Despite Gains, Charter
School Is Told to Close
By TRIP GABRIEL
ALBANY — Accountability is a mantra of the charter school movement. Students sign pledges at some schools to do their homework, and teachers owe their jobs to students’ gains on tests.
Nathaniel Brooks for The New York Times
Shakirah Mason prepares for art class. A committee will vote Tuesday on closing the school.
Nathaniel Brooks for The New York Times
Attrition rates have been criticized, but Mr. Jean-Baptiste said, “We attract more than the amount of students we lose.”
Nathaniel Brooks for The New York Times
The principal of New Covenant Charter School, Jecrois Jean-Baptiste, speaks to students at the end of the day. He started an ambitious turnaround plan.
But as New York State moves to shut down an 11-year-old charter school in Albany, whose test scores it acknowledges beat the city’s public schools last year, it is apparent that holding schools themselves accountable is not always so easy, or bloodless, as numbers on a page.
The principal, teachers and families of the New Covenant school have mounted a furious defense, citing rising achievement as well as their fears for the loss of a safe harbor from chaotic homes and streets, where teachers deliver homework to parents who are in jail to keep them involved, and the dean of students chases gang members from a nearby park.
“We’re that turnaround school America has been waiting to see,” said Jamil Hood, the dean, who grew up in the Arbor Hill neighborhood where the school is located.
Nonetheless, a trustees’ committee of the State University of New York, which grants the school’s charter, voted last month to close it. The committee endorsed the findings of state evaluators who said that despite academic gains, New Covenant fell short of a key benchmark in English, suffered from high student and teacher turnover and was not fiscally sound. The full 17-member SUNY board will decide the school’s fate on Tuesday.
A commitment to shut or radically shake up failing schools is central to President Obama’s vision of education reform and explains in part the bear hug his administration has given charters, which are publicly funded but privately run. But the dispute in Albany exposes a delicate issue in the data-driven world of education policy: If a school improves, but not enough to meet high standards, should its value as a safe and nurturing community also be weighed?
“Everyone who ever closed a school knows it’s not easy,” said James Merriman, who closed five when he was executive director of the Charter Schools Institute, the regulatory agency that evaluates SUNY-authorized charters. Since 1999, SUNY, one of two statewide authorizers, has granted charters to 82 schools and closed seven. “If we are serious about not just incrementally, but substantially, improving achievement in the inner city, we need to stick to standards,” said Mr. Merriman, who is now chief of the New York City Charter School Center.
New Covenant narrowly avoided being closed last year. It was given a one-year reprieve and told to meet specific testing and financial targets. It hit its benchmark in math but missed in English. It was required to have 75 percent of third through sixth graders who were enrolled for at least two years demonstrate proficiency on the state language arts test.
Only 67 percent were proficient, up from 48 percent the prior year and 33 percent in 2006-7, the first year of the current principal, Jecrois Jean-Baptiste, who has put in place an ambitious turnaround plan with twice-weekly teacher workshops and 14,000 new books in classrooms.
Over all, 65 percent of Albany students in grades 3 through 6 reached proficiency on last year’s English test.
Evaluators were also critical of student attrition: Of 118 children in third grade in 2005, only 30 remained last year as sixth graders. Mr. Jean-Baptiste said that was because charter middle schools in the area start in fifth grade, and parents wanted to enroll children before places disappeared. “We attract more than the amount of students we lose,” he said, adding that enrollment rose to 646 from 571 even with the threatened shutdown.
Occupying a handsome brick and gray-block building, New Covenant stands out amid many boarded-up houses. On a recent Monday, children in uniforms — some loosely interpreted — formed lines to walk to the cafeteria. Younger children asked Mr. Jean-Baptiste, 45, for a hug as he moved through the halls.
In her first-grade class, Erin Losee passed around cups with tiny mealworms to 16 children gathered on a carpet. “Do they bite?” “Can we touch it?” students asked, as jumpy as popcorn kernels. “Active listening,” Ms. Losee commanded in a no-nonsense voice, beginning a countdown to quiet her students.
Ms. Losee, who worked last year at a public school but returned to New Covenant, where she had worked before, said, “I didn’t think they cared for the students as much” in public school.
Pedro Noguera, a SUNY trustee who cast the only vote to renew New Covenant’s charter, said he was not opposed to shutting failing schools — but this is not one. “I think the decision to shut down a school should be a last resort, especially if there’s evidence the school is improving,” he said. “It’s highly disruptive to children and families.”
An advocacy group, the New York State Charter Schools Association, has taken the unusual step of supporting the closing. “If they start moving the goal posts and focus on the gripping and emotional issues at play, then you start to get us to a point where charter schools really shouldn’t be,” said Peter Murphy, director of policy for the group.
According to state evaluators, New Covenant has the weakest financial position of any SUNY-authorized charter. James Stovall, the chief administrative officer for Victory Schools, the for-profit company that manages New Covenant, said that last year the school went into the red because it was required to establish reserve funds in case it was dissolved. Victory has dropped the per-student management fee it collects from $1,650 to about $1,120 and says it will do whatever it takes to stabilize the school financially.
New Covenant has some friends in high places. Former Gov. George E. Pataki and Malcolm A. Smith, president of the State Senate, have called trustees to press for the school at the request of Mr. Stovall and Steven B. Klinsky, the private equity manager who founded Victory Schools (and has donated to both men’s political campaigns, among others).
Mr. Pataki said that students “are doing better, the school is improving, and I think to just close the school and deny them an education that is already better than surrounding schools’ is the wrong decision.”
That is the argument that Gloria Nelligan, a single parent rearing three children enrolled at New Covenant, hopes will carry the day.
Ms. Nelligan praised the school for bringing her fifth-grade daughter, once shy and now a cheerleader, out of her shell, and for keeping her grandson, who takes medications for multiple disorders, from being shunted into special education. “I told Mr. Baptiste, ‘Wherever you go, whether right here on the corner or a bleacher, I will send you my children,’ ” she said. “We don’t need the building to call it a school.”
The New York Times
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