Please Join Our Press Conference and Protest Today to Reject the Success Charter Network's Pending District 3 Application and Co-Location at PS 145: Tuesday 10/19, 3:45 PM at PS 145, 150 West 105th Street

For Immediate Release

Please Join Assemblyman Danny O'Donnell, Council Member Gale Brewer, Other
Elected Officials, Community and School Representatives, and District 3
Parents at a Press Conference Today, 10/19 at 3:45 pm at PS 145 (150 West
105th between Amsterdam and Columbus) to Reject the Success Charter
Network's "Upper West Success" Application and Instead Improve the Prospects
of All of Our District 3 Schools

Currently, the SUNY Board of Trustees is considering an application
submitted by Success Charter Networks for a new K-8 school to be co-located
within a district school building within Community School District 3.
Apparently, however, the legislated charter approval process and its public
input component do not apply to Eva Moscowitz and her Success Charter
Network Schools. While the SUNY Board of Trustees vote on her latest
Success Charter network application has yet to take place (it is planned for
tomorrow, 10/20), and no building location has been specified within her
pending 1000+ page charter application, Ms. Moscowitz has picked out a
public school building of her choice and already begun advertising her new
"Upper West Success" school at bus stops on the Upper West Side and on a
website.

IMG_0411.JPG

Meanwhile, the faculty, parents and administration at Ms. Moscowitz's target
location, PS 145, are none too happy to have been told by the DOE's Office
of Portfolio Planning that the SUNY vote and the mandated Educational Impact
Statement process for co-location already is a foregone conclusion: "We
were informed by the DOE last week that it is 95% certain that the new
Success Charter School will be co-locating within our school come next
September" said PS 145 PTA President Tina Crockett.

In fact SUNY had scheduled a vote to approve the application over a month
ago on September 15, long before the end of the required 45 day public
comments period for charter applications, but postponed the vote after being
threatened by a lawsuit from the District 3's Community Education Council,
and the Co-Presidents of the Parent Elected Citywide Council on Special
Education, Jaye Bea Smalley and John Englert in the attached letter.
"Clearly, SUNY knew it would have broken the law by approving the Success
Charter application in the middle of the 45 day mandatory public comments
period," stated CEC 3 President Noah E Gotbaum.

The CEC 3/CCSE Presidents' letter further protested a SUNY Trustee's
sub-committee resolution recommending approval of Success Charter's
application only 11 days after the application had been filed. The late
August draft SUNY resolution also claimed that "no comments" on the
application had even been received by SUNY, a statement met with amazement
by the dozens of District 3 parents and community members who had sent in
emails to SUNY seeking Success Charter's rejection.

When queried by the CEC on this omission of community input into the
application process, SUNY Charter Institute Director Jonas Chartock
explained that the only "comments" the Trustees "are required by statute to
have considered..prior to a vote" are those sent in by Chancellor Klein, who
in fact had not forwarded any comments on the application. Is this the
public input process as envisioned by the legislature?

And what happened to the dozens of comments from the community not penned by
the Chancellor? According to Ralph Rossi, Vice President for Legal Affairs
at SUNY, those are to be summarized by SUNY and sent to the Trustees at any
point in the approval process. Mr Rossi continued, however, that many of
these comments became "null and void" after Ms. Moscowitz's organization
suddenly withdrew its application on the last day of a prior public comments
period, only to reapply a few days later - with a clean slate and no
community comments on record to that point.

Back at PS 145, the school's plans to increase its enrollment and reach into
the broader Upper West Side and Harlem Community are under threat by the
Success Charter incursion. In fact there is a palpable fear that PS 145
students will be squeezed into hallways and basement space as has occurred
in PS 149 and PS 241, the other District 3 schools co-located with Ms.
Moscowitz's Success Charter schools. The PS 145 community is justifiably
worried that eventually it may have to close down completely in order to
accommodate the 698 proposed Success Charter students, since by the DOE's
own assessment there are only 320 unutilized seats within the PS 145
building.

Where will the remaining 370 seats come from needed to accommodate the
Success Charter application? The DOE isn't saying. Given, however, that
many of PS 145's students are in self-contained Special Education classes -
which not one of Ms. Moscowitz's schools offer - possibilities are extremely
limited for a substantial number of PS 145 students to move across the hall
and matriculate in the newly established charter. Regardless, in a rezoning
plan unveiled last week to CEC3, the DOE proposed to freeze the 145 zone
size thereby limiting its enrollment increases and maintaining the
building's "underutilized" status for the pre-ordained Success Charter
co-location. "Underutilized buildings are extremely hard to come by and as
such we seek to use them for co-locating new schools" commented Elizabeth
Rose, the Director of the DOE's Office of Portfolio Planning.

Sadly, Success Charter's approval and co-location within the PS 145 building
likely will negatively reverberate far beyond the Bloomingdale School
community and across all of District 3, not simply by taking up seats that
our overcrowded district desperately needs, but also by putting at risk a
Federal magnet grant awarded to PS 145 and seven other District 3 schools.
The $11 million grant, which seeks to increase racial integration and
performance, stipulates that every magnet school involved must have adequate
space to grow their programs in line with the grant application. In PS
145's case this is not a curtailment of students but rather an increase in
racial diversity and enrollment of some 8-10% over a 3 year period. The
grant further stipulates that if one school is out of compliance, as PS 145
is likely to be, all schools will be, thereby forfeiting the grant funding
for all 8 of the magnet schools.

For these and numerous other reasons as delineated in the attached Class
Size Matters and CEC3 comments on the Success Charter Application, and the
PS 145 Community Comments - we ask that you join Assemblyman Daniel
O'Donnell, Councilmember Gale Brewer, PS 145 and District 3 Teachers,
Administrators and Parents, and Elected members of Community Education
Council 3 and the Citywide Council on Special Education today at 3:45, at PS
145 - 150 West 105th Street between Columbus and Amsterdam.

For comments and questions, please contact:

Noah E Gotbaum - President, Community Education Council District 3: 917
658 3213

Tina Crockett - President, PS 145 Parent Association: 646 315 4462

Jaye Bea Smalley - Co-President, Citywide Council on Special Education*:
917-601-8924

John Englert - Co-President, Citywide Council on Special Education*: 973
907 0319

Leonie Haimson - Executive Director, Class Size Matters: 917 435 9329

*for affiliation purposes.

Mosaic Prep/HSA Charter Invasion Follow-up

Follow-up to this story on Ed Notes:

Eva Moskowitz Wants Mosaic Prep Academy- Hearing, Monday

There are hearings on this illegal expansion of Harlem Success 3 on Monday at 141 E 111 ST; come by 4;30 - 5 PM if you want to speak.

The below letter from Rose Jimenez is addressed to Jonas Chartock, the head of the SUNY charter institute, as well as Pedro Noguera, head of the charter committee for SUNY, which has to approve every charter authorized by SUNY, as well as any charter revision, which this is.

Dear Mr. Chartock and Prof. Noguera:

As a parent at Mosaic Prep Academy (PS 375) and a member of the Community Education Council in District 4 in East Harlem, I do not understand how the SUNY Charter School Institute could consider allowing Harlem Success Academy 3, a school that is co-located in our building, to revise its charter to substantially expand from 363 students to 468 students next fall.

Any such expansion would obviously require a significant change in our school building’s utilization, without any of the public procedures outlined in the school governance law having been implemented.

As I’m sure you are aware, the governance law, A8903, requires that any significant change in public school utilization in New York City must be preceded by an Educational Impact Statement issued at least six months before the start of the new school year, as well as a joint hearing of the DOE, the CEC and the School Leadership Team at the affected school; and finally, a vote of the Panel for Educational Policy.

None of these events have occurred in this case, and in fact, it is too late for the DOE or SUNY to allow any expansion of the school to occur without warning so late in the school year, unless these additional students would attend classes elsewhere in a non-DOE building.

A SUNY hearing on the expansion and charter revision of Harlem Success Academy 3 is due to occur this Monday, June 21, at 5:30 PM.

I would very much like to hear from you before that time as to how SUNY could countenance such a potentially illegal expansion.

Yours sincerely,

Rose Jimenez, CEC District 4 and PS 375 Parent Association President

Patrick Sullivan, Manhattan PEP rep, corresondence with Ralph Rossi of SUNY, supposedly the governing body for HSA appeals to modify the charter.

To: Rossi, Ralph
Cc: mosaicparentassociation@univision.com; Charter Schools;
robertjacksonnyc@gmail.com; efox@council.nyc.gov;
classsizematters@gmail.com; MDuffy12@schools.nyc.gov; Erin McGill;
cec4@schools.nyc.gov; pednoguera@gmail.com; Joel Klein
Subject: Re: ILLEGAL CHARTER PROPOSAL

Mr. Rossi,

Ms. Jimenez refers to the schools governance law passed by the State
Legislature in August. As the Manhattan member of the city school
board ("Panel for Educational Policy") I can assure you that none of
the legally mandated process for such a significant change in
utilization of a public school building was followed in this case.
There has been no Educational Impact Statement, no joint hearing of
the Mosaic SLT with the Community Educational Council of District 4
and no vote of the Panel for Educational Policy.

I alerted DOE General Council Michael Best several weeks ago of the
need to follow the required process in this case and several others
involving SUNY chartered schools. I have been told DOE is looking
into the matter but there has been no response otherwise.

The SUNY trustees have a legal obligation to ensure all legally
mandated procedures are followed prior to allowing the expansion of a
SUNY chartered school. Expansion of HSA 3 in the Mosaic building
without adherence to the above process constitutes a violation of law
for which SUNY trustees must be held accountable.

Frankly, given that SUNY recently came very close to losing its
chartering authority, I am extremely disappointed that its first
instinct is to deny any responsibility for compliance with the very
clear guidelines under state education law. This law was implemented
to protect public school students from the very type of encroachment
now being attempted by HSA. Instead of washing their hands of the
very real issues facing Manhattan public schools in co-location
situations, I suggest the trustees begin to more seriously consider
their moral and legal obligations to help all our students.

Patrick J. Sullivan
Manhattan Member
Panel for Educational Policy
NYC Board of Education

On Sat, Jun 19, 2010 at 10:12 AM, Rossi, Ralph Ralph.Rossi@suny.edu wrote:

I am not in the office now but it is SUNY's understanding that all of the steps for the expansion took place before the passage of the amendments to the charter schools act. The hearing would NOT be co-location hearing by the NYCDOE or a SUNY hearing on facility. Rather it is a NYCDOE revision hering required by the charter schools act for a material change to a charter located in the district, in this case enrollment. The timing of the hearing is required by regs of the State Education Commissioner and based on notice by SUNY to the NYCDOE. You can direct any questions about the space process to the NYCDOE.

Haimson on Eva's saturation charter school mailings

Subject: [nyceducationnews] Eva's saturation charter school mailings

See this message from a friend who lives on the Upper West side with a child entering Kindergarten next year, who has received multiple mailings from the Harlem Success Academy in the week:

Today we received the 3d or 4^th mailing in the last week from the Harlem Success Academy, looking to enroll [his son’s name].

This really surprises me:

A. How do they get the $ to do direct mail & find out what kids are going to start kindergarten?

B. Why are they direct mailing to White couples on 102^nd?

Really curious if you have any thoughts or insight - -

The infamous Eva Moskowitz/Joel Klein emails, FOILed by Juan Gonzalez of the Daily News and posted here, revealed how Klein overturned long-standing policy to provide her with names and addresses of prospective parents through mailing houses; and allowed her to make repeated mailings to promote her chain of charter schools.

Juan’s column in which he showed how she picked out the space she wanted for her schools in existing zoned public schools, which Klein then tried to illegally close for her benefit, is here ;Juan’s earlier column about the preferential treatment she received from Klein, including his help in getting her a $1 million grant from the Broad foundation to build an army of parents to promote their political agenda, is here.

In her emails to Klein, Eva confides her desire to engage in saturation mailings, supposedly to promote “choice”, but really to build up her waiting list; which then she uses as a political weapon in their battle to lift the charter cap.

This may be one reason DOE is making parents register for Kindergartens earlier at public schools, so they can capture their addresses and make them available to charter schools in time for their lotteries.

Though Eva told the NY Times she spends $325,000 on recruitment, a cursory examination of the school’s financial statements shows that her spending on recruitment is actually much more. She has run ads in buses and is now also advertising on NY1. The actual expense must be near a million dollars or more.

Harlem Children’s Zone was featured on American Express ads during the Oscars.

Of course, no district public school could afford this sort of marketing campaign; and if they did, they would be accused of wasteful spending.

Here is Eva’s message to Klein, dated Dec. 21, 2007, in which she says though DOE only allows “one mailing to elementary and pre-K families” she wants to be able to mail promotional materials 10-12 times to each family.

As in all things between Klein and Eva, she gets her way. Her choices are clearly maximized!

Soon thereafter, she is provided with unlimited mailings through a third party mailing house to prospective public school parents.

Here is Michael Duffy’s reply, the head of the DOE charter school office, written the day after Xmas, in which he pledges cooperation and tells her she can always call him, day or night, on his cell:

No one could argue that this is an equal contest, when all the advantages are being given charter schools; not to mention Klein’s relentless promotion of charters, which is priceless.

Eva has now extended the reach of her mailings into large swathes of Manhattan and the Bronx. As one astute observer pointed out, this not only allows her to build up her charter school waiting list, but also to gather names for future battles over the charter school cap, funding, or her own future candidacy.

Her repeated mailings and advertising, financed through contributions from her hedge-fund supporters and billionaires like Broad, resemble the saturation mailings and domination of the air waves that New Yorkers have been subjected to by our billionaire mayor, each time he runs for re-election, sparing no expense.

Just as he has bought his way into a third term, the hostile takeover of public education by charter schools has nearly unlimited financing to back it up. Is this the future we really want for our public schools?

Two GEM NYC Teachers on "The Charter School Invasion of Harlem"

ANALYSIS: EMILY GILES AND BILL LINVILLE

The charter school invasion of Harlem

New York City teachers Emily Giles and Bill Linville describe how the drive to spread charter schools affected one public school in Harlem--and how teachers, parents and the community are organizing an opposition.

September 14, 2009

P.S. 123 is one of New York City's "well developed" schools, according to Department of Education (DOE) standards.

Also called the Mahalia Jackson Elementary School, it was so successful that the DOE approved a proposal to add 7th grade classes for the 2009-2010 school year--and according to a teacher at P.S. 123, more than 600 students applied.

But P.S. 123 doesn't have the space to accommodate those students. Teachers at the school are dismayed at the loss of two science labs, the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) lounge, a parent room with computers for parent GED prep classes, half the library and the social studies room.

As a matter of fact, the "well developed" P.S. 123 lost an entire floor for this school year. Strangely enough, as the school was given DOE approval to grow, the very same DOE took away classrooms and program space.

That space was given to a charter school called the Harlem Success Academy II (HSA II), the second such academy founded by former City Councilwoman Eva Moskowitz, opened inside the P.S. 123 building one year ago.

Initially, HSA II was scheduled to move this school year to P.S. 194, another public school in the area that already houses a different charter school. But after a pushback from P.S. 194 teachers and parents, HSA II remains inside P.S. 123.

And not only is it staying--it's growing.

Like P.S. 123, HSA II submitted a proposal to add new grades and increase enrollment this year. Both schools were given permission to add classes, but HSA II gained space while P.S. 123 is losing it.

Thus, according to a P.S. 123 teacher, HSA II now has two science labs for 1st graders and Kindergarten students, while P.S. 123 science teachers are sharing one science lab for elementary and middle school science classes. And keep in mind, the teacher emphasized, that P.S. 123, and not HSA II, teaches science for grades that face high-stakes standardized tests.

What's most alarming about the P.S. 123 story is that it isn't unique. The same pattern of new charter schools moving into community public schools is happening across Harlem, where the charter school invasion is at its fiercest, and now across the city, where two dozen new charter schools opened across the city, and more are on the way.

What is unique about P.S. 123, however, is the way that teachers stood up to the activities of Eva Moskowitz and HSA--a struggle that gained momentum this summer and will continue into the new school year as HSA II continues to operate inside P.S. 123.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

MOSKOWITZ MADE the first move at the beginning of this summer. She hired private movers to come into P.S. 123 classrooms, pack up teachers' belongings and put them in the gymnasium, so HSA II could begin its takeover--all without even notifying P.S. 123 staff.

The movers came in and attempted to break into teachers' rooms, but many teachers stood their ground. "I told the other teachers to sit in front of their doors and don't move," one teacher said. "And don't let anybody touch you. If anybody touches you, it's on. You're not coming and breaking and entering with the person right there."

After New York City police and the DOE were called, the move was stopped. But on a walk-through of the school some days later, Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer found "a whole lot of boxes that are unmarked--people's supplies and resources moved into spaces of the school," he said. "No marking of what classroom they came from, no teacher's name on the boxes. They were basically packed up and pushed out. That's what's all over the school."

When students returned to school last week on September 9, materials were still piled up in classrooms, thanks to HSA's dump and run--and the refusal of teachers to clean up after them. Meanwhile, say teachers, HSA II's hallways inside the building have new lighting, remodeled bathrooms (with potpourri!), and every classroom has brand-new air conditioners.

This arrogance provoked protests throughout the summer, and the first day of school was no exception. Beginning at 6:30 a.m., more than two dozen demonstrators gathered outside of the HSA II entrance to the building.

When Moscowitz showed up, she claimed to the media that the protesters were scaring the children--and even had children up outside the building (which they normally don't do) to make it look like the picket line was blocking their entrance.

As parents from P.S. 123 came to drop off their children, parent leaders gathered them together and spoke about the conditions inside the school. The parents tried to enter the building to see for themselves, but were prevented from doing so by the principal. Yet later in the morning, reporters from the right-wing New York Post showed up and claimed that the schools chancellor had given them permission to enter.

After the first week of classes, some of the effects of HSA II's growth at the expense of P.S. 123 began to emerge: a class that lost its room to HSA was meeting in the basement, but had to be relocated after the children and teachers were having difficulty breathing; the former library is now a combination of several classrooms, and students and teachers have difficulty hearing each other because there are no barriers between the classes; a special education class with 12 students and seven adults is crowded into a half-classroom with no closet space.

One parent told a reporter, "I feel like my child is being raped."

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

THIS SUMMER saw a flurry of protests in Harlem in response to charter school takeovers and encroachments of public school buildings.

At P.S. 123, there were three rallies in July drawing between 30 and 50 people, among them parents, teachers and some students, along with community members and teachers from elsewhere in the city.

William Hargraves, a P.S. 123 parent, compared the situation to injustice of the fake separate-but-equal doctrine used to justify segregated schools under Jim Crow in the South. "We need to have charter schools governed with the same criteria that public schools are governed by," Hargraves said. "This is happening all over the city."

Annette Jimenez, leader of the Parent Association at P.S. 375 in East Harlem, said:

We're facing the same problem. The charter school that's in our building started with half of one of the floors in our schools. It moved on take a whole floor this year and next year...It will be servicing more children than we are now, and it's displacing most of our kids.

This is something that we need to stand up and fight now. This charter school system has come in to create a two-tier system for our schools and our students. Our children deserve the same treatment that the charter school students are getting. We see that their numbers aren't better than our numbers. We're going to continue to stand up and fight for this, and we're going to win.

On September 2, activists held a forum in Harlem called "The Truth About Charter Schools," which was attended by more than 100 people--around half of them parents of school kids. State Sen. Bill Perkins hosted the event, and speakers included William Hargraves; Brian Jones of the Grassroots Education Movement (GEM); and Akinlabi Mackall of the Coalition for Public Education.

Perkins opened up the forum by putting the issue of racism front and center. "They say that the charter schools are the prep schools for people of color," Perkins said. "That tells me we have a problem. Parents are in despair over what they don't have, and are hoping for something that is a satisfactory improvement. They're being forced to take action because of benign neglect. I think that's a political issue, and a civil rights issue."

Jones went through five myths about charter schools, exposing each as false. "If the charters are doing something innovative, then why aren't we doing that in the public schools?" he asked. "There's nothing in our union contract that stops us from teaching to smaller classes, from integrating the arts into the curriculum, or from using real science laboratories. If they're not doing anything innovative, then why are they pushing public schools out of their own buildings?"

Mackall talked about how charter schools are focused on the concerns of parents, but in a divisive way. "Who's addressing the problem of academic excellence forall of our children?" he said. "We need to be the parents of all of our children."

During the discussion, teachers from P.S. 123 and P.S. 241 and spoke passionately about how the expansion of charter schools inside public school buildings has caused horrible overcrowding and unsafe conditions for public school students.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

THE CHARTER school invasion and the protests against it have raised a number of questions about how to challenge the drive toward privatization.

The GEM members who helped organize the September 2 forum are mostly New York City public school teachers, who aim to work in coalition with parents and community members. GEM has taken a position explicitly against the expansion of charter schools. But other groups have been more equivocal.

The position of teachers union leaders has been to support charter schools that do the right thing--those that allow unions and that represent "public schools freed from bureaucratic micro-management to be educational laboratories," in the words of American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, who came out of the UFT.

In fact, the UFT runs two of its own charter schools and has partnered with Green Dot to run a third--even though teachers at these schools aren't under the same contract agreement as public school teachers.

Essentially, the attitude here can be summed up as: "If you can't beat them, join them." According to Weingarten, "Charters have a place in public education, and unions are not impediments to their success, despite some claims to the contrary. We need to get past the politics of conflict by working together and making sure that all New York City public school children attend a quality public school."

The community organization ACORN took the lead at several protests in July, but its organizers have argued that parents and teachers shouldn't be against charter schools, but should ask only that charters find their own space outside of public school buildings. At a July 10 protest, ACORN organizers told members of GEM to take down anti-charter school signs at the July 10 protest.

Meanwhile, Scott Stringer, the Manhattan borough president, said at the protest, "Nobody was disrespectful to the charter school, or that faculty or those children. There really is an ability to create common ground and negotiation and transparency...We should have a cooling-out period until there's a real sit-down between P.S. 123, the charter school, the Board of Education, and area elected officials."

There's nothing in this statement about granting the use of public school space to privately run charter schools. Stringer is merely calling for "transparency" in the process. While this would certainly be a good first step, we need to demand that politicians oppose charter schools and instead favor adequately funding public schools.

What's happening at P.S. 123 and elsewhere in Harlem is nothing short of a hostile takeover, facilitated by an education system under the control of the mayor--with no room for input from the community, parents or teachers. As journalist Juan Gonzalez wrote of the takeover:

[There was] no parent or faculty meeting to gauge whether anyone wants the new school. No official vote of the local Community Education Council. Some young bureaucrat from the city Education Department's Office of Portfolio Development arrives one day with a bunch of maps under his arm, and promptly orders a new allocation of rooms. Boom. Done. All part of Klein's rush to create 100,000 new charter school seats over the next few years.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

WHY THE rush? Is it really, as so many advocates boast, because charter schools are freed from bureaucratic controls, allowing them to be, as former AFT President Albert Shanker put it, "incubators of good instructional practice"?

This idea is unsettling because it suggests that public schools are in some way not set up to be "incubators of good instructional practice." Shouldn't we strive to make changes that enable all public schools to be bastions of "good instructional practice"? Of course we should.

In practice, the bureaucratic freedoms allowed to charter schools have nothing to do with good instructional practice--they have to do with the bottom line. Charter school administrators are freed from constraints like employing only certified teachers, employing unionized teaching staff, abiding by DOE time limits for the school day and year, using DOE contracted unionized support staff--and, above all, serving all students.

So it's unclear how lifting restrictions on teacher certification and unionization facilitate "good instructional practice."

Instead, charter schools are often plagued with high teacher turnover because of the absence of union contracts, longer school days and higher teaching loads. A study released by the Education Policy Research Unit found that the national teacher turnover rate in public schools averages 11 percent--while the average charter school attrition rate is almost 25 percent. In Harlem, Moskowitz's own Harlem Success Academy I fired the principal three weeks before the 3rd grade ELA test.

Charter schools not only have a different population of teachers--they also serve a different demographic of students than public schools.

Data for the 2007-2008 school year showed that 14 percent of students in New York City public schools were English Language Learners--while only 4 percent were in charter schools. Around 15 percent of public school students had special needs, while only 5 percent did in charter schools.

The numbers speak for themselves--charter schools don't serve the same population of students as public schools. Yet the most systematic study of charter schools found that around four in five charter school students had test scores at the same level or worse than public school students.

The primary result of the charter movement thus far has not been to create "incubators of good instructional practice," but instead to develop a separate and unequal system of education.

Charter school operators claim they are just a part of the public school system, but this is only true in the sense that they take money and resources from the public education system. In addition to money that they receive from state, local and federal governments, charter schools receive grants from foundations, and one-quarter of all charter schools are run on a for-profit basis.

In the Harlem community, the response to charter schools is mixed. Public schools in Harlem are segregated, under-funded and overcrowded, leaving parents searching for other options. Parents see fresh, newly renovated, activity-packed charter schools and see an opportunity for their children.

The charter movement operates under the guise of promoting civil rights and preys on parents' dissatisfaction with public schools--but in fact, it's pushing a right-wing neoliberal agenda that is systematically destroying community public schools.

The fight at P.S. 123 is a start in the ongoing battle to stop separate and unequal from becoming reality in our public schools.

http://socialistworker.org/2009/09/14/charter-school-invasion-of-harlem