SUNY trustee quits over Cobble Hill co-location

Micau LandauDr. Pedro Noguera resigned from the SUNY Board of Trustees, one of two bodies with the power to authorize new charter schools in New York State, over the approval of a controversial co-location in Brooklyn. Upset over the approval of a controversial charter school co-location, Dr. Pedro Noguera on Jan. 27 resigned from the SUNY Board of Trustees, one of two bodies with the power to authorize new charter schools in New York State.

Noguera, a prominent professor of education at New York University, resigned in the wake of a decision by the board’s Education, College Readiness and Success Committee, which he chaired, to allow charter impresario Eva Moskowitz to open a new Success Academy inside a school building in Brooklyn’s affluent Cobble Hill neighborhood that already houses three other schools — despite the community’s staunch opposition to the plan.

“That was kind of the last straw for me,” Noguera told The New York Times, explaining that he is concerned about the community divisions caused by charter co-locations and fears that SUNY’s Charter Schools Institute is more interested in increasing the number of charters than in developing experimental schools that can help to improve public schools at large.

“Many of the new schools that have been authorized — there’s nothing innovative about them,” Noguera said in an interview with the New York Teacher.

Noguera supports charter schools but believes that they should serve as engines for innovation from which other schools can learn. Unfortunately, he said, lack of leadership from the state has led to “competition between the public schools and charter schools, which was not the intention.”

“The main problem that I see now with charters throughout New York State is that there’s no policy,” Noguera said. “I just don’t see any thinking going on, at least not that I can understand.”

Noguera also said in an open letter explaining his decision that “the proliferation of charter schools and their co-location…were actually undermining rather than improving public schools” and described the Department of Education’s closure of “failing” schools, which he said educate the “most disadvantaged” students, as “a setup” and “blatantly unfair.”