The front group misleadingly called “Families for Excellent Schools” has added nearly another $1 million to the $3.6 million it has spent on television advertising to slam Mayor Bill de Blasio and to press Albany to expand funding for charter schools. Of course, none of the families of the children in the ads are paying for the ads. Four of the five founding board members of “Families for Excellent Schools” are Wall Street hedge fund managers. Other major contributors to the group are Los Angeles billionaire Eli Broad and the far-right Walton Family Foundation. The ads were paid for by hedge fund managers and allies, including the billionaire Paul Tudor Jones, on behalf of Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academy. According to Forbes, Paul Tudor Jones manages $13 billion in assets; he has decided that he wants to “save” public education by privatizing it. His Robin Hood Foundation raises as much as $80 million in a single night for his causes.

 

The goal of the negative TV ads is to intimidate Mayor Bill de Blasio and make sure he never rejects another charter school proposal. It is focused on de Blasio’s decision not to allow Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academy is to expand into a middle school in a Harlem public school where it currently has an elementary school. De Blasio rejected the proposal because the expansion of Harlem Success Academy 4 would have required the eviction of students with disabilities from the public school.

 

The billionaires supporting the charter movement see an opportunity not only to drive down de Blasio’s poll numbers and end his “tax-the-rich talk,” but to bully the legislature into increasing funding for charter schools and guaranteeing by law that they can never be moved from whatever public space they have and never have to pay rent.

 

Last Sunday, de Blasio held out the olive branch to charters, pleading that charters and public schools should work together. He doesn’t understand that the charter schools are not in a mood to compromise. De Blasio followed up his conciliatory speech by creating a committee to discuss how to utilize space in the public schools. He added to the committee a representative of Paul Tudor Jones’ Robin Hood Foundation and David Levin from KIPP. (Recall that a KIPP school in Washington Heights has a padded closet where children are placed when they misbehave, a practice that would not be permitted in public schools.) Public school parents howled in outrage on blogs and saw this as pre-emptive surrender, considering that the very people paying for the ads are now on a committee to decide how much space to give to charter schools.

 

If they can pay more than $4 million for a negative TV campaign, why can’t they afford to pay rent for use of public space. In light of the recent court decision won by Moskowitz saying that her schools cannot be audited by public authorities, it is clear that her schools are not public schools. The judge agreed with her contention that Success Academy is not “a unit of the state.” Like charters elsewhere, she claims that the schools are run by a private corporation with a government contract. Why shouldn’t this private corporation pay rent for use of public space? Why should they be allowed to be squatters when they can afford the rent? Why should their desire for more space take precedence over the well-being of children with the greatest needs, who have no billionaires to lobby for them?