Emergency meeting on Thursday on behalf of the 97% of New York State students who are not in charter schools:
Anyone who can make it tomorrow should do so. The state budget is hitting crunch time, with the Charter lobby spending millions on behalf of privatization and the 3% in charters, while firmly controlling both the Governor and the State Senate. Support must be given to Speaker Silver and the Assembly Dems to hold fast for the 97% of our kids in public schools and for public education, and to allow Mayor de Blasio to determine his own education policies.
The Senate/Cuomo proposal would force the DOE (and all local public school boards throughout the state) to provide public space for EVERY charter authorized at the state level, or else pay the charter’s rent in private space; a colocation policy that would be worse than anything Bloomberg ever sought. Additionally, the charter lobby boondoggle bill would give Charters more upfront money (aka tuition), and give Albany control of our NYC public school buildings and budget, while sending 25 cents of every new state education dollar to the 3 out of 100 kids in charters. Meanwhile, the City and State public schools are looking at 2009 funding levels which the courts said were $2 billion short – back then. Outrageous.
Please join New York Communities for Change, Public School Parents, Elected Officials, Educators, Community Members.
Thursday, March 27
12 noon
Tweed Courthouse – 52 Chambers
Noah
noah eliot gotbaum
community education council district 3 (cec3)
noah@gotbaum.com
twitter: @noahegotbaum
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The rich will keep trying until they buy everyone’s vote, so this may be the tipping point. Why are we allowing history to repeat the same mistakes of the 1890’s? It must be the terrible public school history teachers! How do we continue to elect such weak moral people to represent us? JP Morgan, Astor, Gould, Schwab, Rockefeller, Frick, Drew, Vanderbilt, and the other robber barons must be enjoying this return to the values of their time.
A very worthwhile endeavor, but they should really plan ahead and get the word out when organizing such rallies, because it can take more than one day for interested parties to make arrangements so they can attend.
No words for this. Why aren’t suburban parents standing up too? They don’t seem to crave this choice. Incidentally they have some of the highest property taxes anywhere – where will all this money for more schools come from?
The state money is not enough and there is a history of passing more costs back to them.
Why is there money for charters where there hasn’t been money for public schools?
“Why aren’t suburban parents standing up too?” Believe it or not, my guess is that it is because suburban parents don’t know about this issue. I’m here on Long Island in the fight against standardized testing and STILL there are parents who don’t know about the refusal movement. If they don’t know about that, how in the world can we expect them to know about the upcoming budget issue???? (Rhetorical question.) In fact, I’m at a total lack of faith in my BOE and administration for not bringing this to the attention of our various HSAs (PTAs).
Reblogged this on 21st Century Theater.