Is this the future of school privatization?

Is this how corporate school "reform" will play out? As charter schools in Albany, N.Y., discovered teaching is hard work, especially in low income neighborhoods, they closed their bright new campuses and now the public schools have to take up the slack. A story in Capital New York, a magazine and website that covers politics, government and media in Albany and New York City, suggests that may be the case.

Charter schools in Albany opened several years ago to a lot of hoopla about how they'd "[herald] a new beginning for children living in grinding poverty and stuck in a long-troubled school district," to quote the Capital New York story by state government reporter Scott Waldman. But now, dogged by persistent low student test scores and graduation rates, as well as investigations into shady financial practices, they're closing one by one.

Says Waldman:

In total, Albany taxpayers have spent more than $300 million on the city’s charter schools in the last decade, Albany school district spokesman Ron Lesko said. Many of those schools have now been closed.

“We didn’t need to spend scores of millions of dollars to find out that the work our teachers and staff do and the staff in Rochester, Syracuse, Buffalo and New York City, and every city in poor communities in America is doing is hard work,” he said. “There is no quick and easy fix and privatizing education is no answer and that’s been proven here.”

The failure in Albany has shown the disruption that charters can cause to public school systems and surrounding neighborhoods. The Brighter Choice middle schools set to close were built just a few years ago, near the foundation’s headquarters. Half of a city block was leveled and residents were displaced from their homes.

The closure of those schools has created an administrative nightmare for the Albany city school district, which must now establish an entirely new middle school in the next six months to handle the almost 400 charter school students who were enrolled in the failed Brighter Choice schools.

Waldman said the charters initially brought great promise to Albany. But over time the promise faded as financial irregularities were discovered and, more importantly, the charter schools failed to measure up academically.

Privately, Albany city school district officials have acknowledged that charter competition has spurred changes to the public school curriculum, the addition of extracurricular activities and more intense focus on student achievement. Some Albany schools also extended their school day and provided students with uniforms.

In many cases, charter schools have also provided stability to students who come from unstable home environments, offering them clean uniforms, two or three meals a day and a safe building that was open to them for up to twelve hours a day, including weekends and much of the summer. One Albany charter, the Kipp Tech Valley Middle School, regularly sends students to some of the northeast’s top boarding schools on full scholarships.

For a time, Albany’s charters created such a highly competitive market for students that forced the public school system to run advertisements on public buses, and to sell off schools that it no longer needed.

Now, the Albany city school district is again looking to create space for hundreds of charter students returning to the system. Lesko said the district is interested in purchasing the soon-to-be shuttered charter schools, just as it did with the former New Covenant Charter School building.

Meanwhile, the taxpayer funds that paid for the charter schools, often through leases far above market rates, has essentially evaporated.