New York, NY —
New York City is well on track toward Mayor Bloomberg’s goal of having 100 charter schools by the fall. Charters are publicly funded but privately managed. Some parents believe they provide competition that can force the rest of the school system to improve. But others believe they’re draining resources. WNYC’s Beth Fertig took a close look at their effect in Harlem – a neighborhood that’s seen an explosion in charters.
To witnesss the debate over charter schools firsthand, it’s worth going someplace you wouldn’t expect: a girls’ bathroom at PS 123.
SCOTT: It’s very filthy. Look at it. Look in here, look on the floors, look in there. Not even tissue we have in here.
Hope Scott is a parent leader at the school. She’s pointing to the lack of toilet paper in a stall, and a long, old-fashioned sink with multiple faucets. It’s not awful – just old.
But it’s not as nice as the bathroom upstairs, where the Harlem Success Academy runs a charter school in the very same building as PS 123.
SCOTT: Look at the lighting. Everything is so different.
We’re now in the girls bathroom in the charter school. It’s brighter, with new tiles. Not exactly the Four Seasons. But to Hope Scott, it’s a big difference.
SCOTT: They have a mirror, we don’t. They have a new basin that they wash their hands. Look at it compared to what the public school have. It’s segregation.
Segregation is a strong word. But the decision to put a charter school inside PS 123 has incited strong feelings – partly because of these different facilities. Charter schools are privately managed and don’t have to use regular Department of Education contractors for things like bathroom repairs. They can also raise private money.
But Eva Moskowitz, who runs the Harlem Success Academy, says parents who think charters are taking resources away from regular public schools are missing the point. She says charters wouldn’t exist if there wasn’t a need.
MOSKOWITZ: You know what kind of segregation we have that is really morally troubling? We have a segregation where 19 of the 23 zoned schools in Harlem are educating kids poorly. If this were the Upper East Side of Manhattan nobody would stand for lousy schools that are not working for kids, they wouldn’t stand for it! There would be an uprising!
Moskowitz is a former City Council member from the Upper East Side. She’s opened four Harlem Success Academies in the past three years. The one inside PS 123 is especially controversial because its location was supposed to be temporary. But it’s now staying another year.
PROTESTERS: Who’s school? Our school! Who’s school? Our school!
The community group ACORN joined parents and teachers outside PS 123 to protest the Harlem Success Academy because they think it will cause overcrowding. Both schools are planning to expand this fall. The Department of Education insists there’s room for both. But kindergarten teacher Whitney Davis of PS 123 says not enough.
DAVIS: Cause if they want, you know, a very tightly packed space where there’s no space for any extra activities, there’s no science room, there’s no computer lab, there’s no art room – that’s what we lost when they came in.
From Brooklyn to the Bronx, there have been complaints about charter schools opening alongside - OR replacing - regular public schools. In fact, The Harlem Success Academy is staying at PS 123 for another year because the teachers union and some parents blocked a plan to move it to a another Harlem school that’s failing.
The Harlem Success Academies promote a culture of high achievement starting at an early age.
SHAKTIMA: I’m writing about horns.
First grader Shaktima Tater reads her essay explaining why car horns beep.
SHAKTIMA: It says horns beep because when there is traffic people send news to each other.
Students write often and have eight and a half hour school days – plus weekends. Classrooms have charts showing how much money college graduates make compared to high school dropouts.
First graders are too young to take tests. But at another Harlem Success campus on 118th Street, 95 percent of third graders met the state standards in reading. And 100 percent scored at or above the state standards in math.
Chancellor Joel Klein says charter schools provide new options for parents in districts with failing schools.
KLEIN: Any time there’s a better school – if your kid gets into college and she gets into three different college, you and everybody else want her to get into the best of them. That’s human nature and all we’re doing is creating this rising tide, that’s all.
But are charters part of this rising tide Klein seeks to create among all the city’s public schools? Or are they isolated pockets of achievement?
In the neighborhood schools of Central Harlem, 59 percent of students met the state standards for reading this year. That’s compared to an average of 78 percent of students at five charter schools in the same district.
Ernest Logan, who heads the principals union, attributes this gap partly to demographics. Charter schools hold lotteries for their students – which Logan says could attract more motivated parents. But a public school like PS 123 takes anyone from its Harlem neighborhood.
LOGAN: They come out of the projects right there. They also come out of six or seven domestic shelters there, that they have for parents fleeing domestic abuse. This area here is inundated with many shelters.
Despite these disadvantages, Logan says test scores have been rising steadily at PS 123 since the school got a new principal. He says that’s proof public schools can succeed when given the right tools. But he claims charters make their job even harder by hanging onto students most likely to succeed. Over the past two years, he claims principals at 17 schools in Harlem have taken 50 transfer students from charters.
LOGAN: The complaints I’m getting from the principals in Harlem is that they’re getting students back who had been in the charters, whose parents had been really encouraged that maybe they would not do as well there and they need to go other places.
The charter schools have heard these complaints before and say their lotteries for random admissions produce similar demographics as the neighborhood schools. Charters do tend to take fewer foreign language speakers, and they often can’t serve the neediest special education students. But if anything explains her higher test scores at her charters, Moskowitz says it’s the same freedom from union contracts and work rules that allowed her to renovate the bathroom.
MOSKOWITZ: One of the reasons we are able to succeed is we give our teachers the time that they need to be super well prepared. We are also able to deploy our resources very, very nimbly. So, our art teacher teaches literacy. Our science teachers teach literacy. And a teacher can’t say to us ‘No, not my job, not in the contract.’
TEACHER: Is a rectangle a solid figure or a flat polygram?
As charters like Harlem Success Academy continue to grow, some parents say the public schools should learn from them. Kimberly Hall Hart has a son in third grade at Harlem Success.
HART: Instead of coming after the charter schools organize your parents raise your standards with the administration of the public school and don’t take it out on charter school. Everything we have we fought for tooth and nail.
Including those nice bathrooms, she says. But at PS 123, parents say they’ve also fought to improve their school. They don’t want to lose momentum when the school expands next year alongside the growing Harlem Success Academy.
Twelve-year old Scott Paterson – whose mother showed us the bathrooms – says he attended a charter school for a year. He says he got good grades but thought it was too strict. When he heard the Harlem Success Academy would be sharing space with PS 123, that inspired some rivalry.
SCOTT: It had an impact on me. So it wanted me to work more harder and try to um, show them how we can be better than them. Cause they’re trying to say they’re better than us, but really they’re not.
Chancellor Klein often says “charter” is just a label, and that parents will flock to good schools regardless of whether they’re charters or regular schools. But he also expected there to be competition; and in Harlem, he certainly got it. For WNYC I’m Beth Fertig.