The education model that fell apart
ALBANY—A few blocks from the Capitol, a cluster of vacant buildings testifies to the rapid rise and quick retreat of Albany’s charter school sector.
Once heralded as a new beginning for children living in grinding poverty and stuck in a long-troubled school district, Albany’s charter system has so far failed to live up to that promise. Five of the 12 charter schools that opened in the last decade have already closed, and others are being skeptically eyed by state officials.
The failures of Albany’s charter sector reflect some of the significant questions that surround Governor Andrew Cuomo’s push to expand the state’s charter sector in this year’s budget.
Charters were designed to rattle a public school system that graduates far less than half its student body in most of the state’s major cities and that has proven remarkably resistant to major change. Cuomo has offered a full-throated endorsement of charter schools, appearing at a massive rally last year and enacting new protections for the sector in last year’s state’s budget. This year, Cuomo wants to expand the sector even more, over the objections of Democrats in the state Assembly and their traditional allies in the state teachers’ union.
In Albany, all of the charter schools currently operating were supported by the Brighter Choice Foundation, created by Pataki-era officials who helped write the state’s charter laws. Once considered a gold standard of charter operations, two Brighter Choice middle schools were closed by the state’s Charter Schools Institute after just five years in operation, because 80 percent of the students were not proficient in English and math. Other charter schools in Albany, including an all-girls high school with a graduation rate of 51 percent, could be shuttered in the near future for poor performance.
In total, Albany taxpayers have spent more than $300 million on the city’s charter schools in the last decade, Albany school district spokesman Ron Lesko said. Many of those schools have now been closed.
“We didn’t need to spend scores of millions of dollars to find out that the work our teachers and staff do and the staff in Rochester, Syracuse, Buffalo and New York City, and every city in poor communities in America is doing is hard work,” he said. “There is no quick and easy fix and privatizing education is no answer and that’s been proven here.”
The failure in Albany has shown the disruption that charters can cause to public school systems and surrounding neighborhoods. The Brighter Choice middle schools set to close were built just a few years ago, near the foundation’s headquarters. Half of a city block was leveled and residents were displaced from their homes.
The closure of those schools has created an administrative nightmare for the Albany city school district, which must now establish an entirely new middle school in the next six months to handle the almost 400 charter school students who were enrolled in the failed The education model that fell apart | Capital New York: