1) Is Elissa Gootman trying to set a record for the number of hatchet jobs in a week?! She's back again with another piece of shoddy, biased journalism about charter schools, printing Sheldon Silver's multiple lies about charter schools without a single quote from any of the countless people who could rebut them!
In the 2nd paragraph, for example, she quotes Silver saying:
"There is no reason that the mayor or the chancellor should be giving away these facilities to a nonpublic endeavor," Mr. Silver said yesterday.
HELLO!?!?! Charter schools ARE PUBLIC SCHOOLS!!!! The fact that they are run by private groups should be CELEBRATED because: a) the private groups are held accountable and their schools will be shut down if they don't perform; b) the alternative to the private groups is the existing school bureaucracy, which is responsible for massive, systemic failure; and c) it saves the government money since charter school students get about 20% LESS money (the private groups have to raise the balance).
Gootman then proceeds, without directly quoting Silver, to assert:
he expressed reservations about charter schools, saying that they have the effect of cherry-picking students with the most involved parents because as a practical matter, only parents who understand that admission is by lottery, will enter for their children.
Mr. Silver also attacked a premise at the heart of the charter school movement — that they help improve public schools through healthy competition.
Jay Greene rips this theory to shreads in the "Draining Myth" chapter (attached) of his book, Education Myths. In it, he writes: "That a plausible story can be told to support the Draining Myth does not justify adopting it without checking to see whether it is supported or contradicted by the facts." In the rest of the chapter, he proceeds to show that the data (not to mention common sense) does NOT support the Draining Myth.
Gootman then proceeds to blindly quote Silver in a direct attack on the great work Bloomberg and Klein are doing and their motivations for supporting charter schools -- yet (of course) does not give them a quote to rebut this:
He suggested instead that the reliance on charter schools is an indication that Mr. Bloomberg was having trouble turning around the city schools.
"I'm interpreting his message now as 'I failed, and I need some other entity to be able to educate children in order to get me to make the public schools more competitive,' " Mr. Silver said. "There's no other conclusion that you can reach."
How ridiculous! In fact, the latest data shows that New York City public schools are showing decent improvement -- among the best among all major cities in this country -- and the reason for this is BECAUSE of Bloomberg's embrace of innovations like charter schools.
The second half of the article is more balanced because Gootman bothered to pick up the phone and call Eva Moskowitz and included her quote (which is spot on):
"It would really sadden me and frankly tick me off if Randi is going to make somehow Harlem students victims in her personal vendetta against me," Ms. Moskowitz said. "She has repeatedly said that I'm going to pay. I was hoping that my political career would suffice, but perhaps not."
Ms. Moskowitz added: "Not only are schools going into schools already all over the city, but even within Harlem there are charter schools going into other schools. And Randi is making an issue of this particular situation."
If you believe this, please call me -- I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you:
Ms. Weingarten said Ms. Moskowtiz's involvement with the charter had nothing to do with her opposing it.
Read the attached articles from the WSJ and the Economist about Eva's courageous City Council hearings in 2003 on union rules and mandates and tell me this isn't pure and simply payback.
The bottom line is that this sharing space issue is mostly a tempest in a teapot. The original KIPP school in the Bronx has been sharing a hallway with another middle school (and a building with two other schools) for 10+ years without much Sturm und Drang, and I have to believe there are plenty of underutilized buildings in NYC into which charter schools can go. What's really going on here is that those who think the educational status quo is acceptable and oppose charter schools are using this as one more way of undermining progress.
2) And they REALLY hate the fact that sharing a facility can lead to wonderful articles like this one -- one of my all-time favorites:
In the South Bronx, there is a hallway. At one end, children in shirts and ties and dresses line up to shake their teacher’s hand as they enter their classroom. At the other end, noise escapes an art class. “Excuse me! Why are you running around my room?!” screams a young, blonde, frazzled-looking teacher. “Look at my niggas from the East Side!” yells a black boy, maybe 12 years old.
One can pace the hall, moving from quiet to bedlam and back again.I did so repeatedly on Friday, my jaw a tick away from slack.“A lot of people notice that,” a young woman said as she walked past.
The hallway is split between Intermediate School 151 and the Knowledge Is Power Program Academy charter school. The schools share a building on East 156th Street, across from the housing projects, but not much else. Last year marked the sixth straight that KIPP Academy was the highest-performing public middle school in the Bronx; its neighbor has long been one of the worst. As Mayor Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein negotiate a new contract with the United Federation of Teachers, there is no better length of linoleum they could study than the demilitarized zone in that hallway that separates the status quo from the forces of reform.
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Public vs. Private Schools: A New Debate
Published: April 5, 2006
Downtown, talk of placing a new charter school inside a popular Lower East Side public school has so angered the Assembly speaker, Sheldon Silver, that he is threatening to look into the legality of the city's placement of charter schools — privately run, but with some public money — in public school buildings...
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School Reform’s 38th Parallel
By R.H. SAGER, NY Sun, 9/22/03
http://daily.nysun.com/Repository/getFiles.asp?Style=OliveXLib:ArticleToMail&Type=text/html&Path=NYS/2003/09/22&ID=Ar00901
In the South Bronx, there is a hallway. At one end, children in shirts and ties and dresses line up to shake their teacher’s hand as they enter their classroom. At the other end, noise escapes an art class. “Excuse me! Why are you running around my room?!” screams a young, blonde, frazzled-looking teacher. “Look at my niggas from the East Side!” yells a black boy, maybe 12 years old...
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