Charter school not making the grade, a scathing report by a local newspaper

[erodriguez]

From the New York Amsterdam News a local paper covering Harlem, New York City.

Charter school not making the grade

By Nayaba Arinde, 
Amsterdam News Editor
 and
By Cyril Josh Barker, Amsterdam News Staff
Published: Thursday, October 7, 2010 12:05 AM EDT


Who’d have thunk it? When Mayor Michael Bloomberg wrestled school control from the Board of Education in 2002, he said a near Nirvana would ensue in the New York public school system; thousands of parents – perhaps close to 1.1 million schools kids, may beg to differ.

The release last week of the report card for the city’s schools show a drop in the grades, which have the uber hyped charter schools doing even worse...

“Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein have failed,” said City Councilman Charles Barron, the former chair of the City Council’s Education Committee. “The test scores prove that we right all along. Scores dropped 26 percent in reading and 28 percent in math. This at a time when they turned our schools into test taking mills, with test prep every other period. There’s no arts, no music, no science labs, no extra curricular activities. Then they have the nerve to push charter schools, which the test scores show have not been as successful as they claim. Even the banner school – Geoffrey Canada’s Harlem Children Zone did not fair as well as they declared.”...

Of the schools that made a “C” was the famed charter school Harlem Children’s Zone/Promise Academy II, which had a higher grade last year.

On the school’s report card, the DOE said that while HCZ, which is ran by celebrated educator Geoffrey Canada, had superior performance in school environment and student performance, student progress received an “F” grade.

Student progress measures median student improvement from last year to this year in English Language Arts and math. HCZ received a score of 10.6 out of 60 in the progress area...

The grade has reopened the conversation on charter schools as a better choice for the city’s children. Mayor Michael Bloomberg aims to open 100 charter schools at the same time the report card reveals that charter schools underperformed district schools...



“These scores remind us that we should never believe the hype, that we should scrutinize what we are being told,” said Sen. Bill Perkins. “Our children deserve a state of the art education, and the results show that we are not getting this, even in the places that are bragging that superman has arrived,” said Perkins referencing the documentary film “Waiting for Superman.”

“Where there is success we should celebrate it; but we have those models in the public school system too. You have PS180 in Harlem, with Principal Peter McFarlane. But they don’t look at those types of schools to see what the leadership is doing there and try and to replicate it in other schools. The charter school movement is trying to undermine public schools. Superman may be coming, but in all fairness he’s not here yet, and there’s a lot of room for improvement.”

The charter school movement needs to stop misleading our parents that this is the answer then coming up short come test time. Our parents are desperately trying to give their kids a good education, so they will believe anything. Sometimes their faith is misplaced.”

According to the UFT, of the 60 elementary or middle school charters that were rated, 48 percent got As or Bs. By contrast, 61 percent of district schools got As or Bs.


Assemblywoman Inez Barron said that the grade is a clear example that the city should put the breaks on rushing to get charter schools off the ground and that they are no different from any other school.

She said, “I think that this is a blatant timely revelation that charter schools are not achieving at the level that have been widely reported by Bloomberg and company. With all of the support from large corporations, HCZ is demonstrating that they are no different than public schools.”



Read the rest of the article here:
http://www.amsterdamnews.com/articles/2010/10/06/news/doc4caceb120d81d305342419.txt

[DrDan]

1. another example of a failing charter school

"Staff stated concerns with operators of Boston Avenue Charter School, which serves elementary grades, expanding because the school earned an "F" on its state report card this summer."

http://www.news-journalonline.com/news/local/west-volusia/2010/09/27/vote-set-on-5-volusia-charter-schools.html

[Starry Messenger]

2. recommend.

[Tansy_Gold]

3. I cringed reading this.

When Mayor Michael Bloomberg wrestled school control

should have been

When Mayor Michael Bloomberg wrested


Even the banner school – Geoffrey Canada’s Harlem Children Zone did not fair as well as they declared.”

should have been

". . . did not fare as well."


". . . which is ran by celebrated educator. . ."

should be

which is run by. . .


a clear example that the city should put the breaks on rushing

should be

. .. put the brakes on. . .



If this weren't an article about education, I probably wouldn't have made these comments. But these are the kinds of usage errors that simply were not made in this wholesale quantity when I was reading newspapers and magazines in my pre-computer public education days. Today there should be no excuse for it, not in an article of this nature.


Tansy Gold

[mikelgb]

4. i only caught the "ran" on the first read, good eye...

[erodriguez]

6. New York Amsterdam needs a better editor

[surrealAmerican]

7. It looks to me like they've replaced ...

... their copy editors with a spell-check program.

[jmowreader]

9. Or their copy editors are addicted to spelling check

We've got an ad we run in our paper. It's for the cable company, we run it on Monday and it tells of the newest Pay Per View movie.

The headline: "Premiers Today!"

Dammit, it's supposed to be "premieres today" because "premiers" is what you'd use in this sentence: The premiers of China, the Soviet Union and Outer Mongolia met today with Fearless Leader and Pottsylvania to discuss ways to kill moose and squirrel. But 'premiers' passes the spelling checker, so it's fine.

[erodriguez]

5. There is so much media involvement in the hyping of these schools

Rupert Murdoch's NY Post called for the school progress report grades to be thrown out because of poor charter school grades.

It was a fight to get NBC to include teachers in its education nation charter hype-a-thon.

It takes local news to report this stuff.

[ThomCat]

8. Bloomberg and Klein have been gutting NYC schools

in order to help rich people profit off from educational tax dollars. They also get to gut teachers unions as a nifty side benefit.

But their stated goal, helping kids, never materializes. It's a sham. Their only real goal is money. Never forget that!

[johnaries]

10. Yep, pick one outlier and then use it to broadbrush

many other schools which actually have very little in common. And ignore the majority of sucesses, just focus on the few failures.

Why don't you post about the many non-Charter schools who have failed? Which is, basically, ALL of them?