Hey Michael Winerip, I have another great charter-bashing story for you – even better than the one last week in which you deliberately presented false data about Harlem Success to make it look like it's creaming. Well, the school I'm taking about really is creaming: according to the article below (the full data is at: www.nyccharterschools.org/storage/documents/2011_test_score_analysis.pdf; see page 16), just 9% of the students:

are special education students, compared with 14% in the Brooklyn district where it's located. Only 1% of students at the school speak English as a second language, compared with 14% in the district as a whole.

At charter schools citywide, about 11% of students are in special education classes and 4% are English language learners.

(Recall that at Harlem Success, 16% of kids are SPED and 9.5% are ELL.)

Worse yet, unlike Harlem Success, even with the creaming, this schools' scores stink: overall math proficiency is 47.3%, ranking it 78^th of 91 charter schools in the city (vs. 98.6%, #1 for Harlem Success), and 28.7% in ELA, ranked 76^th (vs. 85.5%, #2 for Harlem Success) (see pages 23-30 at

www.nyccharterschools.org/storage/documents/2011_test_score_analysis.pdf).

Finally, the school is on its 4^th principal since its founding in 2005, it was rated a D by the NYC DOE in the 2009-10 school year, ranking it in the bottom 5% of school in NY for the second year in a row (it's also only the second charter school to remain in the bottom 15% of all schools citywide for three years in a row), and SUNY only renewed its charter for three years rather than five.

So, inquiring minds might want to know, why did Winerip attempt to smear a great charter school yet hasn't written a word about the other school I'm talking about???

The answer is obvious: the other school is the UFT Charter School and, as best I can tell from every article Winerip has written, he does the unions' bidding and only criticizes reformers…

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