Sunshine on a Cloudy Day
So, work life is horrible (not that everybody at the office isn’t actually being great, mutually supportive, buying each other drinks, but you know: we really need those drinks). But there is good news elsewhere in Millmanland.
Specifically: Democracy Prep Charter School, whose board I chair, just got its report card from the City’s Department of Education. And we did rather well. The news capped a nice week for DPCS, a week which began with the ribbon cutting on our new facility, adjoining historic St. Philips Episcopal Church in Harlem. So I’ve got that going for me.
I owe TAS a long post (or series of posts) about charter schools and education more generally. In the meantime, I encourage folks to check out the school’s website, and check out the school physically if you are in the area. And of course, since Matt Yglesias is right that high-performing charters do depend on additional private funds on top of their public funding (note, however, that their public funding is below that of regular public schools), if you’re looking for a way to put charitable education dollars to work, you could do a whole lot worse than a school like ours. (And, contra Matt, structural reform is neither a complement nor a substitute for more funding; it’s a prerequisite – first you have to prove that the additional funds could do good, then you have to set things up so that additional funds will do good, then you get the money.)
Charter schools have the great advantage of experimenting with news methods of pedagogy and with greater individual accountability for teachers while maintaining public oversight and public accountability. Unfortunately, for many of the people who consider themselves educational reformers, the entire point (besides bludgeoning the teacher unions and unions in general) is to eliminate public oversight and public accountability.
— Freddie · Sep 19, 06:10 PM · #
This sounds like a great opportunity for students and teachers.
— Joules · Sep 19, 06:22 PM · #
God bless Mr. Andrew. That is an amazing story.
— Julana · Sep 19, 09:52 PM · #
I’m new to TAS and to the charter school debate, but am enjoying the discussion here.
As a parent of a child with neurologically-based special needs, I’m aware that private—and many public schools—lack the resources to implement IEPs (Individualized Education Plans) special needs kids are entitled to under law.
This is a HUGE driver of costs in school (speech therapiest, physical therapists, occupational therapists, teachers aides, etc) that most private schools refuse to take on.
Is Democracy Prep required to take Special Needs kids? If so, does the state provide extra funding? If not, having cherry picked those children most likely to succeed, how can you make realistic comparisons between your charter school and public schools saddled with this resource intensive, learning impaired population?
— Flaneur · Sep 22, 04:48 PM · #
Flaneur:
All NYC Charter Schools are required to take special needs kids. Our students are assigned by lottery from the pool of applicants, and we’re not allowed to refuse to take a student because he or she has a disability, physical, mental or emotional. In practice, not all charter schools are able to meet all IEPs, particularly the most demanding ones, but that group is a very small minority of children who have IEPs. And this is, of course, a huge problem in the regular system as well, as I’m sure you know; there are far too many kids in the regular system being “warehoused” in horrible settings where they are not being taught at all, though on paper they look like their IEPs are being met.
Democracy Prep has made a particular commitment to serving students with special needs. Our head of school and founder is himself a former special ed teacher, so this is a particular area of interest of his. In our first year of operation, we actively recruited students with special needs with a goal of getting a student population with a higher percentage of special ed students than the surrounding district, a goal that we met. We continue to have one of the higher percentage special ed populations among NYC middleschool charters.
Funding for special needs children is much higher on a per-pupil basis in the regular public school system, to reflect the substantially greater cost of meeting the needs of these students. This higher funding is also reflected in the charter world, as our per-pupil funding is a percentage of the regular system per-pupil funding. So the more special ed students we have, the more funding we get, but naturally our costs go up as well.
If you’d like to know more about DPCS’s approach to teaching students with learning disabilities and other special needs, particularly if you’re looking for an appropriate school for your child, I’d encourage you to contact the head of school, as he’s going to be in a much better position to go into detail on the subject than I am.
— Noah Millman · Sep 22, 06:55 PM · #
Noah-
That sounds complicated. Between that stuff and Shakespeare, how do you find time to “eliminate public oversight and public accountability?” That’s what it’s all about, right?
— Matt Frost · Sep 22, 07:06 PM · #
Eh, destroying the world’s financial system isn’t a full-time job.
— Noah Millman · Sep 22, 07:36 PM · #
Ideally the charter movement should put working and middle class students beyond the sanctimonious wonkery and control of the privately and expensively educated Matt Yglesias and his ilk.
— natt · Sep 23, 03:14 AM · #