UPTOWNflavor

There was a lot of speculation about a charter school being headed by a former politician but at the end of the day it seems to be making strides in it’s pursuit of “success for all.” Below is an excerpt of an article that appeared in the New York Sun about a charter school founded by Eva Moskowitz, a former City Council Education Committee chairwoman.

Ms. Moskowitz started the Harlem Success Charter School this year, setting out to practice what she preached during her frequent clashes with the chancellor, the mayor, and the union.

The school’s principal is Iris Nelson, a veteran of P.S. 65, which used the Success For All curriculum and an infusion of outside tutors to become one of the best-performing schools in Queens after being one of the worst. The teachers work nine-hour days for $5,000 to $7,000 more a year than the normal starting salary for teachers.

The school’s model borrows some from the model applied to P.S. 65. But it also has new elements the administrators say they could include only with the freedom afforded by a charter school, such as competitive soccer, modern dance, and an intensive focus on hands-on science, one of Ms. Moskowitz’s causes while in office.

It got off to a rocky start: Protests by parents and the United Federation of Teachers kept the school out of P.S. 154, the location it was originally assigned. But any disappointment seems to disappear at the door. The boisterous first-graders hunched over geography lessons in a classroom decorated with their work seem unaware of the struggle administrators went through to find a building to house the Harlem Success Charter School.

Optimism seems to be the best word to describe student achievement at Harlem Success so far, according to the school’s self-reported preliminary assessments. For literacy and math, the regimented Success For All curriculum includes regular assessments every few weeks. According to the school, 45% of first-graders, most of them from the surrounding neighborhoods, began the year reading at grade level. Now, 83% are reading at or above grade level.

The idea behind the school is to create a model that can be replicated. The administrators want to start up 40 more charter schools in the future. They also aim to influence education in mainstream public schools — by the third or fourth year, the school wants to be spending the same amount per pupil that other public schools spend.

The frustrations that surrounded the school’s opening aren’t necessarily over. Harlem Success currently occupies the third floor of a school on 118th Street that holds four other schools. To expand to the capacity of its charter as a kindergarten through fifth grade school, it will have to negotiate to take some over some of the space currently used by the other schools, or move.

The administrators’ plans to open 40 more schools are also limited by the state charter school cap, which the Legislature recently decided not to raise.

Read the entire article here.