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Would I send my child to this school?


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Bari Katz, the co-founder and former Director of Student Life at the Achievement First Crown Heights High School, has written on Achievement First’s model, describing both its strengths and what she described as its fundamental flaw. If you have given any thought to the Achievement First debate, please take a moment to read her words:

“Would I send my child to this school?” This is a question I asked myself every day while working at Achievement First and helping to build their first high school in Brooklyn, NY in 2009 and 2010. I served as the Director of Student Life at Achievement First Crown Heights High School (now called AF Brooklyn High School), which entailed developing and managing all after-school and summer enrichment programs, building the advisory system for both college skills and character development, counseling students, and organizing and leading community events each week to contribute to school culture. As a member of the founding team, I was involved in almost every aspect of the school, from hiring, to behavior management, to building systems for school culture and discipline, to working with others in the Achievement First network to find and implement best practices for our new school.

There are many things to say about my time at Achievement First; some of them personal opinion, some experiences shared among many. Let’s start with some of the things AF does really well. AF hires incredible teachers. Walking through the halls of almost any AF school, you will find hard-working, dedicated and passionate educators in front of our children. The principles behind a longer school day are right on—to keep kids off the streets and out of trouble, and in classrooms getting extra academic time to support their achievement. Systems and data are both priorities, from my experience, in the AF network. For example, every behavior management system we tried at the high school in our first year was systematized in a way that ideally would have allowed every adult in the building to enforce these norms. Also, data-driven instruction is the driving force I would argue behind teacher development. Teachers and their coaches (usually a senior member of the school leadership team) work with both daily and long-term assessment data to improve lesson plans and increase student achievement.

While the strengths I mentioned above are real, the underlying approach to youth and community development are, in my opinion and experience, fundamentally flawed. This has a detrimental impact on the students and families in Achievement First schools, specifically in high schools.

The majority of my students at AF Crown Heights High School were fed in from AF Crown Heights Middle School, with approximately 10% being accepted off the wait list. Almost all of my students had relatively positive experiences at the AF middle school, due largely in part to their principal and teaching staff. When they arrived at high school, it became apparent to them and their families very quickly that this was a different AF than they had known before. As the Director of Student Life, I too became frustrated early on with the philosophy of youth development the school administrators (backed strongly by the AF network) were implementing.

I believe, especially at the high school level, that there must be a balance between structure and flexibility, between rules and independence, and between thinking inside a predetermined box and creative thought. Unfortunately, I witnessed time and time again students being pushed to “fall in line” with the rigid behavior system (sitting up perfectly straight in class; not wearing any jewelry or headbands for girls; having a closed bottle of anything other than water on their desk; making eye contact 100% of the time when being addressed by an adult; etc.). Rules are important. However, these examples are a few of many that AF labeled as character development, which I disagree with.

Character development for high school students is about having the opportunity to make one’s own choices and sometimes fail, but being able to meaningfully learn from those mistakes.Character at AF was defined as “doing the right thing when no one is looking.” However, because of the extreme emphasis on these small behavioral “infractions” to the system, there was a culture of conformity rather than critical thinking that was created. This resulted in students superficially following the rules but feeling like they had to hide their true selves while at school. We often saw students get in trouble for losing their temper because they felt so repressed by the culture of the building, which AF labeled as a character flaw on the part of the student.

In addition to being developmentally inappropriate for the age of our students, the school system was oppressive in other ways. I would receive phone calls from parents and families on a daily basis because they felt disrespected by AF leadership. Many parents felt the rules in the school were over the top and not beneficial to the “college preparatory mission” of the school. Many parents were called up to the school on a regular basis to have meetings with school administrators to address student discipline issues, often times even for minor infractions. Usually, students were not allowed to attend academic classes until these parent meetings happened (students in this situation would sit alone in a classroom or in the main office all day and independently do work assigned by their teachers even though they often couldn’t complete the work because they hadn’t received the lesson for the day. Perhaps because their shoes were 98% black instead of 100% black. For instance). Parents reported feeling devalued, disrespected, and frustrated by AF’s condescending approach to family involvement.

This leads me to my second concern about Achievement First’s proposed expansion. AF works in low-income communities of color in urban areas in New Haven, CT and Brooklyn, NY. From my experience, the mentality by many at the head of the organization and by association many of the school leaders as well, is one of disregard for the indigenous community they are entering. Rather than becoming a part of the neighborhoods in which they operate, AF most often runs schools that end up isolating the community in the surrounding area. Instead of valuing the parent and family contributions of their student body, many AF schools underestimate the power and capability of the families they are supposed to be serving. I always got the feeling that “we” were there to “fix a problem.” “We” were there to “save these kids.” The message to our students was often, “if you don’t do things ‘our’ way, you will never be successful in the ‘real world.’” As an organization working to serve urban populations, this kind of cultural insensitivity and sense of superiority are deeply harmful to the students, the families and the communities in which AF operates schools.

This is not about me. And I don’t want it to be about my experience. I left AF after my kids finished their ninth grade year for many reasons. I still speak to my kids and their families on a regular basis. When I left, half of the founding team left as well. By the start of the school’s second year, the 10th grade class (my kids) was down to a group of approximately 45-50. This year, the third year of the school, the founding class is down to around 35-40 students. This is the same trend in the AF high school in New Haven, which has graduated less than 30 kids the last two years (which they call a 100% graduation rate). I wanted to make sure that the voices of the families I’ve worked with for the last several years from AF Brooklyn High School were represented in this statement. They all asked me to keep their names confidential as they did not want their kids, some of whom still attend AF Brooklyn High School, to be penalized in any way for their speaking out.

From a family member who still has a child in Achievement First:

“The focus is always on discipline and consequences. It makes the kids not want to go to school. Even the really good students don’t want to go to school. My experience is probably way better than another parent’s because my daughter is academically and socially sound. But I’ve sat and chatted with so many parents and know the horror stories are more the norm than not. If we had to rely just on Achievement First to get my daughter what she needed for college, it would never happen. They’re setting the kids up for failure.”

From a parent who pulled her daughter out of AF:

“The AF teachers are dedicated to the success of the students and the school. Public schools are difficult because achievement is not always the focus. Charter schools are good for lower grades because it gives kids the discipline they need. But my daughter gained a sense of purpose from the great teachers and mentors at AF, and the fact that she knew everyone had one goal which was for her to succeed. But at the upper grades AF is training the kids to do what they want them to do and AF won’t relinquish control. They’re supposed to be allowed to use what they know, to let their budding minds grow. They aren’t allowed to think for themselves. AF is an experiment to see what ‘kids who wouldn’t have a chance otherwise’ can do if they follow the AF model. They push the discipline too much. But you can’t run an experiment on the backs of the children who are really trying. Our children are not getting what they’re supposed to get.”

From a parent whose daughter still attends Achievement First:

“All of the good counselors and teachers are leaving or have already left because they feel trapped and confined. The children are caged—they treat the children like it’s a boot camp. The good kids are made to feel like they’re bad kids and in prison. The kids are just hanging on to get out and move on with their lives. As a parent who speaks her mind and stands up for my daughter’s education, they shut me down and now they don’t even talk to me anymore. They are disrespectful and mistrusting of the parents like we’re crazy.I think it’s a race thing. These people come from all over the place to hold back our kids. The people who really love our kids do not get the time of day to do things for our kids. There are teachers who would do anything for these kids but they get brainwashed or they leave. They don’t want the children to associate with the teachers who really love them because it undermines their control.”

I’ll say the same thing to anyone reading this statement as I said to everyone I worked with at Achievement First: If you wouldn’t send your kid here, then it’s not good enough.

Bari L. Katz

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Board of Regents say AF isn’t good enough for Cranston…but it’s fine for Providence?

It’s amazing how much you can learn about people–and the system they represent–by reading between the lines of their decisions. I was at the Board of Regents meeting today, and what I saw there taught me a lot about the different levels of value those in power assign to the different communities they are supposed to represent equally.

For those of you who haven’t heard yet, the BOR voted to deny Achievement First’s application to open their schools in Cranston, following the request of Governor Chafee, who advised the Board to take into account the opposition by the Cranston community over the past few months.

The governor then, a mere sentence after validating the concerns of the hundreds of Cranston parents and community members who have been protesting the AF proposal on the grounds that it could be damaging to the Cranston community (protesters have cited the financial ramifications of taking that much money out of the district, the loss of public accountability inherent in allowing a private board to take governing authority from public institutions like a school committee, and worries about the organization’s discipline policies which many believe to be excessive) made a recommendation that the Board instead explore bringing the charter management organization into Providence. And the Board, mere seconds after voting to keep Achievement First out of Cranston–presumably because they agreed with the Cranston community’s claims that it could, indeed, damage their district in all the ways cited above–wholeheartedly passed a motion to begin the process of looking into creating an AF district in Providence.

Wait…how does that work?

Now, there are a couple different ways to read the governor’s advice and the Board’s actions. But as someone who was there, listening to the debate, I can tell you that it seemed pretty clear to me that Governor Chafee and the Board of Regents made a simple decision, and one that those in power have been making regarding those who aren’t for centuries: what’s not good enough for us is good enough for them. Specifically, an organization that the clear majority of white, middle-class parents in Cranston don’t believe to be good enough for their students is just fine for all those low-income students and parents in Providence.

It’s hard for me to understand their line of reasoning. How can they recognize Cranston’s concern about AF’s military-like discipline and history of excessive punishment scandals, but still think this set of values is fine to inflict on kids in Providence? (I’m not a big fan of PPSD’s discipline policies, but I don’t think they’re comparable to those of Achievement First.) How can they agree that Cranston’s parents are right not to accept a disempowering administrative system in which they have little or no say in how their children get educated, but still think such a system should be acceptable to parents in Providence?

I don’t know how to answer these questions without going back to that same fundamental perspective: what’s not good enough for us is good enough for them. It boils down to nothing more than inequality of the worst kind.

Of course, there are already immense inequalities between Cranston and Providence schools. And I’m certainly not arguing that PPSD is a haven of perfect pedagogy and policy; on the contrary, I work with students in Providence–at times organizing against the school district–so I know very well the deep problems in our school system. We need to think creatively about how we can have better parent engagement, because our schools will never improve until parents are involved, and what we’re doing now clearly isn’t working; we need a curriculum that students find relevant to their lives, because what we’ve got now consistently alienates kids into boredom and apathy; we need to improve support systems for students and create more secure cultures of learning, because now those are few and far between; and, in the long-term, we need to change the way low-income communities are short-changed out of resources for their schools, because without more resources much of the above list won’t be possible.

These are not easy problems to solve. But they are solvable. And they are only solvable if we put all of our public attention, energy, and efforts on public education, rather than diverting these resources into creating a new, private district with even less public accountability and an even dimmer community focus. The people of Cranston have made clear that their students deserve better than Achievement First. Why should Providence’s students deserve any less?

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Achievement First Secret #4 – Nothing Says 21st Century Education Like Segregation

Do charter schools have to teach all kids in the community equally? As they find them, as they are?  This blog post from Wait, What in Connecticut, looking at the enrollment data of several charter schools, including Achievement First schools, argues no.

Perhaps most disturbing of all is the fact that despite Connecticut’s urban areas having significant numbers of students coming from non-English speaking homes, charter schools have somehow managed to create learning environments in which virtually NONE OF THE STUDENTS who come from non-English speaking households end up in their schools.

As educators and policy makers know, one of the most significant challenges to educational achievement is language barriers particularly a problem when students take their homework (which is written in English) home to non-English speaking households.  Greater parental engagement in their children’s education is hard enough, but when the students are learning in a language that is not spoken at home it makes it virtually impossible to generate significant parental involvement.

In Bridgeport 40% of the students go home to a non-English speaking home.  That percentage increases to 44.7% in Hartford and in New Haven the percent of students coming from non-English speaking homes is 28.6%

In Connecticut, charter schools are required to ensure equal access to their schools.  Efforts must be made to recruit students from all racial and ethnic backgrounds and admission tests can’t be used.  In fact, entrance decisions must include a blind lottery system.  So that said, compare the percentage of students from non-English speaking homes with the numbers the charter school have reported to the State Department of Education:

School     (% students from non-English speaking homes)
Bridgeport Public Schools     (40%)
Achievement First – Bridgeport Academy (0.6%)
The Bridge Academy (14.9%)
New Beginnings     (0%)
Park City Prep     (0%)
HartfordPublic Schools     (44.7% )
Achievement First – Hartford (0%)
Jumoke     (0%)
New HavenPublic Schools     (28.6%)
Achievement First – Amistad     (0%)
Achievement First – Elm City Prep     (0%)
Common Ground School     (4.6%)
Highville Charter     (0%)

The data is certainly unsettling.  If Connecticut’s publically funded charter schools are supposed to be equally accessible to all and up to 4 in 10 students from those areas come from non-English speaking households then it is pretty unbelievable and completely unconscionable that almost no charter school students come from non-English speaking households.This follows along the lines of scholarly reports that have looked at whether charter schools are recreating the conditions of segregation.  As the LA Times reported:

The trend toward segregation was especially notable for African American students. Nationally, 70% of black charter students attend schools where at least 90% of students are minorities. That’s double the figure for traditional public schools. The typical black charter-school student attends a campus where nearly three in four students also are black, researchers with the Civil Rights Project at UCLA said Thursday.

The other researchers also focused on economic segregation, looking at private companies that manage schools, in most cases charters. The enrollments at most of these campuses exacerbated income extremes, they concluded. Charters tended to serve higher-income students or lower-income students. Charters also were likely to serve fewer disabled students and fewer English learners.Because nothing says Progressive like Segregationist policies!

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Achievement First Secret # 3 – Treat kids like scholars?

According to the Achievement First website, this person is part of their leadership team:

Chi Tschang – Regional Superintendent

Mr. Tschang is responsible for driving high student achievement by overseeing a portfolio of schools and supporting Achievement First principals in developing and implementing rigorous academic programs and positive school cultures. Previously, Mr. Tschang founded KIPP Academy Fresno, a 2008 Title I Distinguished School in California. In addition to serving as principal for five years, he also taught fifth-grade history, sixth-grade math and seventh-grade English. Prior to that experience, Mr. Tschang taught history for four years at Boston’s Academy of the Pacific Rim charter school. After college, he participated in City Year, where he lived in a housing project and tutored fourth graders in south Providence. For his work in Boston and in Providence, he was profiled on the Oprah Winfrey Show and in the New York Times #1 best-seller, What Should I Do With My Life? Mr. Tschang holds a B.A. in history from Yale University, and is the recipient of several distinctions including the Comcast National Leadership Award.

Now, this caused quite a stir in New York because after a few run in with parents, it was discovered that Mr. Tschang was run out of a KIPP school in Californa for a raft of bad treament of students.  From The New York Post:

A Brooklyn charter school administrator who gave up his old gig in California amid charges that he had been physically and emotionally abusive to students is at it again, fed-up parents told The Post.

Just over a year into Chi Tschang’s role as assistant superintendent of middle schools for the Achievement First charter school network in Brooklyn, a student’s mother said he aggressively grabbed an 11-year-old boy he was kicking out of class last month.

READ THE CALIFORNIA REPORT

“[Tschang’s] not supposed to do that,” said the AF Crown Heights mom, who asked to be identified only as Lorna. “He’s supposed to speak with his mouth, not grab him.”

Several other parents at the Crown Heights school questioned Achievement First’s judgment in hiring an educator who resigned as head of KIPP Fresno, part of the Knowledge Is Power Program charter network, in February 2009 after an investigation into his disciplinary practices.

Achievement First officials, who have fielded complaints about their strict discipline in the past, stood by Tschang, despite the ruckus raised earlier this year when he took a misbehaving Crown Heights student home in his car.

That incident prompted the network’s co-CEO, Doug McCurry, to write parents a six-page letter in May that qualified Tschang’s move as a misunderstanding of school policy.

The letter also said Achievement First’s review of Fresno’s investigation found it to be factually inaccurate, “bogus” and conducted by a district that was biased against charter schools.

“During his entire tenure in Fresno, Mr. Tschang never hurt a single child,” Dacia Toll, co-CEO of the Achievement First network, told The Post. “In fact, he was beloved by the students and parents at his school, so much so that hundreds of them took to the streets to protest his resignation.”

Tschang resigned following a report issued in December 2008 in which the school district of Fresno, Calif., found that he had pushed students against the wall, repeatedly yelled at them and instituted various forms of punishment that “exceeded the bounds of the law.”

This included a charge that he forced a student to crawl on his hands and knees and bark like a dog, according to the district probe.

Tschang had allegedly punished a whole fifth-grade class by stuffing them into two bathroom stalls and placed misbehaving kids outside the school building for hours at a time in extreme heat or rain.

He even channeled Oscar the Grouch on one occasion by dumping a garbage can over a student who was clowning around.

According to the Fresno investigation, Tschang admitted to placing “an empty, clean trash can over his head for a few minutes while I was talking to him.”

In response to an allegation that he had picked a student up, held him against the wall by his neck and dropped him, Tschang told probers, “I don’t remember picking up and dropping a student, I do remember shaking a kid.”

A message left at a number listed for Tschang Friday was not returned.

Fresno district officials dismissed the characterization of their probe as biased, noting it had been conducted by an independent investigator.

Additional reporting by Erin Calabrese
Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/brooklyn/school_big_bullies_kids_tYDkSueDY2zXz7GDx6H70H#ixzz1VwfOyaSO


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Achievement First Secret #2 – Just Don’t Deal With Kids. Lock them up and force them Out

Teaching kids is tough work.  Achievement First seems to have found a short cut through the hard stuff though – Here is another story about their track record on New York City from NYDAILYNEWS.COM:

She has served detention for slouching, humming and failing to look her teachers in the eye.

It’s no surprise that former honors student Gianna Boone hates going to Achievement First Crown Heights Middle School.

The East New York Ave. charter school’s strict rules have landed the 13-year-old girl in detention nearly every day this year. And her grades have dropped from an A average to a C.

“I get into trouble every time I turn around,” said Gianna, an eighth-grader who has served detention at least four times every week since school began in August for humming, talking loudly in the bathroom and using a pen during math class. “It’s killing me.”

The five-year-old middle school hands out detention based on a system of demerits – which students earn for infractions such as putting their heads on their desks, not facing forward while walking in the hallway.

With every three demerits, a student must serve 45 minutes of detention.

Some behaviors are considered so bad – rolling their eyes, sucking their teeth or complaining after getting a demerit – students get an immediate 45-minute detention for committing them.

On an average day, one in six kids – about 50 – in the 300-student school stays after class, Achievement First officials said.

“We have high expectations, and we’re really confident that what we’re doing is in the students’ best interests,” said Principal Wells Blanchard, who instituted the policies when he took over the school this year.

Charter school advocates say the strict rules maintain order for kids.

But a group of parents with children at Achievement First Crown Heights say the rules are overkill. More than 20 of them met last week at the Crown Heights public library to discuss protesting the policies.

The group agreed to speak out at the school’s next board meeting Nov. 22.

“I understand that schools need to have rules, but this is like Rikers Island,” said Sarah Dickens, who said she will be at the board meeting to protest her fifth-grade son’s daily detention for things like dropping a pen and failing to address a teacher as “ma’am.”

“They’ve gone too far,” Dickens said.

Education experts say charter schools with tough rules are a growing trend.

“These schools may seem extreme, but the idea is to create an optimal learning environment,” said Chris Wynne, co-author of “Inside Urban Charter Schools.”

“If you don’t address small problems, things can spiral out of control,” said Wynne.

The Crown Heights school is part of Achievement First, a charter school network with 10 schools in Brooklyn.

In February, an Achievement First middle school in Bedford-Stuyvesant made headlines for its strict rules.

About 20% of Achievement First Endeavor Charter School’s students served detention on any given day, and in the first half of the school year, one in 12 students transferred out.

The Crown Heights parents say they are also considering taking their youngsters out of the middle school.

“The school’s worse than a prison,” said Gianna’s mother, who said she blames her chest pains on her daughter’s troubles at school. “The situation has to change.”

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Achievement First Secret #1 – Pick on kids with Autism

Much has been made of the (mostly by themselves) of the untested results of Achievement First schools.  AF is the Charter school operator that wants to run the Mayoral Academy in Cranston.  But where has the scutiny been?  I will give the beat reporters in the Providence Journal credit – I think they have done a very good job laying out the issues (even though their editors are obviously biased) For example: there are a number of horror stories about students having to withstand torments at AF schools.  Ordeals like this one endured by a 10 year old austitisc boy named Brandon Strong. Note the condescending note at the end from the principal:  typical corporate think – blame the victim. From NYDAILYNEWS.COM

An East New York boy diagnosed with autism has gotten dozens of detentions this school year for behaviors caused by his condition, his parents say.

Brandon Strong, 10, who attends fifth grade at Achievement First East New York Middle School, has been held after school and at lunch for fidgeting, talking to himself and failing to look teachers in the eye.

The boy’s parents say his ongoing disciplinary problems at the Richmond St. charter school are out of his control – and the punishments he’s receiving are ruining his life.

“This situation at school is driving my son crazy,” said Laila Strong, 37, a small business owner. “He hates it so much he’s starting to come apart.”

The talkative kid with glasses hasn’t always had such a tough time in class. Brandon was diagnosed with attention deficit disorder when he was 3 years old, after preschool teachers noticed he had trouble sitting still. Two years later he was diagnosed with autism but he worked hard with his family to succeed in mainstream classes.

“We built a life for Brandon that worked,” said Strong, who helped the boy with his homework every afternoon and discussed the upcoming school day with him each morning while he brushed his teeth.

Strong said the routines that kept Brandon balanced in elementary school were disrupted this year when he started at middle school.

That’s when he started getting held for “not tracking,” “talking” and “not following directions” during class, according to school documents.

Two months into the school year, he started having trouble sleeping. He began to throw hysterical fits before school when he begged his mother to not send him to class.

“I kept getting in trouble for things I can’t control,” said Brandon. “It wasn’t fair.”

The Strongs don’t want to move him to another school because they say it would disrupt his life even more. “We want to Brandon to succeed in the school he’s in,” said Laila Strong.

Brendan’s parents have had several meetings with school officials over the boy’s disciplinary issues but haven’t agreed with them over how to address his behavior.

Achievement First East New York Middle School Principal David Harding said the boy and his parents have overstated his trouble in school.

“The Strong family unfortunately is not partnering with us to get Brandon into college, and I think that is more of a hindrance in his development,” said Harding