Special ed: Charter-school champ Eva Moskowitz makes a play for brownstone New York
Eva Moskowitz testified before a congressional committe on education.
8:48 am May. 12, 20117
This winter, orange fliers advertising a K-8 charter school planned for Bedford-Stuyvesant began appearing on the doorsteps of apartment buildings and houses in the upmarket neighborhoods of Brooklyn Heights and Cobble Hill. I live in Cobble Hill, and have two children already enrolled in a top-rated public elementary school around the corner from my house. In the week before the charter’s April 1 enrollment deadline, I received six fliers, making a total of 12.
The mailers were the work of Eva Moskowitz, the famously combative charter-school champion and former city councilmember who is now C.E.O. of the Success Charter Network.
The paper blitz is a familiar tactic for Moskowitz, who has been blanketing neighborhoods annually for the past few years in a much publicized effort to build an education empire. She’s had great success generating interest this way, in part because the neighborhoods she has targeted in the past have housed the city's poorest-performing public schools. Parents in those neighborhoods have typically responded to her marketing by scrambling madly for the relatively few slots being offered. (Moskowitz's strategy was detailed in Madeleine Sackler’s documentary The Lottery, and was the subject of a congratulatory policy paper released by the Democrats for Education Reform, the influential political action committee run by former Daily News reporter Joe Williams.)
But there’s something significantly different about this latest round of outreach from Moskowitz, who currently runs seven schools in Harlem and the Bronx, all of which fit neatly into the popularly understood charter-school mandate of providing options to low-income families zoned for poor-performing public schools. This time, she’s going after the middle class.
Moskowitz has spent a total of $800,000 on advertising for the school she's planning for Bed-Stuy, much of it on outreach to middle-class families—who live near and sometimes not so near the school—as well as on a Success Charter Network school that is scheduled to open this fall on the Upper West Side on the new Brandeis High School campus.
During a recent interview at one of her Harlem schools, Moskowitz bridled at the idea that her latest projects represent a departure from her previous ones, or that they are any less well aligned with the mission of charter schools.
“I’ve never believed the charter movement was exclusively for socially and economically disadvantaged kids,” she told me.
Moskowitz said that long ago, in her pre-Council days, she applied to the city to start a charter school on the Upper East Side, only to withdraw the application when her political career took off.
“It was incredibly radical back then,” she said. “You can live on a posh street and be zoned for a very terrible school.”
The Upper West Side “has failing schools,” she said, adding that despite vocal opposition to her new charter, she received between “700-800 applicants” for the 188 available spots.
“I didn’t design schools for poor kids,” Moskowitz said, finally. “I’m designing schools to be world-class.”
THIS WOULD SEEM TO BE A TIME OF UNPRECEDENTED opportunity for the charter-school movement, and for Moskowitz, to expand in New York. Overcrowding is at an all-time high in many parts of the city, to the point where some kindergarteners are being turned down by their zoned schools. There is a charter-friendly administration in City Hall, which is being strongly encouraged by a charter-friendly White House.
Last year, after a protracted fight in which the teachers' lobby was ultimately outmatched by the combined lobbying efforts of Michael Bloomberg and the charter-school movement, the legislature in Albany increased the state’s cap on the number of charter schools from 200 to 460. New York currently has 125 charter schools, with a large cluster of them in Harlem and in the South Bronx, educating a total of 38,000 students. They number only 4 percent of the city's schools. (Compare that to D.C.’s 40 percent.)
This means that there’s room for charters to proliferate, which they’re going to need to do to show themselves to be viable over the long term to their financial backers, who quite explicitly see what’s going on as a fight for survival with traditional public schools. This goes for individual charter organizations, too: they have to grow in order to demonstrate sustainability. According to Jeffrey Henig, a professor at Teachers College, proponents of charter schools were placing an ever-increasing emphasis “on multiple organizations opening multiple schools,” in part due to pressure from donors who see themselves as “catalysts, not banks.”
Robin Lake, associate director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education, a research center at the University of Washington, says a lot of networks have faced economy-of-scale challenges that few predicted. The chains have expanded only to discover that they have some of the same money-sapping bureaucratic issues that the public schools have.
“[Operators] are really ambitious and entrepreneurial and they think they can do anything,” Lake said. “But they’ve hit some bumps in the road.”
Moskowitz has said that it is her goal to open and operate 40 schools.
IT HAS BY NO MEANS BEEN AN EVEN FIGHT BETWEEN charter schools and their traditional public counterparts.
Despite the fact that they depend on public money to operate, charters are exempt from many state and local regulations, so they can create their own curriculum and hire as they please. They are also in a position to be selective about student admissions, unlike zoned public schools, on top of the fact that the parents who vie for spots in the charter self-select, as a group, for relatively high levels of engagement with their children’s education.
Then there’s the funding. The New York City Charter School Center calculates that charters receive $3,017 less per student than traditional public schools, which sounds like a positive statistic. But that figure applies to charters that are not housed in public school buildings. This is an important distinction because last year, according to figures released by the New York City Independent Budget Office, charters housed in public school buildings (that’s two thirds of them) actually received $649 more per pupil in public support than traditional public schools. (In 2009-2010, that meant $16,660 per charter pupil, and $16,011 for each public pupil.)
The free space, free maintenance and free security services that charters receive when they are housed in existing public schools—the perks that are often so resented by those very public schools—are a prerequisite for the Moskowitz model to function as it does. According to NewSchools Venture Fund director and Success Charter board member Jim Peyser, without the deal on rent-free space, the network would be forced to stop expanding.
The challenge for the charters, under these circumstances, isn’t so much to compete with public schools, but to satisfy their nonprofit boards, whose members directly or indirectly generate much of the non-public money for these schools, and to impress the public. This is because a lot of what the charters need to flourish—like that free space in public-school buildings and their per-pupil allotment of public money, which many charter operators say is still too low—will require the city and the state to remain hospitable to them even after Bloomberg, their hard-charging champion, has left office.
“This is ultimately a political question and ultimately about public support,” Peyser told me.
HARLEM SUCCESS ACADEMY 2 WAS LAUNCHED WITH about 175 kindergarten and first-grade students. According to an independent auditor’s report filed with the Charter Schools Institute, the school received more than $1 million in contributions and private grants and $19,000 in donated legal services for the school’s first year, starting in the middle of March 2008, when operators began building up the school, and finishing at the end of June 2009, when the school year ended. But in addition to that money, the school received $2.3 million in state and local per-pupil operating revenue, $490,000 in federal grants, and $150,000 in state and city grants. So for that school year, for that school, taxpayers contributed approximately $3 million.
Wow, do you have a fact checker? The number of errors here is pretty amazing.
NEST+M is a citywide gifted and talented school, which is nothing like a magnet school.
This following is EXACTLY BACKWARDS: "[Charter schools] are "in a position to be selective about student admissions, unlike zoned public schools, on top of the fact that the parents who vie for spots in the charter self-select, as a group, for relatively high levels of engagement with their children’s education." First, charter schools are emphatically NOT in a position to be selective. If they have more applicants than seats they MUST use a lottery to govern admissions. That is STATE LAW. (By contrast, the part of the quoted sentence about self-selection is true.) Second, zoned schools in NYC have traditionally had enormous flexibility in choosing which out-of-zone students to admit. (Read the complaints compiled by the Center for Immigrant Families on this front.) The DOE has started cracking down on this recently, but at best the process remains highly opaque and suspect. Not to mention all the zoned schools that also have students admitted based on their high performance on gifted tests. (Often a quarter to half the students, at schools that host district GT programs.) Then there are non-charter unzoned schools, which continue to use a process which is completely lacking in transparency.
"Quadratic triangle"? Really? The author and editors obviously have not the slighted idea what a "quadratic triangle" might be, or if such a thing really exists. Did it occur to anyone to maybe try Googling the phrase, before advertising their ignorance of elementary school mathematical content to the world?
Where are those special education numbers coming from? They aren't in the state accountability report, which suggests a MUCH smaller percentage of students with disabilities (as in off by about an order of magnitude). It's very hard to believe that a gen ed school has 67% of students receiving special education services, much less "extensive time in special ed classes every day".
But to me the most astonishing paragraph is really the following: "Whatever legitimate dissatisfactions higher-income parents in New York may have with their children’s education, they are usually not thought to be suffering from a lack of options. Armed with their Macbooks and Clara Hemphill's guide books, New York’s mid- to upper-income parents pick between zoned schools, magnet schools, and gifted programs for their children." REALLY? What about those of us whose kids didn't test into the gifted programs? Or who got lotteried out of their zoned school? Or, those of us who, in spite of our mid-to-upper income, still can't afford to live in a desirable zone in the first place? (or aren't willing to uproot our lives when we might still end up getting lotteried out anyway) Can you name even a single NYC elementary magnet school that appeals to mid- to upper-income parents? Six District 3 elementary schools are receiving federal grants this year to transform themselves into magnet schools--Shazam!--but so far I haven't seen a shred of evidence that any of them have succeeded in appealing to this population (and I toured most of them). Some barely even seem to be trying. I can only presume that the author hasn't spent any time talking to NYC parents of four-year-olds about all the options we supposedly have for Kindergarten. The one non-magnet, non-charter school of choice in District 3--the ultra-"progressive" Manhattan School for Children--got at least 575 applications for maybe 80 slots, a good portion of which will go to siblings. So tell me again about how there are lots of good options?
I'll try to address these points here, at least the factual stuff.
1. Is NEST+m a magnet school or a gifted and talented school?
Technically, it's both. A magnet school is a school that draws from inside and outside its zone. The term does not address how students are selected for the school. A non-charter lottery school can be a magnet school. So can a gifted and talented school like NEST+m. New York City parents don't use the term as often as parents in other areas. They will more often refer to a place like Nest+1 as a gifted and talented school. But that does not mean it is not also a magnet school.
2. Do charter schools self-select? A lottery system is by nature a self-selection system because it requires a certain amount of effort on the part of the parents. For prospective students whose parents who do not have the time, the energy or the ability to make that effort, charter schools are not an option. Once a parent has a child in a charter school like the ones Moskowitz runs, he or she is expected to remain actively engaged. That level of engagement can be too intense for some parents because of work, home or health issues. And this serves as a further weeding-out process.
Zoned schools do not self-select in the same way. Yes, there are gifted and talented programs which allow schools to recruit bright students. But the city itself has acknowledged that its gifted and talented programs are not serving as much of the city's diverse population as they ought to, a problem it is trying to rectify. So the argument about who actually gets into these programs would seem to support what the article says: that middle- and high-income parents know how to work the system. Sharon Otterman wrote a good piece on this in The New York Times last year.
To the extent that zoned schools have flexibility in choosing which out-of-zone students to admit, it serves as further evidence that well-educated middle- and upper-middle-class parents can leverage their clout and the schools' flexibility to get their children into institutions they're not actually zoned for.
4. Where did the demographic/special education numbers for Harlem Success and PS 149 come from?
The numbers came from a piece Gotham Schools did last year in response to Steve Brill's Times magazine piece on the Race to the Top competition, which looked at both schools and came to the conclusion that one was doing a much, much better job. Gotham Schools questioned whether their challenges were really the same.
I was able to check the free lunch numbers and the English proficiency stats myself in the state report cards. These are 2009/2010 report cards that include 2008-2009 numbers. They're here and here.
Gotham Schools got its special-education numbers from reports for PS 149 and special-education invoices given to the UFT by the New York State Department of Education.
The special-education figures for the students requiring the most intense assistance can be confusing because the percentage (67 percent for PS 149 and 35 percent for Harlem Success) is a percentage of each school's total special-education population, which is also uneven. At PS 149, 21 percent of the children fell under the special-education category, compared to Harlem Success where 14 percent fell under that category.
5. Do middle-class parents have options?
The story does not seek to belittle the issues facing middle-class parents as they struggle to get their children into good schools, nor does it seek to downplay the city's overcrowding issue. But it does suggest that as a group, middle-class parents have much better options than the low-income families to whom the charter operators have sought to appeal up to this point.
And 6. thank you for pointing out our editing snafu. What Klein was referring to was a quadratic equation.
1. If a magnet school is "a school that draws from inside and outside its zone", then NEST+m is not a magnet school, insofar as it has no zone.
According to the Federal Department of Education: "Federally funded magnet schools will eliminate, reduce, or prevent minority group isolation in targeted elementary and secondary schools with substantial proportions of minority group students." That is how I have ALWAYS heard the term used in NYC. There are many magnets schools in NYC; generally they have the word "magnet" as part of their official or unofficial name. I have NEVER heard any of the NYC gifted schools describe themselves as magnet schools, or be described as such in any NYC DOE communications.
Under the most expansive definition of a magnet school, you could say that every school in NYC is a magnet school, since all are required to accept applications from students outside of their zones (even those that won't actually accept any students from outside of their zone because they don't have the seats). But that would be silly. In NYC, a magnet school is a school which calls itself a magnet school, and NEST+m is not one of them. (I guess you could argue in NYC schools, it is white and Asian students who are "minorities", and that that NEST+m reduces their "isolation" by allowing them to attend a school that is majority white and Asian. But somehow, I don't think that's quite what the Federal government has in mind with its definition of the purpose of magnet schools.)
2. OF COURSE there is SELF (i.e. parent) selection at charter schools; that's the whole point. That's not what I took issue with, and I even said so explicitly. What is manifestly untrue is the claim that charter schools THEMSELVES are "in a position to be selective about student admissions" OTHER THAN THE SELF SELECTION EFFECT (which is what the sentence in the article explicitly asserts). That claim calls out for a retraction.
It is remarkable that you minimizing the importance of the self-selection effect at zoned schools. Might I suggest that you talk to a Realtor about the differential in rents and apartment prices for a family-sized apartment that is zoned for PS 191 versus PS 199? I choose those two because their zones are immediately adjacent on the Upper West Side. Of course the price difference is much greater if you compare the UWS to Harlem. There is a huge self-selection effect there, with a much higher barrier to entry than charter schools. The effort required to live in a neighborhood zoned for a high-performing school is incomparably greater than that the effort required to enter a charter school lottery.
4. I'm glad you have corrected the special education figures you cited. However, that was a correction, not a clarification. The original wording indicated that you were referring to a percentage of all the students at the school, not a percentage of the special education students.
Schneidg, I would take issue with your claim that charters schools are not "in a position to be selective about student admissions." If you talk to any parent who has been following the admissions process at Moskowitz's Upper West Success, you will find sound suspicions to the contrary, some of which it is hoped will be investigated. On the somewhat more transparent end of the spectrum, the school was selectively marketed, with brochures mailed directly to families chosen by Success. After that, applications do not seem to have been vetted for accuracy, truth or intent, so it is likely that some people who were accepted were removed from the pool at admissions time. On the opaque end, the lottery results were unmonitored and the seemingly unnumbered 'waitlst' for the school allowed Success to choose whomever it wanted to attend after anyone in the first group of accepted families declined. The school no longer had to give preference to 'at risk' children as was mandated by its charter for the lottery - it could simply sweep in the upper middle class families that serve its political ends.
btw: The Upper West side does not, as Moskowitz routinely claims, have "failing schools.” Only one school, is considered 'failing' by the Dept of Ed (for freak reasons that sought-after school received a D). Success invented its own definition of 'failing' to enlarge its applicant pool, and it is not a definition that is used by anyone but them...not the NYC DOE, not SUNY and not the State DOE.
As it happens, I AM a District 3 parent who has been following the admissions process at Upper West Success closely.
It's funny. Mostly I hear complaints about how many brochures they mailed out--their "saturation" of the neighborhood. Then once in a while someone complains that their mailings are "selective" (generally with no evidence whatsoever). My understanding is that all the mailings have to go out through a third-party vendor because the DOE isn't allowed to provide names and addresses directly to Success. So they don't even have the capability to be "selective" about who they go to. I'm pretty sure that the ads on Harlem bus stops weren''t selective either.
How do you think applications ought to have been vetted for "accuracy, truth or intent"? Especially "intent"--what would vetting for "intent" even mean? I honestly don't even understand what you are insinuating here.
I certainly have no proof that Success is proceeding through a randomly-generated wait list in order, just as you have no apparent evidence that they are doing otherwise. Of course, if they are, that would place them in clear violation of state law, which would put their charter at risk. So if you have evidence that this is the case, I urge you to bring it to the attention of the state education department; otherwise you are just spreading unsubstantiated rumors.
By contrast, it seems clearly to be the case that non-charter schools in District 3--which are not bound by any such state law--DO play games with their so-called wait lists, telling "wait-listed" parents (at least out-of-zone wait-listed parents) that they need to keep calling the school back to see if there are any openings, and indicating that any spots will go to those who are persistent about calling at the right times. I have heard no such message from Success. Their message to wait-listed families is "hang in there, get measured for uniforms, and we'll call you if and when your number comes up". Which is what one would expect if they are applying the process by the books.
The Success definition of a failing school is one which received a D or F on the "performance" section of its NYC Progress Report. That's a definition they made up, as you say, but one which strikes me as perfectly reasonable. Speaking as a District 3 parent who is zoned for an "F" school where 9 percent--9 percent!--of 6th graders passed the state ELA test last year, I am grateful that there is a high-performing school operator out there which will give my children an admission preference on that account.
Success was able to choose the recipients to whom that third party mailed (could be by zip code, zip + 4, current school attended, specific grades at current school etc - the breakdown is unclear, as they have not spoken about it, that I know of). As a recipient of a mountain of flyers, some addressed to just parents and some to each of the kids I have in DOE schools, I am aware that different mailings went out in different ways.
By "accuracy, truth or intent" I mean that - in contrast to when one applies to a DOE school - it is my understanding that no proof of address was required at the time of application to Success. That is, Success took applicants' addresses and other application info at face value all the way through the lottery. Someone's actual home may fall in the zone of a Success-defined 'failing school' or it may not, but if what my applicant friends tell me is true, there was no checking on proof of residency, ELL status, or correspondence of zoned school to address was done prior to the lottery.
Waitlisted applicants at the DOE schools I know are given numbers; they can track WL movement by calling the school. That applies to the list of non-catchment kids as well (sibling and not). Success does not seem to have issued numbers to parents - who knows how they picked who got in after they cleared out the lottery winners who either declined or were found to have wrongly received admissions preference based on a fraudulent or mis-matched addresses (if that was even done)?
All that aside, why do we as parents let the DOE pit us against eachother by failing to address deficiencies at their own schools and by giving away valuable school space in a completely inappropriate site that is needed to serve the older kids for which it was built? There would be much less in-fighting if the DOE supported its schools AND stopped jamming charters into buildings all over the city that cannot accommodate them without jeopardizing someone else's child's education.
There were about a dozen DOE schools to which I submitted an application and did not get an initial seat offer. I received a wait list number from exactly one of those. I asked several of the others and they all told me they were unable to provide a number. One school offered my child a seat when I called them; it seems unlikely that they just happened to reach my child's lottery number at just the moment I called them. Several expressly indicated that seats would go to whomever was calling them when seats happened to open up. This is completely different from the messages being sent by the charter schools at which I submitted applications.
Most of the DOE schools asked for proof of residence at the time the applications were submitted. A few did not, and said they would ask for proof of residence at registration time. I fail to see what difference it makes when proof of residence is submitted. If you received a lottery number based upon incorrect representation of your address, then you would lose that lottery number when you furnished documentation of your correct address (and presumably drop to the bottom of the list). Again, for charter schools (and ONLY for charter schools), a random process is mandated by state law, and violation could lead to the school's closure. Since there are a lot of people determined to prevent Upper West Success from opening--and since most of those are precisely the sorts of people whom Upper West Success is alleged to be seeking out (i.e. mid-to-upper-SES West Side families)--you would think that if there were any actual evidence of impropriety that it would have come out. Instead, there is nothing but unsubstantiated rumor mongering. Success requires both admitted and wait-listed applicants to attend an information session in order to make a registration appointment or remain on the wait list. Although we only needed to attend one, my spouse and I both wanted to see what Ms. Moskowitz had to say, so we attended separate sessions. In both cases, it looked like just about every parent there was Black or Hispanic. So the idea that there is some sort of secret illegal process for preferentially admitting "families chosen by Success" strikes me as rather preposterous on its face.
I don't know why Success isn't telling families their children's lottery numbers, but my guess is that it is because they have so many schools that even those with high lottery numbers have a decent chance of eventually getting into one of their schools, and that they think that giving out the numbers would be unnecessarily discouraging. Personally, I think that that lack of transparency is a mistake. It doesn't make me embrace conspiracy theories, but I can see where it might have that effect on those who are so inclined to begin with.
Certainly PS 145 would have been a more sensible placement location for Upper West Success than Brandeis. I toured PS 145 and was frankly amazed at all the unused space there. That site was rejected, apparently because PS 145 has received a Federal magnet grant with which it is supposed to improve the school and attract a wider range of students (i.e. more non-minority and non-poor students). As just the sort of parent they are supposed to be attracting, I am deeply skeptical of the viability of that project. I guess we'll see what their numbers look like in a few years. In the meantime, I am grateful that the DOE is trying to provide alternatives to under-performing neighborhood schools, and it doesn't bother me in the least that they are providing these alternatives with space taken from those same under-performing neighborhood schools. The education of children attending PS 145 is already in dire jeopardy. With fewer than a third of students having passed last year's ELA tests, their prospects of eventually graduating from high school, much less college, are dire to the point of tragedy. I am quite unconvinced that having a second school in the building would further jeopardize the education of the first school's students.