Harlem, a Test Lab, Splits Over Charter Schools By SUSAN SAULNYThe schools sit side by side in a handsome red brick building in Harlem overlooking Morningside Park. But they could not be more different. The fifth and sixth graders at KIPP Star College Prep Charter School earned some of the highest scores in central Harlem on last year's citywide reading exams. At Public School 125, only 36 percent of the third- through sixth-grade students met city and state reading standards last year. The contrast in the building on West 123rd Street is emblematic of the inequities, opportunity and experimentation that define education across Harlem after decades of stagnation, and as gentrification is increasing pressures for better schools.....Plain and simple, charter schools in Harlem are a beggar thy neighbor shell game. The charter schools cherry pick their kids. It's not that they have better teachers. It's all an illusion. No one has the where with all to solve the real economic and social problems that surround the failures in education
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The Charter schools, in fact, do not cherry pick their kids. Applicants all enter a lottery and are randomly selected. Additionally, having spent some years in an I.S. and now a year in a charter school - truth is - the Charter schools really do hire the better teachers - and then support them and help them to improve.
You miss the difference in the kids. While all of the kids come from the same blocks, one must have a parent or two that is aware enough to enter the lottery system in the first place. Many of the kids I had at an I.S. school were stuck there because there was no support structure at home.
There is another kind of cherry picking and that involves picking from a selected applicant list, even if the list is open to all.
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