A contentious battle rages over the future of education for children in Albany
By Scott Waldman
(From Times Union, February 20th, 2012)
CLIFTON PARK — To hear Albany school officials tell it, a well-funded and powerful industry growing in a Clifton Park office building is dedicated to dismantling the city district.
But to Tom Carroll, the man behind that so-called industry, it’s not an assault launched on city schools from the suburbs, but simply an effort to encourage educational choice for Albany parents.
Whichever view one takes, it is clear that the battle to fill classrooms in Albany’s minority neighborhoods increasingly is being waged between Albany school district administrators on one side and, on the other, mostly white and wealthy conservative activists, many of them hundreds of miles from the city.
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Albany school board President Dan Egan says the goal of Carroll and the people who finance the 11 charter schools he helped found in Albany is to see the district fail.
“They’re trying to privatize education in the same way Blackwater is trying to privatize the U.S. Army,” he said, referring to the private military contractor. “That’s not good for our community or our society.”
Carroll, whose career began in Republican politics before he turned to the charter school movement, says he has opened schools only when they are needed and created organizations to support them.
“The goal all along is to create enough charter schools to meet the demand of parents,” he said. “There’s always a willingness to open more schools if there is demand.”
Carroll has long been the district’s most steadfast competitor and helped bring to Albany one of the highest densities of charter schools in the nation. But in the last year, three separate non-profit organizations, all connected to Carroll, have intensified the charter battle with the district. It’s a new direction in an old fight. Charter schools and district schools have scrapped over Albany’s 10,500 public students for a decade.
Both sides have shown that they are capable of making the brawl increasingly nasty. The Clifton Park groups tried to wound district schools by pumping tens of thousands of dollars into negative ad campaigns; the district cut off some charter tuition payments for months.
And while the district has a $200 million budget and occasionally the backing of the powerful teachers union, the three non-profit groups have proven to be formidable foes, capable of collecting millions of dollars from groups outside Albany, including Wall Street multi-millionaires and hedge-fund billionaires.
Fifteen miles from the Albany city line, The Foundation for Education Reform & Accountability, The Coalition for Education Reform and Accountability and School Performance Inc. all use a bland office complex at 4 Chelsea Place as headquarters.