The Genesee Community Charter School faces a serious
challenge to its charter renewal because its enrollment, as almost anyone
familiar with the school knows, doesn’t reflect the city’s student population.
The latter population is almost 90 percent African American
and Latino, and mostly from low-income households. But only about 30 percent of
GCCS students qualify for free and reduced meals, says Lisa Wing, Genesee’s
school leader.
The State Education Department, in a last minute challenge to
GCCS’s renewal, says that it wants that figure to be higher. But Wing says that
would run counter to the school’s approach to education.
“Our charter that was renewed in 2010 was designed to mirror
the demographics of the county, not the city,” Wing says. “It has been part of
our founding model.”
But a change in the charter law, according to the State
University of New York Charter Schools Institute, says that enrollment “must be
comparable to the population of students attending public schools in the
district where the charter school is located.”
GCCS has appealed to the SED to let it keep operating
according to its charter. Though Wing says that she believes that Genesee will get
a full five-year renewal, she says that a short-term renewal — another
possibility — could be destabilizing to the school.
GCCS officials expect to learn the status of the renewal
later this month.
GCCS is located on East Avenue in the Rochester Museum and
Science Center. Its academic performance has been on par with some suburban
districts.
But GCCS’s academic success and its enrollment policy have
also been subject to sharp criticism. The school is often accused of
cherry-picking students — a tactic used by some charter school operators to
inflate academic performance.
Wing has firmly maintained over the years that GCCS doesn’t
cherry-pick students, and she doesn’t equivocate about the school’s enrollment
policy.
In a recent letter to parents, she said, “We stress that
everyone is welcome to enter their child in our open annual lottery which
assures that everyone has an equal shot at acceptance.
“Our charter says GCCS will reflect the demographics of the
entire county because we believe in the benefits of structuring schools with a
blend of socioeconomic groups — and certainly our outstanding results prove
without question that we are on the right track.”
GCCS has about 215 students in grades K-6 who are chosen by
random lottery, Wing says. Though Genesee’s student population doesn’t reflect
the city’s, some research shows that a school’s academic success goes down when
enrollment of poor students exceeds 35 percent or 40 percent — the case in most
city schools.
Economically disadvantaged students benefit greatly, the same
research suggests, when they attend schools where the majority of students are either
middle income or higher. Wing says that the economically disadvantaged students
in her school have performed dramatically better on English language arts and
math tests than their peers in the city school district.
And that, she says, raises a question: Why is the SED intent
on breaking something that works?
The State Education Department, in a last-minute challenge to
Genesee Community’s charter renewal, says that it wants the school to more
accurately reflect the population of the City of Rochester.
This article appears in May 6-12, 2015.
This article says the city’s student population is 90 percent African American and Latino. I believe what the author meant to say is that the population of students attending Rochester City School District schools is 90 percent African American and Latino. When you count in all the students who live in the district but don’t attend RCSD schools, the percentage of minorities and people receiving free and reduced lunches drop. Please use accurate statistics.
Further, the insinuation (“The school is often accused of cherry-picking students…”) that the school is selective is simply wrong because admission is by lottery. If you want to see an example of cherry picking, that would be a school that makes students to jump through hoops to get in — say, one that requires parents to request an audition and then have a child create a portfolio of work and go through a three-hour audition. And that would be RCSD’s School of the Arts, another model that works pretty well because the selection process ensures parents are engaged in the attending the school.
1) The state charter law was amended in 2010 to require charters to reflect their
home district in terms of free and reduced lunch. This is not a “last minute” challenge.
2) GCCS has 26% free and reduced lunch while Monroe County has 46% free and reduced lunch. GCCS does not reflect the demographics of the county.
GCCS offers a vibrant school community, diverse student body and an outstanding education. Instead of seeking to change that successful formula, we should be seeking to replicate it in the RCSD and statewide. Instead of asking GCCS to become less diverse, we should be asking how we make the RCSD more diverse and more successful.
If anything, this article and GCCS demonstrate that we need a regional school system so that all students can be part of school communities that are not more than 40% free/reduced lunch, and are thus more likely to do well in school.
In addition to the SOTA, there is another program in Monroe County, one po;ular with community leaders that is designed to cherry pick students. That is the Urban/Suburban program. Students are interviewed by the receiving districts and chosen based on an expected ability to succeed. I happen to think that such cherry picking (or selectivity if you will) is a good thing, as it is likely to lead to more support for the program. Charter school, however, do not engage in such selectivity, as Tim should know. I think his use of the term is more because he disapproves of charter schools in general.
There is nothing inherently wrong with selective school programs (SOTA and Urban-Suburban certainly qualify as such) as long as we are all forthcoming about their nature and caveats. However, this article is about charter schools, which are barred by law from being overtly selective…and one charter school in particular with a continuous history of incongruous student demographics.
A little context would serve Mr. Macaluso’s piece well. First, GCCS is a distinct aberration when it comes to the populations served by charter schools in our city and state. Most charters actively recruit from the poorest and most under-served urban populations and wind up with demographics that match their host districts. When GCCS opened over a decade ago, its admission process was by lottery as required, however the school intentionally recruited a more middle class student population (advertising on NPR, and relying on word of mouth in wealthier communities). GCCS made sure to hold its lottery very early each year to ensure a distinct advantage for those who heard about the school through word of mouth. Through this and other technically legal means, the school had an incredibly low free and reduced lunch student population (poverty measure) that hovered around 10%. Then in 2010, NYS amended the charter law and required charter schools to meet specific demographic targets tied to the school’s host district (NOT host county!). A handful of schools like GCCS came under intense pressure from authorizers to change their recruitment and enrollment practices, though because GCCS only enrolls at the kindergarten level and siblings of existing students are given guaranteed entry, even the changes required by law left only a narrow opening for change at the school. Since then, the poverty rate has inched upward at GCCS to 24%…still well below the RCSD and the county averages.
I happen to believe GCCS delivers an exceptional education program in a city that is short on quality options. However, the school is in clear violation of the charter law and needs to be more accessible to ALL city students. Sometimes in the course of discussions such as this, it is easy to forget that there are outstanding charter schools here in Rochester that serve poor students almost exclusively and deliver tremendous results. These are the outliers we should be writing about and learning from!
Let’s call GCCS what it is: an excellent private school disguising itself as a public charter school.