Thursday, May 29, 2014

The Plan To Force Charter Co-Locations

Hard to see Cuomo's forcing the city to pick up the tab for charter school rent as aimed at anything other than the eventual return of the charter co-location scheme Bloomberg operated:

New York City's move to oust three charter schools from district buildings appears to carry a hefty price tag.
The mayor's budget sets aside $5.4 million in the coming fiscal year to lease sites for three Success Academy charters—more than $11,000 in rent for each child expected to be enrolled.

The price tag comes after Mayor Bill de Blasio revoked space in district buildings for the three charters in February, leading to an outcry from supporters of the high-performing network, whose students are almost all poor and black or Hispanic. After a state budget deal in April gave charters broad new protections, the city scrambled to find spaces for the schools.

City officials are negotiating leases to house the charters in three Catholic schools that are empty or closing. The city's Office of Management and Budget shows an expected allocation of $5.4 million a year for four years. 

Success Academy said last month that in the coming year, the three charters plan to teach a total of 484 children in kindergarten through seventh grades. If they grow to include more than 1,200 children as planned, the rental cost would become less than $4,500 a child.

Expensive, right?

Ah, but magnanimous Eva Moskowitz has a solution:

Eva Moskowitz, founder of Success Academy, said via email: "We thought the original locations made sense but we are grateful to the mayor for having found us alternative sites."

And so does the WSJ:

Mr. de Blasio came into office promising to curb the expansion of charters under former Mayor Michael Bloomberg, but softened his tone this spring. Gov. Andrew Cuomo brokered a budget deal that requires the city to provide free space in education department buildings to charters that are new or phasing in, or chip in up to $2,755 a student in rental costs.

While co-locations are the cheapest option for siting charters, some parents complain about clashing schedules and unfair access to gyms, cafeterias and other resources. Chancellor Carmen Farina has dispatched "campus squads" to resolve these disputes.

In short, the city's picking up the tab for charter school rent is unsustainable and that means we'll eventually be back to the co-locations battles.

Bloomberg is gone but the charter school entrepreneurs will always find other champions for thier cause.

Now it's Andrew Cuomo.

In the future, it will be somebody else.

And the charter schools keep multiplying:

Now, 183 charters serve 70,918 students. In the fall, 15 new charters are slated to open, and the city projects enrollment will rise to 82,989. The New York City Charter School Center projects enrollment to top 95,000 in 2017, and now counts a wait list of more than 50,000 students.

The mayor's budget includes spending city funds of $13,527 a student in charter tuition, plus $250 a child in new state money, for a total of $13,777 a student. Rental costs come on top of that rate.

The mayor's budget anticipates spending $1.29 billion on charters in fiscal 2015, up $247 million from the current year. 

Tell me again why de Blasio is urging Working Families Party to endorse Andrew Cuomo for re-election?

The reason why the city will have to pick up charter rent in perpetuity, no matter how rich a charter school is, no matter how much money it can raise, is Andrew Cuomo.

I mean, I understand political expediency and all, but has anybody given de Blasio more headaches these first months in office than Andrew Cuomo?

4 comments:

  1. Why? Because DeBlasio is a dud. A one term mayor for sure, neither fish nor fowl. Too wishy washy to take a stand and stick to it.
    He clearly lacks the savvy needed to fill the post with aplomb.
    Ends up pleasing no one, aiming for a ride on the backs of the teachers to apease a segment of the population. This is progressive? Not in my book.

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  2. Charters will grow like weeds strangling the public schools in their wake. The number of regular public school teachers will dwindle. It is like a game of musical chairs with teachers scrambling for seats when the music stops.

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  3. This episode demonstrates that, when it comes to the schools, it doesn't make much difference whom the Mayor is: the Permanent Government seeks the devolution of public education and the dominance of a parallel, privatized system, and that's what we will get, especially since the misleaders of the UFT have chosen not to fight it.

    Don't be too surprised if/when De Blasio and Farina start closing and/or reorganizing schools, as he seeks to make amends to the Overclass, whom as we know are very touchy about these things.

    Also, watch for a new front to open up in the coming years, the result of the new contract that is about to be approved: the so-called reformers and their backers will seek to convert endangered schools to charter-lite schools, combining promises of increased private funding with the threat of teachers in those schools becoming easy-to-fire ATRs (another gift of this contract) if they are closed or re-organized.

    It's win-win for the so-called reformers and their UFT enablers: the privatizers get schools with essentially no contract - at least until a little further down the road, when they can drown the union in the bathtub - while Weingrew get dues money from teachers they don't have to bother to represent.

    "PROSE, or close!" Coming soon to schools near you...

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  4. The UFT role in this will be quasi charters that are UFT with thin/sweetheart contracts. UFT will get the dues from people with little representation or support. Hmm - just like public school teachers. Also look for Cuomo to push to raise charter school cap once elected. Charters will skim off best students and pub schls will become repositories.

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