On July 6, 2011, the WCC submitted the following letter to the New York Times.
To the Editor:
We wish to validate what Diane Ravitch wrote about charter schools (letters to the Editor, The New York Times, July 6, 2011) “that they vary widely” and that “some are excellent, some are abysmal and most are no better than regular public schools.”
In 2002, as Co-Chairs of the Education Committee of the Women’s City Club of New York, a civic organization now celebrating its 95th year, we co-authored the first independent study of charter schools in New York City, “Snapshot of New York City Charter Schools 2002.” We visited all 17 of New York City’s charter schools then in existence. Five years later the report was updated.
As Ravitch writes, we found each school to be a separate and distinct entity, many with enormous resources, some with very few. Most impressive was the KIPP middle school in the South Bronx. On the bulletin board in a corridor of the floor of the public school building that they shared with two other schools was a list of the elite high school boarding schools to which KIPP graduates had been accepted. During a second visit a few years later we read the names of the Ivy League colleges KIPP graduates were now attending. We learned that KIPP students, minority and poor, spent part of each summer at camp, and were taken on trips throughout the country. During the school year they received instruction on musical instruments and spent afternoons at structured after-school activities. Each student was given the phone number of his teacher, who could be phoned at night to help with homework. Parents, students and teachers signed a contract that outlined the expectations of the school.
We also visited a charter high school in the Bronx in its own new building that was devoted to the arts, heavily subsidized by several philanthropists. By contrast, a regular elementary school in another part of the Bronx was housed in the basement of a small church; the principal was a member of the congregation as were the parents of most of the children. Another elementary charter school was devoted to teaching reading by color – each sound had it own color, and beginning readers learned to recognize the color in which vowels were printed. The school day of many of the charter schools ran from 7:30 a.m. to 4:30 or 5:00 pm and the school year usually exceeded the state’s required 183 days by 10 to 15 days.
Although children with disabilities were not excluded from charter lotteries, several principals told us that they informed parents that they would not be able to provide the services that regular public schools provide, which tended to keep children in need of those services from entering the lottery. It is no wonder that thousands of parents apply to charter school lotteries hopeful that their children will benefit from the many more resources that many charter schools provide.
We often wonder how much resources-starved regular public schools would improve if all the interest and funding now offered charter schools by hedge fund managers and well-meaning philanthropists were instead allocated to them.
Dorothy Wilner – former teacher and former Community School Board member
Eleanor Stier – Education Policy Analyst
