nothin A Week Later, Charter Rally Reverberates In… | New Haven Independent

A Week Later, Charter Rally Reverberates In Town

Aliyaa Swaby Photo

Harp: “Over the top.”

A mass pro-charter school rally aimed at influencing people statewide may have backfired, at least temporarily, with two allies in New Haven.

The rally (pictured at top), organized by the pro-charter group Connecticut Coalition for Achievement Now (ConnCAN), brought 6,000 people to New Haven’s Green last week. After an election year in which the charter movement took political hits — most notably the forcing out of a pro-charter education commissioner who’d earned the ire of teachers unions —the rally appeared to be a flexing of muscle in advance of a tight budget year at the state Capitol. ConnCAN is following up the rally with a TV ad campaign.

ConnCAN invited New Haven Mayor Toni Harp and schools Superintendent Garth Harries to the rally. Both have supported the charter movement in the past. And unlike in other cities, New Haven’s public school officials have built a working relationship with local charter schools after earlier battles— most prominently in a leadership training program in which future top administrators do a residency in both charter and NHPS district schools.

But when Harp saw the rally’s advance talking points,” she said in an interview Thursday, she decided to stay away. She took exception to the claim that 40,000 students are trapped” in failing” schools.

When I saw the talking points, I said, Oh my goodness, no!’” Harp said. We’re working really hard in New Haven to lead the way for others in the state. To say that we have kids trapped’ was a slap in the face of the work that we do.” She argued that organizers’ hyperbole” and over-the-top rhetoric” made it difficult for themselves” with the rally.

Melissa Bailey File Photo

Superintendent Harries (pictured) said he found references to kids being trapped” in failing schools” an echo” of the rhetoric from six to seven years ago, before city and charter officials declared a truce and began serving on each other’s boards. (New Haven’s mayor sits on a local charter organization board; a former ConnCAN leader, Alex Johnston, pictured, sits on the New Haven Board of Education.)

Whatever the intentions, some of the language of the rally was divisive,” said Harries. How does this help us to come together around shared goals? If they really mean all kids, let’s have a constructive conversation about who all kids’ are.”

He argued that the rhetoric doesn’t match reality. He noted that when students leave charter schools mid-year because of, say, misbehavior, they end up attending traditional district public schools. That has created a burden for some schools. (Read about that here.)

We really have to ask why some students are leaving charter schools for district schools like Wexler-Grant,” Harries said.

We agree that there needs to be urgency in improving schools for all students and we are working intensively to raise academic achievement in the classroom. But we also working to address the needs of students who come to us with complex challenges rooted in poverty, trauma and mental health needs.”

New Haven teachers union President David Cicarella did attend the New Haven rally — to watch. He said he left outraged at hearing city schools blamed when charters, for instance, don’t accept transfer students after Oct. 1 in any given academic year.

Aliyya Swaby Photo

Unlike Harp and Harries, Cicarella is an outspoken opponent of charter schools as currently run. He noted that his union, the American Federation of Teachers, birthed charter schools in the 1960s as laboratories for experimentation. He argued that they’ve now become competitors who get to cherry-pick students while leaving traditional public schools to educate the most troubled children. They select students, then they want to bash all New Haven schools — These kids are trapped! — and pushing kids as props [at a rally]. Use some integrity! They won’t take all the poor kids’ they supposedly advocate for. … They come back to us. We take them. Fine. But it’s a two-way street. We’re having trouble with kids at Wexler-Grant, Lincoln-Bassett … Can we send you some of those students?”

ConnCAN CEO Jennifer Alexander Thursday defended the rally, including the choice of words organizers used. She said the point was to advocate for change and present the reality of a crucial issue.

She said ConnCAN invited Harp and Harries to the rally because of New Haven’s school-reform efforts. She said speakers complimented those efforts from the stage.

There are good things happening in New Haven. Part of the reason we had the rally here was to celebrate that,” Alexander said. She noted that nine New Haven schools have shown up on various ConnCAN top ten” lists of top-performing schools. But she also noted that 10 of the city’s schools have ranked as failing” based on student performance.

She noted that both charter schools and magnet schools in New Haven have waiting lists. There are families that would like a different and better option that don’t have access,” Alexander said. We could parse words. The reality is this is a problem that needs to be solved. New Haven is making some progress. They need to keep going.” The rally, she said, was about coming together to call on largely the state” but also cities to improve schools.

Do [parents] feel trapped’? That is a fair characterization of some what some families feel,” Dacia Toll, president of Achievement First, which operates five New Haven charter schools, said Thursday. I’m on the receiving end, as I’m sure the superintendent is on the receiving end, of phone calls from parents who are desperate for better schools.”

Toll said Thursday that her organization is working on changing the mid-year transfer policy: There are certainly individual students who have transferred mid-year because they’ve felt they weren’t being successful. I think it’s overstated; I think our intentions as an organization are often mischaracterized. We would love to continue to serve all of our students.”

Like Alexander, Toll praised New Haven’s reform efforts. She said the teachers union — which has agreed to contracts that have been held up as a model of cooperation in identifying and addressing low-performing instructors—“has gone further than almost any other union in the country in terms of trying to come up with effective, creative solutions to vexing challenges. I think the call of the rally was to keep going and to not allow complacency to set in when there are still tens of thousands of kids who are still not getting what they deserve. The issues are so serious with such very real consequences for individual kids and communities that I hope we don’t get stuck on rhetorical choices and we can really talk about the much harder issues” involved in improving schools.

Back in 2008, Toni Harp, then a state senator, criticized New Haven’s then-mayor for battling charters. (Read about that here.) She said New Haven’s Amistad schools in particular were having success at a time when struggling traditional public schools should be looking for good ideas. She has supported the introduction of charter schools in New Haven, including most recently the creation of the Booker T. Washington Academy.

On Thursday Mayor Harp said that the way the charter schools are set up was they were limited in the state. They were basically what I considered to be pilots around seeing if this alternative to the public system, that was smaller, that had more time, would be more effective than the current system that we have. They have state charters that require a little more accountability. As experimental schools, they can lead the way around how to address some of the urban educational issues.” She said they were never intended to replace the public school system.”

That said, Harp noted that last week’s rally was one day. We will still continue to work with them. We will be partners here in New Haven. The rhetoric turns me off. We will still try to partner with them as much as we can.” She added that while Achievement First is part of the ConnCAN coalition, it was not the group that organized the rally.

We are all trying to work together,” Toll said.

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