crow in the South. "We need to have charter schools governed with the
same criteria that public schools are governed by," Hargraves said. "This is
happening all over the city."
Annette Jimenez, leader of the Parent Association at P.S. 375 in East Harlem,
said:
>We're facing the same problem. The charter school that's in our building
>started with half of one of the floors in our schools. It moved on take a
>whole floor this year and next year...It will be servicing more children
>than we are now, and it's displacing most of our kids.
>
>This is something that we need to stand up and fight now. This charter
>school system has come in to create a two-tier system for our schools and
>our students. Our children deserve the same treatment that the charter
>school students are getting. We see that their numbers aren't better than
>our numbers. We're going to continue to stand up and fight for this, and
>we're going to win.
>
On September 2, activists held a forum in Harlem called "The Truth About
Charter Schools," which was attended by more than 100 people--around half of
them parents of school kids. State Sen. Bill Perkins hosted the event, and
speakers included William Hargraves; Brian Jones of the Grassroots Education
Movement (GEM); and Akinlabi Mackall of the Coalition for Public Education.
Perkins opened up the forum by putting the issue of racism front and center.
"They say that the charter schools are the prep schools for people of color,"
Perkins said. "That tells me we have a problem. Parents are in despair over
what they don't have, and are hoping for something that is a satisfactory
improvement. They're being forced to take action because of benign neglect. I
think that's a political issue, and a civil rights issue."
Jones went through five myths about charter schools, exposing each as false.
"If the charters are doing something innovative, then why aren't we doing
that in the public schools?" he asked. "There's nothing in our union contract
that stops us from teaching to smaller classes, from integrating the arts
into the curriculum, or from using real science laboratories. If they're not
doing anything innovative, then why are they pushing public schools out of
their own buildings?"
Mackall talked about how charter schools are focused on the concerns of
parents, but in a divisive way. "Who's addressing the problem of academic
excellence for /all/ of our children?" he said. "We need to be the parents of
/all/ of our children."
During the discussion, teachers from P.S. 123 and P.S. 241 and spoke
passionately about how the expansion of charter schools inside public school
buildings has caused horrible overcrowding and unsafe conditions for public
school students.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
THE CHARTER school invasion and the protests against it have raised a number
of questions about how to challenge the drive toward privatization.
The GEM members who helped organize the September 2 forum are mostly New York
City public school teachers, who aim to work in coalition with parents and
community members. GEM has taken a position explicitly against the expansion
of charter schools. But other groups have been more equivocal.
The position of teachers union leaders has been to support charter schools
that do the right thing--those that allow unions and that represent "public
schools freed from bureaucratic micro-management to be educational
laboratories," in the words of American Federation of Teachers President
Randi Weingarten, who came out of the UFT.
In fact, the UFT runs two of its own charter schools and has partnered with
Green Dot to run a third--even though teachers at these schools aren't under
the same contract agreement as public school teachers.
Essentially, the attitude here can be summed up as: "If you can't beat them,
join them." According to Weingarten, "Charters have a place in public
education, and unions are not impediments to their success, despite some
claims to the contrary. We need to get past the politics of conflict by
working together and making sure that all New York City public school
children attend a quality public school."
The community organization ACORN took the lead at several protests in July,
but its organizers have argued that parents and teachers shouldn't be against
charter schools, but should ask only that charters find their own space
outside of public school buildings. At a July 10 protest, ACORN organizers
told members of GEM to take down anti-charter school signs.
Meanwhile, Scott Stringer, the Manhattan borough president, said at the
protest, "Nobody was disrespectful to the charter school, or that faculty or
those children. There really is an ability to create common ground and
negotiation and transparency...We should have a cooling-out period until
there's a real sit-down between P.S. 123, the charter school, the Board of
Education, and area elected officials."
There's nothing in this statement about granting the use of public school
space to privately run charter schools. Stringer is merely calling for
"transparency" in the process. While this would certainly be a good first
step, we need to demand that politicians oppose charter schools and instead
favor adequately funding public schools.
What's happening at P.S. 123 and elsewhere in Harlem is nothing short of a
hostile takeover, facilitated by an education system under the control of the
mayor--with no room for input from the community, parents or teachers. As
journalist Juan Gonzalez wrote of the takeover:
>[There was] no parent or faculty meeting to gauge whether anyone wants the
>new school. No official vote of the local Community Education Council. Some
>young bureaucrat from the city Education Department's Office of Portfolio
>Development arrives one day with a bunch of maps under his arm, and promptly
>orders a new allocation of rooms. Boom. Done. All part of Klein's rush to
>create 100,000 new charter school seats over the next few years.
>
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
WHY THE rush? Is it really, as so many advocates boast, because charter
schools are freed from bureaucratic controls, allowing them to be, as former
AFT President Albert Shanker put it, "incubators of good instructional
practice"?
This idea is unsettling because it suggests that public schools are in some
way /not/ set up to be "incubators of good instructional practice." Shouldn't
we strive to make changes that enable /all/ public schools to be bastions of
"good instructional practice"? Of course we should.
In practice, the bureaucratic freedoms allowed to charter schools have
nothing to do with good instructional practice--they have to do with the
bottom line. Charter school administrators are freed from constraints like
employing only certified teachers, employing unionized teaching staff,
abiding by DOE time limits for the school day and year, using DOE contracted
unionized support staff--and, above all, serving all students.
So it's unclear how lifting restrictions on teacher certification and
unionization facilitate "good instructional practice."
Instead, charter schools are often plagued with high teacher turnover because
of the absence of union contracts, longer school days and higher teaching
loads. A study released by the Education Policy Research Unit found that the
national teacher turnover rate in public schools averages 11 percent--while
the average charter school attrition rate is almost 25 percent. In Harlem,
Moskowitz's own Harlem Success Academy I fired the principal three weeks
before the 3rd grade ELA test.
Charter schools not only have a different population of teachers--they also
serve a different demographic of students than public schools.
Data for the 2007-2008 school year showed that 14 percent of students in New
York City public schools were English Language Learners--while only 4 percent
were in charter schools. Around 15 percent of public school students had
special needs, while only 5 percent did in charter schools.
The numbers speak for themselves--charter schools don't serve the same
population of students as public schools. Yet the most systematic study of
charter schools found that around four in five charter school students had
test scores at the same level or worse than public school students.
The primary result of the charter movement thus far has not been to create
"incubators of good instructional practice," but instead to develop a
separate and unequal system of education.
Charter school operators claim they are just a part of the public school
system, but this is only true in the sense that they take money and resources
from the public education system. In addition to money that they receive from
state, local and federal governments, charter schools receive grants from
foundations, and one-quarter of all charter schools are run on a for-profit
basis.
In the Harlem community, the response to charter schools is mixed. Public
schools in Harlem are segregated, under-funded and overcrowded, leaving
parents searching for other options. Parents see fresh, newly renovated,
activity-packed charter schools and see an opportunity for their children.
The charter movement operates under the guise of promoting civil rights and
preys on parents' dissatisfaction with public schools--but in fact, it's
pushing a right-wing neoliberal agenda that is systematically destroying
community public schools.
The fight at P.S. 123 is a start in the ongoing battle to stop separate and
unequal from becoming reality in our public schools.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
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