FDA and creaming

Another common criticism of charter schools is that they cream, which makes it especially ironic what Perkins said when he was on Morning Joe a few weeks ago (http://edreform.blogspot.com/2010/03/senator-perkins-on-morning-joe.html).  The hosts were pressuring him to name even one successful district school in Harlem, so he named Frederick Douglass Academy.

 

Rightly so – I know the school well, as it's one of our top schools in the REACH program, and I think very highly of principal Greg Hodge and his team of AP teachers, including the Jaime and Jaimita Escalante of NYC, Fred Murphy and Jane Viau (see http://edreform.blogspot.com/2009/12/email-from-nyc-teacher.html and http://edreform.blogspot.com/2010/01/trading-portfolios-for-lesson-plans.html, respectively; also, here's a great quote from Murphy I sent around last fall: "I think that the real battle ground for the United States today is in the classroom, not Basra or Kabul. A Gordian knot of lowered expectations, the culture of affirmation, inequitable distribution of resources, and Teaching Colleges spouting methodology instead of driving hard academic curriculum creates an uneducated underclass that are not productive enough to succeed, but just productive enough to be exploited.").

 

Here's the catch, however: FDA is a SELECTIVE school!  Not super-selective like Stuyvesant, but students must apply, they do an interview, including parents, etc. – in fact, there's concern among current students that FDA's standards are being lowered.  Here's the data on the school (http://schools.nyc.gov/documents/teachandlearn/sesdr/2009-10/sesdr_M499.pdf), which shows only 6.9% special ed students and less than 1% ELL.  I'm not writing this to criticize FDA – it's a wonderful school – but for Perkins to heap praise on a selective school like FDA, while simultaneously trashing charter schools for supposedly being selective, not serving every student, having a lower % of special ed and/or ELL than the district, etc. is the HEIGHT of hypocrisy!