I'm cross-posting. I have video interviews with Noah from Monday's rally in Harlem but have to race off to Rockaway Theater to help clean the place for Friday's opening.
 | Noah Gotbaum: Who Are the Real Victims of Eva Moskowitz’s “Success Academies”?by dianeravitch |
In an article in the New York Daily News, which has been an outspoken champion of charters schools and Eva Moskowitz's attacks on Mayor Bill de Blasio, Noah Gotbaum explains why Eva's schools are "successful": they leave out the neediest students. Gotbaum is a public school parent and has children with special needs.
Gotbaum writes:
Eva Moskowitz is up in arms. Her schools are being “closed,” she says, and her students left “educationally homeless” by the mayor’s “war” on charters. She’s even called in the civil rights lawyers.
Truth is, it is Moskowitz and her patrons who are waging war — insisting that autistic and severely emotionally disturbed kids be forced out of their own building to make room for her high-performing “scholars.”
Contrary to the cry of the governor and hedge funders, Mayor de Blasio was absolutely right to reverse Success Academy’s co-location agreement and ensure our most vulnerable kids get needed services and a sound education.
Let’s examine the facts.
In the dying weeks of his administration, Mayor Bloomberg rammed through a record 45 new school-sharing arrangements — including 17 new charters. Late last month, de Blasio allowed 36 of these to move forward, including 14 of the 17 new charter co-locations. Moskowitz’s Success Academies network was handed five new sites. Hardly a war or personal vendetta.
Of the three reversed charter co-locations, two were for new Success charter elementary schools, neither of which has yet to accept a single student. This makes Success’ claims of “closed” schools and “evicted” students disingenuous at best.
The final charter rollback was the proposed move of Harlem Success 4’s fifth through seventh grades into the PS 149 building in Harlem, already home to PS/MS 149; the very-high-needs Mickey Mantle school, which is part of special education District 75; and another Success Academy charter.
To accommodate Moskowitz, Bloomberg’s DOE planned to move one-third of Mickey Mantle’s autistic and severely emotionally disturbed children out of the building, exiling them to three potential DOE sites long bus rides away from their northern Manhattan communities.
According to the city’s own Educational Impact Statement, the co-location would then have increased occupancy in the building for the remaining Mickey Mantle and PS 149 students to 132% — almost 400 students above the DOE’s already unrealistic “target capacity” of 1,200.
To accommodate the overcrowding, students in the public school would have been required to eat lunch at 10:40 am, but not students in Eva's charter school.
To accommodate the overcrowding, students in the public school would have been required to eat lunch at 10:40 am, but not students in Eva's charter school.
Eva has been playing the victim of a vendetta on national television, but the real victims are the children who are pushed aside to make way for her students.
Read more: http://www.nydailynews.
Read more: http://www.nydailynews.
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