Jackson Jambalaya

Jason Riley writes in the Wall Street Journal last week about the success charter schools are having in Harlem:
"New York state passed a charter law in 1998, and the first charter school in Harlem opened the next year. But it is New York City's mayoral control law, passed in 2002, that's allowed school choice for low-income families to blossom. Mayor Mike Bloomberg has the authority to hire and fire the schools chancellor and appoint a majority of the city's board of education, which previously had been controlled by teachers unions.

Today there are 24 Harlem charters. They select students by lottery, and they educate about 7,700 of the community's 50,000 school-age kids. Another 5,700 children matriculate at one of Harlem's 30 private and parochial schools.

"Harlem now has more school choice per square foot than any other place in the country," says Eva Moskowitz, who operates four charters in Harlem. Nationwide, the average black 12th grader reads at the level of a white eighth grader. Yet Harlem charter students at schools like KIPP and Democracy Prep are outperforming their white peers in wealthy suburbs. At the Promise Academy charter schools, 97% of third graders scored at or above grade level in math. At Harlem Village Academy, 100% of eighth graders aced the state science exam. Every third grader at Harlem Success Academy 1, operated by Ms. Moskowitz, passed the state math exam, and 71% of them achieved the top score..." Column

In fact, this study by Stanford Professor Caroline Hoxby compared charter schools and regular public schools in New York City. study Some highlights from the study:
*"The most distinctive feature of the study is that charter schools' effects on achievement are estimated by the best available, "gold standard" method: lotteries. 94 percent of charter school students in New York City are admitted to a school after having participated in a random lottery for school places." In other words, no cherry picking.

*"charter schools' neighborhoods are about 40 percent black non-Hispanic whereas New York City as a whole is only about 22 percent black non-Hispanic. Charter schools' neighborhoods are about 38 percent Hispanic whereas New York City as a whole is only about 25 percent Hispanic.
Charter schools' neighborhoods are also economically disadvantaged. For instance, the average household income in charter schools' census tracts is $37,639 while it is $59,743 in New York City overall. 43.7 percent of households in charter schools' neighborhoods have incomes less than $20,000, but only 28.4 percent of New York City households have such low incomes." See See page 14 of study

*"On average, a student who attended a charter school for all of grades kindergarten through eight would close about 86 percent of the "Scarsdale-Harlem achievement gap" in math and 66 percent of the achievement gap in English."

*"the lotteried-in students who attend New York City's charter schools start out with the same level of achievement as the lotteried-out students who attend the city's regular public schools. By the third grade, the average charter school student is 5.8 points ahead of his lotteried-out counterpart in math and 5.3 points ahead in English Language Arts. In grades four through eight, the average charter school student gains 5.0 more points each year in math and 3.6 more points each year in English than his lotteried-out counterpart. Remember, these gains are in addition to whatever gains the students would have been expected to make in the regular public schools, had they been lotteried-out." (p.43)

Meanwhile, David Jordan from Greenwood brings the wood for the Klan in smacking charter schools away from minority children as he blocks any substantive charter school legislation.