Monday morning, most students in New York City woke up excited to have a snow day. But one boy, who attends Harlem Success Academy Charter School on West 118th Street, was disappointed. “My son can’t wait to go to school,” said Kyesha Bennett of Harlem Parents United—a group that seeks to protect and increase school choice.
Last year, New York State approved the addition of 100 charter schools statewide, a significant number of which are popping up in Harlem, increasing the alternatives for Harlem parents and students. This proliferation of schools may be a ray of hope for locals frustrated by their educational options in the area, where schools are historically known for producing poor standardized test scores and low graduation rates.
Charters are “changing Harlem,” Bennett said. As a founder of HPU, Bennet has been working to dispel misconceptions about charter schools with a group of Harlem parents who are similarly frustrated by the lack of school choice in their neighborhood. “We bring information out and expand choice for parents, and fight people who want to go back to how it was,” Bennet said. “People want to keep the status quo, which is that these kids go to schools that don’t educate our children.”
The Right to Educational Choice
“It’s a civil right to be educated at the highest level,” Bennett said. “Expanding choice means allowing more charters if people want and putting children first.”
HPU’s insistence on locals’ right to school choice seems to resonate with parents and politicians in the area. At the Harlem School Fair held last Saturday at City College, as many as 4,000 parents came to explore area education options. The fair, which included 55 public, private, and charter schools, was proof “that people want an option,” Natasha Shannon, another founder of HPU, said.
Local politicians also voiced support for parents’ right to choose the course of their child’s education. “If you’re a parent, if you have children, you want the best for your children,” Councilman Robert Jackson (D-Harlem) and chair of the Education Committee said. “Every school is not right for every child.” Jackson later added that “public schools are not providing the outcomes that parents feel charter schools can provide.”
New charter schools have greatly increased options. “We have way more choices than we’ve ever had before,” Shannon said.
“There are so many schools here,” Thea Woody agreed. Woody was looking for a school for her daughter Diamond, who is going into the third grade. “I didn’t know there were so many schools in Harlem.”
Choosing Charter
Woody said she was leaning towards charter schools because of their benefits over standard public schools—more challenging work, smaller class sizes, and more extracurricular programs.
Charter schools, which are public, are attractive in part because they provide education for the same cost as traditional public schools: for free. Any student who wishes to apply to charter schools is entered into a random lottery system that will accept a fraction of all applicants.
Unlike private schools, charters—such as Future Leaders Institute Charter School on West 122nd Street—traditionally serve economically poor communities where children have few school choices, according to Peter Anderson, head of school at FLI. FLI opened in 1999 and received official charter-school status in 2005.
“The idea behind charter schools ... is to give those families and communities that tend to have the fewest resources more choice,” he said. “For so long in Harlem, families have been marginalized by conventional education and haven’t had the opportunity to provide as robust choices for their children.” Residents of more affluent neighborhoods, Anderson pointed out, have more resources to pour into their schools and are able to supplement what the school offers with private tutoring, for example.
Especially during difficult economic times, parents are realizing that without a sufficient education, their child’s chances for long-term success are limited, Anderson added.
Consumer Education
Katie Duffy, director of external affairs for Democracy Prep Charter School on West 133rd Street—founded in 2005—said that the range of charter schools now enables parents to ask questions, such as whether their child would rather join the debate team or learn piano. These are questions that, for a long time, they hadn’t been able to ask.
“Parents are becoming savvy consumers and they want to know what their kids are getting,” Duffy said. “We tell our kids that if they work hard, they’ll go to college and change the world, and as a school we have to be accountable to that ... parents are saying show me the results and that it matters and makes sense.”
Describing the student body at Democracy Prep as “a melting pot,” Duffy said that there’s no typical student at her school, but rather a group of racially and socioeconomically diverse children who also differ in terms of ability and parental support.
A testament to the growing demand for charter schools, Democracy Prep saw 800 applications for 100 seats last year and is expecting 1000 this year, Duffy said.
Still, defining success is not easy for charter schools.
One way that Democracy Prep—which teaches sixth through eighth grades—measures success is based on their graduates’ college choices. The school hopes its students will go on to lead a life of active citizenship, Seth Andrew, founder and head of school, said. “Everything we do, from our schedule to our curriculum, to our extracurriculars, to our terminology, is a mechanism to make sure kids get to that end goal. Building that expectation is a part of that and they start that from the day they elect in.”
For example, sixth graders are referred to as the College Class of 2019 to emphasize the importance of not just getting to college, but of finishing.
Having What It Takes
According to an agreement with the state, charter schools are held to certain quantitative standards that, when met, qualify them to receive continued funding. As part of these five-year performance contracts with the state, specific goals are established in relation to test scores, attendance rates, high-school placement, and high-school graduation rates.
These schools seem to be meeting and exceeding these standards. In 2007, according to FLI’s Web site, 100 percent of FLI students in grades three through five outperformed all 18 of the closest traditional public and charter schools in combined reading and math test scores.
Democracy Prep ranked in the top one percent of schools in NYC in its first year, outperformed Westchester County in 2007 state math tests, and has won awards in debate, math, basketball, and dance tournaments, its Web site states.
Despite these schools’ success rates, the trend of creating more charter schools raises contentious issues among parents. Khadyjah Wilson, parent coordinator for P.S. 180 Hugo Newman on West 120th Street and former charter-school parent, said charter schools’ lack of experience and funding must be taken into consideration when parents are choosing schools.
While parents at a regular public school know the school’s track record, new charters may be testing curricula for the first time. “New charter schools are going through growing pains,” Wilson said. She added that charters are known for their teacher turnover rate, which is higher than that of traditional public schools. In her view, charter schools still face the same issues as regular public schools.
Competitive Education
Despite the appeal of choice, some parents are wary of charter schools, saying that they divert funds away from traditional public schools.
Another complaint deals with space shared between traditional public and charter schools. At a recent CB10 meeting, local mother Liz Brock said, “I don’t support charter schools unless they have their own buildings ... You got $30,000—take that and build your own schools.”
Yet the need for extra space is just a side effect of the growing demand for charters from parents.
“I think it [the growing number of charters] just proves that what we’re doing thus far is working, and the more we continue to do it, and the more success the movement has, the greater the confidence our parents have in us,” Joe Negron, principal of KIPP Infinity Charter School on West 133rd Street, said.
“I predict that in five years you’ll have kids, parents, and families begging to come to Harlem schools,” Andrew said.
Lydia Wileden contributed to this article
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