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Access to a high quality public education is not something that should be wonin a lottery—it is a most basic human and civil right. Yet, in May, the NewYork State Legislature voted to raise the charter school cap, allowing 460charter schools to be open in New York State—200 of them in the 5boroughs of New York City. 125 are already open and operating as of thisschool year. But, what do these charter schools really represent? Are they theinnovation and reform we need in education as our president and hiseducation secretary so frequently proclaim? Are charter schools improvingeducation? Or are they destabilizing, threatening and hindering the publiceducation of our children, while at the time same dividing our communities?Read on to discover the truth.
 
Then, please join our fight to improve andpreserve public education for all.
Myth: Charter schools are public schools.Truth: “Public”
means
open to all
members of a community. Charterschools conduct lotteries to select students. They do not accept any studentwho wishes to register during the school year (as public schools do).
Charterschools currently educate less than 3%
of New York City’s children, yetthe mayor and chancellor grant them more attention and autonomy. While thelottery process is allegedly blind, evidence shows many charter schools"counsel out" students who present behavioral challenges or need servicessuch as counseling, ESL, small class sizes, occupational or physical therapy.East New York Preparatory Charter School discharged 48% of their students just before state exams last year. KIPP, Harlem Success Academy, andHarlem Children’s Zone (all NYC charter school chains) have been foundguilty of the same practice.
Public schools do not get rid of students inneed.
Parents must sign contracts at many charter schools. Contracts may listbasic behavioral and uniform codes, but some include strict requirementsabout volunteer hours, participation in meetings and workshops, and evenagreement to attend Saturday detention sessions if children are late ormisbehave in school. If parents cannot live up to their end of this bargain,their children will be asked to leave the school. These are not the practices of public schools. While it would be optimal to have parents in schoolsvolunteering, to make it a strict mandate infantilizes parents. The great geniusof our public school system is that it is inclusive—
regardless of yourfamily’s situation, you are guaranteed access to a free education.
 
Truth: Charter schools are "education corporations"
according to the NYState Charter Act of 1998. The law exempts charters from state and locallaws, rules, regulations, and policies typically applied to public and privateschools. Should the education of our children be outsourced to privatecorporations free of regulation and oversight? Our nation’s current financialcrisis is due, in part, to corporate free rein.
Truth: Charter schools are not governed democratically
, often limitingthe input and voice of parents, students and teachers. To grow up asfunctional members of our democracy, children need to be witness to andparticipate in the democratic process. Significant documentation exists aboutthe
authoritarian practices
charter schools use when it comes to discipline,conduct and even instruction. Harlem Success Academies' kindergartenersare put through a two-week “boot camp,” to learn how to walk, sit and eat insilence. Social skills are often overlooked, as charter schools push theirstudents to achieve higher and higher marks on state-mandated assessments.KIPP schools have been accused of micro-managing students and evenresorting to public humiliation as a form of punishment. Meredith Kolonder,of the Daily News, recently reported on the abusive discipline practices atAchievement First Charter School in Crown Heights, asserting that
20percent of the children are in detention on any given day
. Is this success?Should schools focus on teaching children to do as they are told, to theexclusion of learning to question, to challenge ideas, and most importantly, tothink for themselves? Most charter schools appear to place high priority ontheir students meeting the needs of the school (high test scores for goodpublicity)—an "adult needs before children's needs" mentality. What aboutstudents' needs?
Myth: Charter schools serve the same student populations as publicschools.Truth
:
Charter schools serve far fewer
English language learners, specialneeds students, and those who qualify for free lunch than do public schools.Data from the New York State Report Cards and the Department of Education itself is quite telling:Data from 2007-2008 PublicSchoolsCharterSchoolsStudents Eligible for Free/Reduced Lunch 75.8% 73.3%Students Eligible for Free Lunch 66.9% 57.6%English Language Learners 14.2% 3.8 %Special Education Students 16.4% 3.8%
Truth:
The majority of charter schools are located in the city’s poorestneighborhoods (in Harlem, the South Bronx, and parts of Brooklyn), wherefree lunch averages for public schools are much higher.
Charter schools areNOT enrolling or educating the same types of students as public schools.
 Percentage of Free Lunch byNeighborhoodPublic Schools Charter SchoolsHarlem 71.5% 60.9%South Bronx 86.5% 61.6%North-Central Brooklyn 80% 54.5%
Truth:
Most charter schools in New York City are concentrated in black andLatino neighborhoods. This is not coincidence. Our mayor, former chancellorKlein and current chancellor Black, have replaced a publically controllededucational system. Education of our black and Latino youth is beingoutsourced to unregulated, private corporations.
Experienced educators, notcorporate managers, are best equipped to understand and address theneeds of ALL OF OUR CITY'S CHILDREN.
 
Myth: Charter schools produce better outcomes for their students.Truth:
 
80% of charter school students performed the same as or worsethan students in traditional public schools
in a study of 2,403 charterschools. Director of the Stanford University research center and study leadauthor, Margaret E. Raymond said, "If this study shows anything, it showsthat we've got a two-to-one margin of bad charters to good charters...That's ared flag."
Truth:
 
Many city charter schools have a habit of counseling out studentswith behavioral and academic weaknesses.
Because charter schools operateprivately, with little oversight, they can get away with this practice. Whenthese schools find a student too challenging to work with, they simply askhim or her to go elsewhere. Edwize.org published graphs showing significantincreases in test scores as enrollment dropped at four NYC charter schools.Students who could not perform to these schools’ standards were asked toleave.We cannot continue to allow those in power to tout the success of charterschools, when they are not doing the hard work of educating all learners.
Thebrilliant intention of our public school system is that it was designed toserve everyone, not just a select few.
While charter schools hold lotteriesfor acceptance to their schools, they deliberately recruit
high performingstudents
from neighborhood public schools and
discourage students withspecial needs from applying.Truth:
We need to consider how we measure the quality of education in ourcountry. President Obama and his education secretary, Arne Duncan, havebeen pushing an agenda that equates student performance with a test score.
Our children are more than just numbers--they are individuals withvaried learning styles, strengths and needs.
Focusing ourselves, and ourchildren, on tests dangerously oversimplifies the learning process and does
 
not allow us to foster the true and unique potential of our youth. Charterschools tend to be heavily focused on preparing students for standardizedtests. Test prep reigns king, and little time is spent fostering creativity orcritical thinking skills.
We need reform that takes us away from test prepand pushes us toward truly improved teaching and learning.
 
Myth: Charter schools hire better teachers and administrators.Truth
: Charter schools have surprising staff turnover rates. Examining 2003-04 federal data, researchers from Vanderbilt University found teachers left ata rate of 25% vs. 14% in public schools based on 2003-04 federal data. AJuly 2009
 New York Times
story quoted a charter school employee, “We werereally proud of the scores, and still are…but the workload…
it wasn’t sustainable.
You can’t put out the kind of energy we were putting out for ourkids year after year.” Higher turnover rates create destabilized and chaoticschool environments. Many charter school employees are overworked,underpaid, and denied the right to be part of a union.
Truth:
 
Many charter school administrators and principals are new andinexperienced.
Success Academies, a network of 7 charter schools in Harlemand the Bronx is run by former city-council member Eva Moskowitz, awoman with no background in teaching who pays herself $300,000 a year.Overpaid CEO’s have contributed to the recent downfall of our economy—do we really expect a different result if we take this approach with education?
Myth: Charter schools act as lab sites for innovative educational ideasand practices.Truth:
Charter schools were intended to be innovative, but the schoolssprouting up in New York City are anything but. A few charter corporations(Green Dot, Uncommon Schools, KIPP) run many schools and push studentsthrough a scripted and test-driven curriculum. In a February 2011
 Brooklyn Rail 
piece, “Dubious Standards for Charter Schools,” reporter LizaFeatherstone details the Department of Education’s own Office of CharterSchools recent report on the state of the city’s charters: “The report showsthat
most of the schools are neglecting basic elements of decent education, 
 yet in no case were they punished for this, or pressured to change theirways.” Any sort of emphasis on critical thinking was missing from theinstruction in many of the schools. Students were given little time fordiscussion and spent most of their time answering factual questions posed bytheir teachers. Very little of the learning appeared to be student-driven. “AtDemocracy Prep, a Harlem charter school where students have been acingstandardized tests, ‘few lessons required higher-order thinking skills or deepanalysis of concepts.’”
Critical thinking is an essential skill, and it must befostered and taught.
Students need to be given opportunities to debate, todiscuss and to question. Teaching students to memorize is not difficult work.Teaching students to think for themselves? That is the work of a trueeducator, and few charter schools are doing this important work.
Truth:
 
Charter schools are invading and privatizing public space.
Wellover fifty percent of New York City’s charter schools are co-located insideother functioning public school buildings, often to the detriment of the publicschool already there.
Charter schools are given free space in public schoolbuildings
the Department of Education claims are “underutilized,” howeverfew have extra space to share. In most instances, the
public schools areforced out of their classrooms or to consolidate classrooms to make roomfor the charter schools moving in.
In many cases the charter schoolscontinue to take more and more space each year from the public schools—ineffect, taking over the building. At PS 241 in Harlem, public school studentsare now forced to learn in basement classrooms bordering the boiler room, allso that Harlem Success Academy Charter School can have more spaceupstairs. At PS 15 in Red Hook, Brooklyn, special education students arereceiving their services in hallways and stairwells, all so that PAVEAcademy Charter School can have more classrooms. In each public schoolwhere a charter school has opened there are equally devastating stories.Instead of working with and supporting district public schools,
theDepartment of Education is allowing (and encouraging) our publicschool spaces to be replaced and privatized.
 
MYTH: Competition between schools will improve the educationalsystem.Truth:
 
Any system based on competition will have winners and losers.
Inthe case of our educational system, t
he winners and losers are our children.
 We need to create a system in which everyone, especially our most needy,can excel. In a competitive system, one school’s success is only possiblewhen another fails.
Education is not a game—it is a right.
 
OUR VISION 
Our vision for public school reform does not include privatization. Wesupport quality public neighborhood schools with smaller class sizes, equitable funding, union protections, local school councils, andneighborhood enrollment that protects and includes all children. Wesupport a moratorium on charters, turnarounds, consolidations, phase-outs, school closings and any other form of school privatization.Public schools and educators should be empowered to work withcommunities to develop curriculum that is grounded in the lives of theyoung people they teach. Each school’s curriculum should reflect theculture, needs and lived experience of its students, critically supportstudent identities, embrace and recognize the value of students’ homelanguages, and invite students to engage in solving societal problems.The Grassroots Education Movement (GEM) believes in a bottom-up, participatory and highly democratic process to engage schools andcommunities in school improvement. JOIN US!
The Truth aboutCharter Schools inNew York City 
GEM:
GrassrootsEducationMovement 
  ,
NewYorkCity
February,2011gemnyc@gmail.comgrassrootseducationmovement.blogspot.com/

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