Seeker Blog

The Harlem Success Lottery - read and weep…

Note that Ms. Moskowitz quotes her charter school costs of 75% of NY State union-controlled schools. This is not unusual - the latest study I’ve read indicated that excellent-efficient schools country-wide cost about 67% of the monopoly schools while delivering the high quality product.

If New York State Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver isn’t otherwise occupied, perhaps he could stop by the Harlem Success Academy in Upper Manhattan later today.

The public charter school, which opened last year, is holding an admissions lottery at 6 p.m. to fill 105 kindergarten slots for next year from the 500 or so families who’ve applied for them. Harlem Success was founded by Eva Moskowitz, a reform-minded Democrat who formerly served as a New York City Councilwoman specializing in education issues.

In an interview this week, Ms. Moskowitz described the naked emotions on display at such lotteries, which are a common method for deciding who gets to attend these independently run public schools. “I thought I knew a lot about school choice and ed reform,” she said. “But until I’d done the lottery last year I didn’t understand the desperation.

“Unlike their middle-class counterparts who can use real estate to determine where their kid is going to school, my exclusively black and Latino parents’ only option is to go through this process. And literally, people are praying and shaking and hoping to get into a school.”

As for Mr. Silver, the Democratic lawmaker is single-handedly blocking a bipartisan attempt by Democratic Governor Eliot Spitzer and the GOP-controlled state Senate to lift New York’s current cap of 100 charter schools, which was reached last year. Mr. Silver is beholden to the teachers unions, who oppose charters because they operate outside of union work rules.

Ms. Moskowitz is baffled by his intransigence. “In his bill, he’s proposed further lowering significantly the funding for these schools,” she said. “I’m already educating these kids at 75 cents on the dollar, compared to a traditional public school. And we’re getting results. Sixty-six percent of our first-graders are reading at a second-grade level. We’ve been open 126 days.”