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Inside Success Academy’s Fight for Children

Campbell Brown, New York Post

Campbell Brown, a member of the board of the Success Academy Charter Schools, was honored at Success’ spring benefit Monday night. These are excerpts from her remarks.

Like a lot of others here tonight, I’m just a soldier in Success Academies CEO Eva Moskowitz’s army. And I want to talk about why I joined the fight.

It is a fight. We have to fight for these schools. I wish we didn’t. It amazes me that there could be anything controversial about the achievements of these extraordinary kids — or about the accomplishments of Eva and the team who make all of this possible.

It amazes me that anyone would dare try to choke one of the most exciting, innovative things happening in public education.

But if we’ve learned one thing recently, it’s that keeping these schools open, operating and growing is a battle every single day.

And it’s not going away — because no compromise is possible.

As a reporter for 14 years, I went to work believing that basically both sides had some merit and deserved a fair hearing — and my job was essentially to referee the match.

But sometimes you stare at a problem and you say, “I’m sorry, both sides don’t have merit.” And when the lives of children are literally hanging in the balance, you can’t play referee.

If we believe that charters serve the best interests of children, then every attempt to stop or limit them is a limit on that good influence — and why should we ever accept a compromise like that?

Those on the other side keep saying charters aren’t the answer. They ask, “What about the 95 percent of kids who can’t attend charters?” Well, no one’s saying that every public-school student should be moved into a charter. All we say is that the excellence of our charters should be moved into every public school.

It is a fairness issue: There’s no reason all kids shouldn’t be held to the same high standards as kids in charters, or have the same challenging curriculum. There’s no reason teachers in all public schools shouldn’t face the same accountability as teachers in charters, and get the same support and professional development.

In a rational world, regular public schools would see the example of Success Academy and follow it. In a rational world, principals could put the best people in the classrooms, without rules restricting them that have nothing to do with the quality of learning.

In a rational world, the schools chancellor would have the power to fire a school employee found guilty of sexual misconduct with a child.

We don’t live in a rational world.

That last issue is actually the one that made me an activist in the fight.

A couple of years ago, I saw a list of 14 teachers who still had their jobs after being found guilty of sexual misconduct with kids. I was horrified: Can you imagine your child in that teacher’s class?

A crazy state law took the power to fire out of the hands of the most senior leadership and gave it to an arbitrator who the union has a say in choosing. So even the worst offenders — people you’d never let near your kids — have kept their jobs after a guilty verdict.

As a mother, this offended me deeply, largely because I knew I could protect my kids from this — I had the means and the power. The victims are the most underprivileged children in this city.

So we developed a campaign to bring attention to this outrage and change the system — who (I naïvely thought) would dare defend a system that puts the rights of child molesters before the rights of kids?

We got some attention, but we have yet to change a damn thing. We haven’t convinced our legislators that we can compete with the teachers union, so no one in Albany wants anything to do with it.

Think about the absurdity here. We actually had to wage a campaign to win political support to remove sex predators from our classrooms. And we haven’t succeeded yet.

This is a screwed-up system. It is corrupt. It is failing. And the other side is nothing if not relentless in keeping control over it.

Which means we have to be just as relentless in the mission that brings us together here tonight. It’s a simple shared belief: If any parent wants to find a better school to give their children a better life, that should be nobody’s choice but theirs, and no one should stand in the way.

The good news is, we’re gaining strength. Eleven thousand parents got on buses and went to Albany and made their voices heard and the governor came out to join them. We’re starting to win a few battles.

A few very influential people don’t like it. They have the power to stop change, close doors, shut things down. But they ran out of arguments decades ago.

You can tell who’s on the losing side of an issue when what they fear most is competition. They hate charter schools like Success Academy because the example shows what every school can be, for every girl and boy.

By saving children and giving them a chance, these schools remind everyone what those kids are being saved from — an education system that lost its way.