Times calls charter application ‘phony’
Monday, January 9th, 2012Michael Winerip in the Times rips into a proposal for a Hebrew-language charter high school in the Highland Park area, calling its latest application a “fiction.”
Among its “repeated distortions” are claims of phony endorsements. Nevertheless, writes Winerip, “the charter still may open in September”:
Part of the answer is that charter schools are a top priority for the Obama administration, making federal officials predisposed to support them.
And part of the answer, as Justin Hamilton, an Education Department spokesman, explained in an e-mail, is that federal officials see their oversight role as limited. The department hires private consultants to rate the quality of a charter applicant, but those consultants “cannot use information not included in the grant application,” he said.
In other words, if [applicant Sharon] Akman writes that Assemblyman Peter J. Barnes III supports the charter, the federal consultants are not permitted to interview Mr. Barnes, who would have been happy to tell them that he does not.
Winerip says the state may follow up on the “misrepresentations” he and the school’s opponents have alleged:
A spokesman for the state’s Education Department, Justin Barra, said in an e-mail that in the next review round for charter applications, representatives of Tikun Olam would be brought in for “an intensive in-person interview.” As for possible misrepresentations, he said: “Several individuals in the public comment process have raised concerns about potential inaccurate statements in the application. We will investigate these concerns.”


JustASC is written by Andrew Silow-Carroll, Editor-in-Chief of the 