I also posted this article on Huffington Post so that I could reach more people than just those who read my blog.
The moral of the story is that getting into a fight with the charter school lobby is a very risky thing to do.
They are very rich and powerful, and they are used to opening their boutique charters in public spaces without paying rent.
They are also used to pushing aside the children who are already enrolled in the public schools where they “co-locate.” They don’t care if the children have severe disabilities or if they take away the children’s art room, dance room, library, playground, or anything else. The rest of the kids don’t matter. Only the kids who come to their schools are important. Children who do well on tests are more important than those who do poorly, and they should have more rights.
The de Blasio administration tried to be nice and gave them 14 new charter schools out of 17 proposals. Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academy charter school chain got five new schools instead of the eight she wanted.
That was a call to war for Eva and the billionaires who helped her. There are only 5 new schools! What a jerk!
Eva is now trying to bring down the de Blasio administration, which was just elected in a landslide a few months ago.
Stories about de Blasio’s crimes against children have been all over the Rupert Murdoch press and TV talk shows. This media blitz may be in part because Success Academy gives at least $500,000 a year to Knickerbocker, a powerful D.C. public relations firm run by Anita Dunn, who was President Obama’s director of communication in 2009.
Here’s the story. Help it go viral:
You may have read in the news or seen on TV that Bill de Blasio, the new mayor of New York City, is closing charter schools, kicking out poor minority children, crushing their hopes for the future, and taking away their chance to leave failing public schools.
Most of the complaints come from Eva Moskowitz, who runs the biggest charter school chain in New York City. Her problems have been talked about a lot on Fox News, Morning Joe and Chris Mathews on MSNBC, and in the Wall Street Journal and New York Post.
Time to check the facts.
When de Blasio ran for mayor, he said he would slow the growth of charter schools and charge them rent based on their ability to pay. The city’s Department of Education approved 45 new co-locations in the last few months of the Bloomberg administration. A co-location is when a new public school is added to an existing public school. This means that students from both schools must share the cafeteria, library, and playground, and that each school must give up its art room, music room, and any other space that isn’t being used as a classroom. Parents of kids in public schools don’t like co-locations because it means their kids will have to fight for space and there will be less facilities.
The new mayor took over 45 co-locations, and 36 of them were approved by him. This made a lot of public school parents sad. Only nine co-locations were turned down by the mayor.
The nine were turned down by the de Blasio administration for the following reasons:
It would not let a high school be turned into an elementary school.
It wouldn’t open a school with less than 250 students because it wouldn’t be big enough to meet the students’ needs.
It wouldn’t let any co-locations happen that required a lot of building.
It wouldn’t let any co-location happen that would cause students with disabilities to have to move. The kids who need help the most wouldn’t have to move to make room for other kids.