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Obama vowed to create 20 “Promise Neighborhoods,” following the HCZ model of and enhancing and integrating social services within a geographic area, when he first ran for president. Now, his administration is billing the five Promise Zones announced this week — in San Antonio, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Southeastern Kentucky, and the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma — as the first created to carry out that vow.

But experiments in replicating the HCZ model have been underway for some time. Here’s our coverage of federal investment in Queens and another corner of Harlem, plus a story about what happened when a Queens middle school at the heart of a Promise Zone was slated for closure.

    

“That’s a lively group,” Mayor Bill de Blasio told Principal Serapha Cruz after they left the after-school dance class.

Much of de Blasio’s energy since taking office has gone into the politics of getting expanded prekindergarten funded. But his proposed tax hike on top earners — which requires state approval — would also finance more after-school programs for middle school students.

He stopped by M.S. 331 Thursday to highlight a program that he said would benefit from the funding and to shift focus onto the middle-school benefits of a tax increase that has uncertain prospects.

Solid after-school programs help adolescents stay off the streets, build their confidence, boost their grades, and stay motivated to come to school, de Blasio said Thursday. The Bloomberg administration also sought to expand middle-school learning time, offering after-school literacy tutoring and enrichment to about 90 low-performing middle schools.

But budget cuts have resulted in some 30,000 fewer after-school seats over the past six years, de Blasio said. With proper funding, many more middle-school students could attend programs at schools, community centers, and libraries, he said.

“We need after-school programs to be available literally for every student who wants to take advantage of it,” de Blasio said.

Chancellor Carmen Fariña said schools would be given the flexibility to design programs that meet their students’ needs, and that their success would be judged by various measures, such as the quality of students’ end-of-the-year dance performances.

“There are many ways to assess kids that’s not just test-driven,” she said, echoing de Blasio’s promise to reduce the school system’s emphasis on standardized test scores.

Chancellor Carmen Fariña (left) speaks with M.S. 331 students and Principal Serapha Cruz.

Nearly half of M.S. 331’s students attend the school’s daily after-school program, which can last up to four hours some days, Cruz said.

The first hour involves homework help, small-group tutoring, or academic intervention for students grouped by reading level or math proficiency. The rest of the time is devoted to volleyball and basketball, dance and theater, guitar club, and a student “community board” program that teaches leadership skills.

Cruz funds about half of the program out of the school budget but must find grants to cover the rest, she said. De Blasio’s tax plan could save her from scrounging for money, she added.

“If there’s a sustainability factor to it,” she said, “then it will have a huge impact.”

    

Ellen Eagen, a Syracuse-based lawyer who specializes in education law, then walked to the front of the room and begged for a few more minutes of their time. “It’s time to roll up our sleeves and keep the school open,” she told the parents, before asking for volunteers to join a group crafting a plan for the school’s future.

Eagen isn’t a member of the school’s board of trustees, its charter management organization, or its authorizer. She became involved with the school just months ago when its board took the unprecedented step of voting to give up its right to operate—even though its charter extended for another two years.

Now, Eagen and an ad hoc group of parents, teachers, and board members who have reversed course are attempting to keep the school open independently, though they face long odds.

It’s a strange turn of events for a school that helped pave the way for New York’s charter school movement, which operates from the idea that its accountability systems guarantee high-quality schools: if a school doesn’t perform well, it gets closed.

At Beginning with Children, a fight over the teachers’ union contracts has overshadowed that process. Now, disagreements about whether the school is struggling, who is to blame for its problems, and if it is beyond repair have embroiled teachers, parents, board members, and a foundation in a tug of war that will determine the fate of the school.

A nontraditional start

Beginning with Children Charter School is unlike most of the city’s charter schools, which are relatively new and whose teachers are not unionized. But it also serves as a symbol of the origins of New York charter schools.

The school was opened in 1992 by Joseph and Carol Reich, philanthropists who became interested in public education in the late 1980s. Long before charter schools were allowed to operate in New York state, the Reichs pushed Brooklyn’s District 14 leaders to allow them to open their own public school with many of the freedoms now associated with charter schools.

The school they started transitioned from a charter-like school to a full-fledged charter school in 2001, but the school’s teachers remained members of the city teachers union in keeping with state law. That made it one of just seven New York City charter schools born from district schools, of which only five remain.

When its middle school opened on one floor of a nearby city school building, Beginning with Children also became a pioneer of co-location, which the Bloomberg administration later embraced as a way to help the charter sector expand.

In their book “Getting to Bartlett Street,” the Reichs note that other community groups came looking for help developing their own schools after the school was designated the city’s most-improved elementary school in 1997.

But they said they had not gotten everything right. By converting from a district school rather than starting a new charter school, Beginning with Children committed to upholding the city’s contract with the teachers union and paying the city’s portion of teachers’ health care and pension plans from the school’s budget. This was “an expensive mistake,” the Reichs wrote, and a decision now shaping the future of Beginning with Children.

Evaluating Beginning with Children

A charter school’s most important assessments come from its authorizer, which decides whether the school’s performance justifies its continued existence. For Beginning with Children, the authorizer is the city Department of Education, whose last assessment in April 2011 noted that the school had community support, its students were making adequate academic progress, its board was functioning effectively, and recent revenues exceeded expenses. That judgment earned the school approval to operate until June 2016.

11 Bartlett Street, home of Beginning with Children Charter School’s elementary school grades.

But in recent months, other stakeholders at Beginning with Children have asserted that the school’s situation is dire enough to require dramatic, immediate change—and have attempted to make it happen themselves.

Representatives from the Beginning with Children Foundation, which has helped manage the school for more than 20 years, informed the school months ago that it would pull out from its role as a charter management organization unless the school’s teachers adopted a “thin contract.” (That Green Dot-style contract eliminates many work rules, including tenure and seniority-based layoffs.)

The school’s academic performance shows that it has failed in its mission, they said, and new contracts would allow for a longer school day and other shifts they say would improve instruction.

Parts of the foundation’s assessment are borne out by state test scores. Only 18.8 percent of students passed last year’s state English exam, and 14.9 percent passed the math exam, compared to city averages of 26.4 percent and 29.6 percent. Its students also scored lower than their peers in District 14, critical comparison points for charter schools.

The city’s last annual review also noted that only 6.3 percent of the school’s students were English Language Learners, compared to a 11.4 percent district average—the third year in a row that Beginning with Children served fewer high-needs students than their neighbors did.

But the school earned Bs on its last two city progress reports, boosted by data showing its students improved more than at most of its peer schools, and a number of parents and teachers say they’re seeing academic improvement. The idea that the school should close because of its academic challenges doesn’t add up, teachers said, especially when they’ve been changing the curriculum, doing intensive new professional development, and integrating the Common Core simultaneously over the last three years.

“We don’t understand—we’re a B school,” science teacher Jazmin Rivera said. “We have two more years until the charter is up. Schools close when they’re failing. We’re not there.”

Foundation spokesman Bob Bellafiore said the decision to pull out was simply a result of the determination that the school was not providing a better education than other area schools.

“Charters have to perform. And this is proof of what happens if a school doesn’t perform,” Bellafiore said. “It’s a story of a school not succeeding, but an educational reform succeeding.”

Inside the school, teachers and parents say the back and forth over the school’s status have made it even more difficult to focus on improving scores. Twelve seventh-graders have already left the school, according to middle school principal Dionne Jaggon, presumably to attend a school they know will be open next year. For teachers, the potential closure, intense pressure to improve academics, and recent clashes with school leadership have created a pressure-cooker environment.

“We’re just trying to make sense of all of this. You have new curriculum, new visions. It’s difficult to adapt to all of that, and a lot of teachers left,” Rivera said.

Anatomy of a power struggle

The tug of war over the school’s closure has emerged from the competing groups that influence the school’s operations.

For Beginning with Children Charter School, the foundation that shares its name has played the most significant management role. It has provided academic support, an alumni program, and help supervising the school’s finances and infrastructure. Crucially, the foundation has also provided the school with its space at 11 Bartlett St.

Meanwhile, as required by law, the school’s board of trustees has chosen the school’s leaders, set its budgets, and made other governance decisions. By November, Beginning with Children’s board conceded it couldn’t support the school on its own and that it had been unable to recruit a new charter management organization.

So, faced with potentially running a school with no foundation backing, no space, and just a handful of board members, the board voted to dissolve the school at the end of the year.

Asenhat Gomez, a parent of seventh and an eighth grader at the school, said the decision left parents reeling. “It’s very weird and very sad,” she said.

“At this point it’s like, who do we trust?” Gomez asked.

The United Federation of Teachers’ general counsel Adam Ross said the union sees the discussion about school quality as a distraction. “Despite the largely successful nature of the school and the improving nature of the school,” he said the foundation and the school’s board “elected to close the school out of what largely seems to be largely anti-union animus.”

Stacey Gauthier is principal of one of the only other conversion charter schools in the city, Renaissance Charter School, and knows firsthand the special difficulties facing those schools. “We don’t like everything that’s on the contract and we try to work around certain issues,” she said. But she added that it would be hard for her to imagine her school’s management coming to the same ultimatum. “Would we make the decision to say, ‘If you don’t do this …’? I think that’s drastic.”

Bellafiore said that without the requested teacher contract changes, the foundation stands behind its decision to walk away. “Its resources would be better applied elsewhere to better fulfill the mission,” he said.

Plans for a fresh start

The foundation’s next focus looks like it will be a brand-new charter school. The foundation was involved in planning a new school for much of last year with many of the characteristics of Beginning with Children Charter School, though without its union affiliation.

According to the proposal, which was submitted to SUNY’s Charter Schools Institute but withdrawn last October, the school would have operated in Brooklyn and eventually served grades K-8, potentially drawing from South Williamsburg and other neighborhoods close to Beginning with Children.

The proposed school would have had the extended-day program, Saturday academic help, and other programs that the foundation pushed for at Beginning with Children and are already in place at another charter school managed by the foundation. (That school, Community Partnership Charter School, has higher proficiency rates than Beginning with Children but earned a D on its last city progress report after three years of higher grades.)

That application also shows that foundation officials were acknowledging Beginning with Children’s potential closure months before the board’s vote. If public space were unavailable for the new school, the building could be sublet to the new school for $1 per year, the application notes.

Bellafiore said the charter was withdrawn because the foundation wanted to wait for the Beginning with Children Charter School’s situation “to clarify itself.” The foundation has not yet decided whether the school will be able to use 11 Bartlett St.—the space that proved central to the school’s creation two decades ago—if it finds a way to remain open, he said, though it has committed to providing its alumni program to former students.

The Reichs declined to be interviewed, saying through a spokesperson, “Our heart is still with the community we worked with for so many years. While we have great hope for a better tomorrow for the children, we have not been involved with the school for the last four years.”

The board’s next steps

Knowing that the school won’t have the support of the Beginning with Children Foundation or another management organization, the charter school’s board members have now embarked on an experiment: trying to find a path forward on their own.

Students joined their parents to protest the board’s November vote to return the school’s charter at a December meeting.

Eagen, who previously sued the city on behalf of Williamsburg Charter High School, is now representing the school’s parents and teachers pro bono. Before the December meeting, she found people willing to join the school’s anemic board, including a Beginning with Children graduate, a local middle school principal, and a real estate broker.

That meeting started with brief, awkward interviews of the new board candidates on stage in front of an auditorium full of parents. (“I’d be lying if I said I knew much,” one candidate said of his ideas to turn the school around.) Hours later, the board voted to bring on the new members and pushed the deadline for a decision about the school’s future until the end of January.

That has put the responsibility for the school’s future on an entity that has also faced major internal and external pressures in recent years. In 2007, unhappy with what they described as chaotic infighting among board members, the Reichs came out of retirement and threatened to withdraw support from the school unless the board restructured. It did, but not without a very public fight.

By last year, Beginning with Children Charter School was operating with a nearly nonexistent board, even as the foundation recruited six people to serve on the founding board of its potential new charter school.

Longtime board member John Day had resigned by last summer, leaving Beginning with Children Charter School’s board with four members (down from 11 in 2011), according to meeting minutes. Four board members is well below the recommendations of the New York City Charter Schools Center, whose guide to building a charter school board suggests 11 to 21 members. It’s also lower than the minimum number allowed by the school’s charter, which is five.

That is probably why Day, the board’s most recent departure, voted at the November meeting when the board decided to return the school’s charter to the Department of Education.

Bellafiore, the spokesman for the board and the foundation, explained Day’s voting in two ways: that his earlier resignation was not effective, and that he had become a member of the board again before he took the vote. Day did not respond to requests for comment.

Moving ahead

In a third-floor classroom at 11 Bartlett St. on this Monday night, 18 adults huddled around tables trying to figure out how to build a new version of Beginning with Children. The ad hoc committee members asked one another, how much space do we need? Why are our test scores so low? Are we making any progress?

After a teacher rattled off a long list of the school’s academic programs, board member Alex Fong was stumped.

“Why is it that we sounds like we have such a robust program and such a great school and at the same time, we haven’t been able to turn the students around?” he asked.

Without the structured support and experience of the foundation or another charter management organization, the committee grappled with basic questions. Jaggon asked if they should consider eliminating grade levels. New board member Jeffrey Unger said that it was nearly impossible to plan without a decision from the foundation about whether the school could continue to occupy 11 Bartlett St. And board members contemplated whether it was worth it to try to come up with a plan that might not be sustainable long-term.

The committee has set a deadline of the Jan. 30 board meeting to develop a plan for the school’s independent future, or to announce (again) that it will give up the school’s charter.

If the board decides to give up the charter, even that plan of action isn’t well-defined. The major players say they aren’t yet sure what would happen after that decision is made, given that charters are typically not given up voluntarily before they expire and conversion charter schools are so rare.

According to Ross, the union’s legal team is reviewing the contract to determine how teachers who were hired after the school’s conversion will be handled by the Department of Education. Bellafiore said the foundation was looking into whether it would have financial obligations to the school’s teachers after the charter was returned. And Eagen said she wasn’t yet sure what the full process of returning the charter even is.

Still, parents with children attending Beginning with Children face even greater uncertainty.

Many hadn’t worried about the rumors that the school’s board would give back its charter because board members had told them that the city was considering creating a district school from Beginning with Children’s teachers and students. In November, the board told parents that option was off the table.

Jazmin Andujar, a parent with three sons at Beginning for Children, said she’s hopeful that a clear decision will be made soon. She has been committed to the school since pulling her oldest son out of first grade at a district school in 2006 when he got a spot in Beginning for Children.

He’s now in sixth grade, and Andujar’s two younger sons have joined him, now in kindergarten and fourth grade.”It’s kind of a legacy with them,” Andujar said of her sons. “Of course I’m worried.”

At the committee meeting, Gomez, whose daughters attend the middle school, urged the group to take parents’ concerns seriously.

“Something needs to be said, and said soon,” she said.

    

“I hope you hold me accountable,” Fariña told a group of them this morning at the Department of Education’s headquarters. “And by June, I’d love to ask you: Are the communications between us and parents better?”

The way the department engages with parents was an easy target for every Democratic candidate, including the eventual winner, Bill de Blasio, during the mayoral campaign. As the department centralized and reorganized operations under the Bloomberg administration, parents increasingly complained that they were shut out of decision-making.

Rebuilding the department’s relationship with parents is one of Fariña’s first priorities, she said when she accepted the job last week. She said she would make the rounds of elected parent councils to hear parents’ concerns.

“My passion is obviously parents,” she said.

At today’s meeting with the Chancellor’s Parent Advisory Council, a group made up of PTA presidents from across the city, Fariña offered a few additional details about what she has in mind.

She signaled that, to at least some degree, she would work to make decisions based on what parents want. Passing out green index cards to the CPAC members, Fariña told them to write down a question or concern about the school system. She said she would collect cards for each group she meets in her listening tour — Community Education Councils, another parent body, will get yellow cards — using a color-coding system to help her understand where issues overlap and differ.

“It’s a way to get to what you really need me to do in a much quicker way,” Fariña said.

But she also indicated that the department’s emphasis would continue to lie with informing parents about what they need to know, the main parent engagement strategy of the Bloomberg administration. This spring, the department will hold an all-day parent conference, Fariña announced, adding that workshops could include ones on helping parents better understand the Common Core and which children’s television shows that are best for language development.

Fariña has become known for speaking without a script in her first few public appearances, bouncing from one idea on education to another. Continuing that habit on Tuesday, she shared a series of questions that have been on her mind as she’s thought about parent engagement, including what to do with parent coordinators, the people in each school tasked with communicating with families.

“How do we make parent coordinators smarter about things they can then translate to you?” she asked.

Winning over parents spread across 1,800 schools in five boroughs could be a formidable challenge. Queen Makkada, a longtime parent leader who has children and grandchildren attending schools in three different districts, said she didn’t hear much new from Fariña.

“What she said sounds like what everybody says,” Makkada said. “As far as I’m concerned it’s the same old rhetoric.”

    

Just 20 percent of students with special needs who start kindergarten at a charter school remain there by second grade, compared to 50 percent of students with special needs at district schools who start and remain there. Overall, 70 percent of charter school students stayed put from kindergarten in the 2008-09 year until third grade in 2011-12, compared to 61 percent of students who stayed put at a sampling of nearby district schools.

The findings undermine one criticism of charter schools, that they frequently push students to enroll elsewhere, but provide fuel for another, that the schools disproportionately fail to serve students with special needs.

The report shows that charter schools held onto more of their kindergarten students in each category when broken down by race and ethnicity, free and reduced lunch qualification, and English Language Learner status.

“If you look at students who qualify for free and reduced price lunch, Hispanic students, African-American kids, we do a better job than the district does, and that is simply revelatory and again contrary to accepted wisdom,” New York City Charter School Center CEO James Merriman said.

The numbers reveal that student mobility is very high in both kinds of schools—a statistic with implications for student achievement. Research has shown that students who move schools typically score lower than students who remain at one school.

Charter schools could be at an advantage for holding onto students because the families that enroll must complete an application process that requires planning ahead and an expectation of where they will be living six months later.

But special education mobility numbers at charter schools are especially high, with only one in five kindergarten students remaining where they started by third grade.

“On special education, we don’t do a good job at attracting or keeping kids,” Merriman said. At district and charter schools, “That’s not acceptable, and we have to change that reality,” he said.

Merriman said he didn’t have a full explanation for the charter schools’ low special education retention numbers, but he noted that many small charter schools had difficulty providing the space and and services that high-needs students often require.

“I suspect in part, parents who have special education students are very involved and are looking for the best place where their kid is going to be valued. And charters just may not be getting the job done,” Merriman said.

Students who leave charter schools are much more likely to end up in a district school, since few charter schools take students mid-year or take many students in the older elementary grades. They are also more likely than their district school peers to have been further behind the rest of their grade in math, the report shows.

Today’s report uses data from the Department of Education and looks at all 53 charter schools serving those grade levels over that three-year period. It paints a more dramatic picture of charter school special education students’ mobility than a report from Manhattan Institute researcher Marcus Winters released last fall, which focused on the charter school special education gap.

That report noted that special education students are especially likely to leave the school they’re at, regardless of school type, but said that traditional public school students were more likely to do so. That report looked at the same time period but used a broader set of traditional public school data and a narrower set of charter school data, with information coming from 25 self-selecting charter schools.

    

In his State of the State address today, Cuomo proposed a “Teacher Excellence Fund” that would allow districts to give $20,000 bonuses to teachers who earn the top rating on their annual evaluations. The bonus amount, which is more than a quarter of average teacher pay in the state, is enough to make teachers work harder, he said.

“You want teachers to perform … then incentivize performance with performance bonuses and pay them like the professionals they are,” Cuomo said.

Such a program could be expensive for the state. About half of teachers in districts outside New York City earned the “highly effective” ratings last year, the first in which the districts offered the designation. Cuomo did not specify how he would pay for the program.

But Cuomo signaled that not all districts would immediately participate in the program, which could curb costs. He also said districts would decide with their unions how to apportion the funds, leaving the possibility open that criteria other than evaluation scores could factor into decisions.

Local leaders signaled that they are unlikely to entertain the possibility of implementing a merit pay program in New York City.

Speaking at a press conference after Cuomo’s address, Mayor Bill de Blasio said he thought teachers should get bonuses if they take more challenging assignments, such as a job in a struggling school with many low-income students. But he said he was not interested in rewarding teachers for top ratings or for improving student achievement on tests.

“I believe it’s appropriate, for strategic reasons, to give bonuses, for example when we have teachers work in some schools that are really struggling,” de Blasio said, reprising comments he made on the campaign trail.

And UFT President Michael Mulgrew reiterated the union’s longstanding stance that a “career ladder” that pays experienced teachers more to help newer colleagues would be preferable to a program that rewards teachers based on their annual ratings. The UFT has criticized the city’s implementation of its new teacher evaluation system, which went into effect this school year.

“First you have to be a highly effective teacher,” Mulgrew said about teachers who would climb the proposed ladder. “But you also have to be able to communicate and work well with other teachers because part of your job would be to help them develop.” 

Despite the weak prospects for local implementation, advocates of overhauling how teachers are paid immediately embraced the proposal.

“With his bold announcement of the Teacher Excellence Fund and $20,000 bonuses for highly effective teachers, Governor Cuomo has positioned New York as a leader in the national education reform movement,” said StudentsFirstNY Executive Director Jenny Sedlis.

Merit pay has not been shown to boost student performance. A recent $75 million teacher merit pay initiative in New York City ended after it did not lead to gains for students.

But while little evidence exists that financial incentives make teachers better, a more recent experiment, the Teacher Talent Initiative, suggested that incentives could lead top teachers to head to struggling schools. The program paid $20,000 to teachers who were most effective at improving student achievement to take jobs in struggling schools for at least two years, and over 90 percent stayed there even after the extra pay stopped, according to a recent study. The study showed that students’ test score gains ranged from modest, in reading, to significant, in math.

Cuomo’s policy book, released to accompany his speech, suggests that he’ll follow the Talent Teacher Initiative playbook. It stresses that one way districts can design incentives is by creating higher-paying jobs in struggling schools — exactly the possibility that de Blasio said he would consider.