Charter school closed. Building turned over to another charter school. Favoritism claimed.

[madfloridian]

This is really something. A charter school, Ross Global, is being closed so that another charter school, Girls Prep Academy, can take over the building. Words are being exchanged about how the school leaders are playing favorites.

From the New York Times:

Charter School Cries Foul Over a Decision to Close It


Yana Paskova for The New York Times The Ross Global Academy on East 12th Street has been ordered to close. Another charter school, Girls Prep, may get the space.

When the city provided a home five years ago for the Ross Global Academy, a charter school founded by the widow of a media executive, its opponents complained about what they considered preferential treatment for a member of the moneyed elite. But last month, the Department of Education announced that the school would be closed because of poor performance. And now the Ross Global Academy is claiming that the true reason for its fall from grace is not what happened in the school, but something much more ironic.

They claim the city is catering to the other charter school now.

Money.

In a letter to state education officials this week urging a reversal of the city’s decision, the school says that its newly renovated building on East 12th Street has been promised to Girls Prep, another politically connected charter school on the Lower East Side that has long been yearning for better real estate.

..."The letter also questions whether there was any connection involving Girls Prep’s chairwoman, Sarah Robertson, the daughter-in-law of the prominent financier Julian Robertson, and $25 million in contributions made in recent years by the Robertson Foundation to three entities closely associated with the former schools chancellor, Joel I. Klein.

“We are not complaining about Mr. Robertson’s heavy contributions to public education, which are otherwise laudable, but about the attempt, once again, to favor Girls Prep over another school in consideration of those contributions,” said the letter, written by Edward J. M. Little, a lawyer for Courtney Sale Ross, the founder of Ross Global and the widow of Steven J. Ross, who was the chairman of Time Warner.

The New Yorker also covers this situation. One moneyed elite claiming another is being favored by the powers that be. Whatever happened to the notion of just having traditional public schools and funding them as they should be funded?

New York closes the Ross Global Academy.

The school, into which Ross and members of her board have poured eight million dollars of their own money, has had six principals, has occupied three locations, and lost three-quarters of its teachers last year; its charter is up for renewal this month. At eight-thirty on the appointed morning, Ross’s phone rang; on the line was Marc Sternberg, a deputy chancellor. “He said the most extraordinary thing,” Ross recalled last week. “He said, ‘I am informing you that the Department of Education is going to recommend a non-renewal.’ He said, ‘I want you to know, Courtney, that everybody here respects you, and we really need people like you.’ I said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me—you’re going to close the school, and you need people like me?’ ”

Not just 8 million of their personal money, but the school gets taxpayer money as well....money that will not to go public schools.

The article mentions the influx of the wealthy into the field of what used to be public education.

Among people like Ross—wealthy, connected professionals, whose own children are invariably privately educated—a passion for public education has lately become a favored cause. One has even just been appointed chancellor. (Despite being neighbors on the Upper East Side, Ross says that she’s never met Cathie Black, the new head of New York’s schools.) As an educator, Ross is self-taught—she founded the private Ross School, in East Hampton, twenty years ago, as an alternative to homeschooling her daughter, Nicole—and the Ross Global Academy, whose students are overwhelmingly black or Hispanic, and the majority of whom are poor, is her first venture in the U.S. public system. “I did build a school, so I know how hard it is,” she said. “I didn’t go into this thinking that it was going to be a cakewalk.”

And BTW that chancellor, Cathie Black, this week jokingly made a comment about how fast the schools were growing in one district. She said that practicing birth control might be a good idea.

Again in the Ross school the majority are overwhelming minorities, black and Hispanic. Many think this a back door way to resegregation.

Ross implied the decision to close the school was done to please the teachers' unions.

Speaking at the Ross Institute, her private foundation, Ross, who wore a gray pants suit and had her blond hair pinned on top of her head, acknowledged that her academy had not achieved all that she had hoped. But she also suggested—as the legal petition does—that the decision to close the school was a political move, made to appease the teachers’ union. “I can only surmise, but regular public schools are unionized, and charter schools don’t have to be unionized,” she said. She also implied that the Department of Education, which aims to open two dozen new charter schools this year, might have its eye on the Ross Global Academy’s space, which she and other donors recently renovated, at a cost of more than three million dollars, transforming the cafeteria into the Spiral Café, complete with batik-covered banquettes and noise-abating ceiling tiles; decorating the walls with art posters; and furnishing the classrooms with blond-wood tables.

Of course there is confusion about who benefits from the renovation, who really owns the property. That's what happens when public and private money are mixed this way.

There's a very interesting comment in the very long column at Education Notes about this topic. It's a little ways down the post.

So, now we are witness to a pissing contest between the rich spoiled clueless CMO's duking it out over market share and a real estate shortage ( and another 100 charters to go), while they find innovative ways to make money off of other people's money and other people's children.

Don't you miss the days when education reform was about teaching, learning, pedagogy, educational philosophy? Couldn't you really enjoy a good old fashioned polemic overmath manipulatives or inventive spelling just about now?

We are so far into the world beyond the looking glass we may never get back to kids and helping them learn about the world.

Data, data measurement. data warehousing, data manipulation, technology, innovation, school of one- NOTHING BUT SNAKE OIL, FOLKS. Isn't this really another way to separate the fools from their wallets, just like always?

We been had, and we been had bad.

Ross goes ballistic

Amen to that.

[Richard Steele]

1. K&R

[Starry Messenger]

2. k&r

Hey this is what they claim to have wanted--a free market system where failing schools close. This is what it looks like boys and girls. Ugly. But there it is.

[madfloridian]

3. And they get public taxpayer money....as they argue among themselves.

Free market schools, the dream of Newt Gingrich.

[Starry Messenger]

5. They really shouldn't get taxpayer money.

I don't know how they sold the public on that part. I wouldn't want Starbucks or Delta airlines to get heavily subsidized by tax money, and that's all these chains are--privately managed franchises. The whole point of public schools getting a steady revenue stream in the form of tax dollars is so they can plan based on their community needs. The anarchy of free market schools is just pissing all that money down the drain. Instead of thinking of the price tag per student, people need to think of it in terms of the overall value to a community to have a steady and available school.

[catzies]

4. "Charter schools" are how the rich home school-that's what I got out of the New Yorker article n/t

[sulphurdunn]

6. I wonder how long it will be

before we have charter backed securities bundled and traded on the NYSE? A $600 billion publicly financed and securitized investment bubble insured by public money would be a great, risk free investment strategy. Just because it didn't work with real estate doesn't mean it won't work with education, especially if public funds insure the entire racket against insolvency. :smoke:

[tblue37]

7. While reading the linked article, I was brought up short by this detail--

a description of Ross: "Ross, who wore a gray pants suit and had her blond hair pinned on top of her head. . . ."

Why on earth do we need to know about ehr gray pantsuit, her blonde hair, and how she styled her hair? Why are reporters still that stupid?

[madfloridian]

8. Yes, that was odd.

And not necessary.