Opinion
Education Opinion

Sean “Diddy” Combs to Open Harlem Charter school

By Matthew Lynch — April 01, 2016 1 min read
  • Save to favorites
  • Print

Sean Combs, better known as “Diddy,” has started a new charter school that will open this fall. The school is to be named Capital Preparatory Harlem Charter School and will work in conjunction with charter school leader Steve Perry’s Capital Prep Magnet School that’s based in Connecticut.

Perry founded Capital Prep Magnet School in 2005 and touted its success by noting that 100 percent of the students who attended his school went on to a four-year colleges.

Diddy’s Capital Prep school in Harlem will be located in East Harlem where the music mogul was born. For its first year, Capital Prep in Harlem will enroll 160 6th and 7th grade students and will likely expand as it grows.

The school is free and will be considered to have a year-round curriculum.

Joining Diddy and Perry to lead the school will be Danita Jones. Jones is based in Orlando and graduated from Florida A&M University. She will serve as the school’s principal.

But of course, this move hasn’t come without controversy. Charter schools have been lauded as a new way for low-income students to attain a good education yet many of those schools turn out to be financial black holes.

Perry is poised to collect a fee of $2.5 million per year over five years for overseeing his schools in Connecticut and Harlem.

The bad news doesn’t stop there as a recent study of charter schools compared them to the subprime mortgage crisis of the early aughts.

Charter schools are run like private businesses in an effort to generate revenue and are often mismanaged. The study also posed that some students who are deemed as expensive are often turned away.

This theory is also levied towards Perry as he supposedly cherry picked students for his school in Connecticut to ensure that all went to four-year colleges.

Either way, Diddy and Perry’s school opens this fall in Harlem to much fanfare. For the sake of the students, hopefully all goes well.

The opinions expressed in Education Futures: Emerging Trends in K-12 are strictly those of the author(s) and do not reflect the opinions or endorsement of Editorial Projects in Education, or any of its publications.