I was premature yesterday is reporting that a deal was near on renewing mayoral control.
As of now, there is no deal.
The State Senate, controlled by Republicans, wants more charters. The State Assembly, controlled by urban Democrats, does not. On June 30, mayoral control expires, and the previous board is revived, seven members, with only two appointed by the mayor.
The Republicans in the Senate want to humiliate De Blasio. So does Governor Cuomo, his rival. The leader of the State Senate, JOHN Flanagan, loves charters but has none in his suburban district.
No one is giving a minute of thought to children or education. It’s all politics and ego.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This notwithstanding, mayoral control is terrible. Who needs a fake board of education where everyone can get up and speak only to be ignored by mayoral appointees?
I thought it might be better in the hands of a mayor who was anti-charter, but nonetheless they just changed laws so he’d have to pay charter rent. It’s a lose-lose. My only fear is that once we get another reformy mayor they will give it away once again.
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As a parent, I PREFER Mayoral control. However, I do not believe in paying ransom to unethical people and since Mayoral control means paying ransom specifically to Success Academy I oppose it.
And it IS about Success Academy, period. That is the charter chain demanding the right to expand their reprehensible schools (we only suspend the violent 5 year olds but so many of those poor minority kids are violent in our kindergarten — VIOLENT, Moskowitz insists! and they deserve every single suspension we mete out to them).
It is no wonder that the NAACP called for a moratorium on charters and that rich white billionaires and their chosen proponent of “so many 6 year olds who come to Success Academy are VIOLENT and that’s the only reason I suspend them because they are VIOLENT) is demanding the right to expand in NYC.
There is something sickening about the ONLY person with power to stop the suspensions — Joseph Belluck at the SUNY Charter Institute — agreeing with Eva Moskowitz that her suspension rate for low-income non-white children is all because of their violent nature and tendency to be very dangerous in kindergarten classes.
And since Belluck is telling me that he accepts without question Eva Moskowitz’s claim that violent 5 year olds end up in Success Academy charters 5 times as often as they end up in any other NYC charters, then I oppose Mayoral control.
I don’t need the SUNY Charter Institute overseeing where MY tax dollars are spent spouting racist beliefs about how violent the non-white children in Success Academy schools are. And I don’t want MORE of my tax dollars paying for the SUNY Charter Institute’s staff to promote that racism to the country. Too bad Joseph Belluck ignores the NAACP because he knows that on the matter of how violent young African-American children are, Eva Moskowitz is the expert to trust.
For those reasons, I oppose Mayoral control. It is being held hostage by people who insist that 20% of the 5 and 6 year olds in a charter are violent and needed suspending because they think NYC residents will believe them because those children aren’t white. We don’t. Joseph Belluck, you should be ashamed of trying to convince us it is true.
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OMG, what a bunch of sleaze balls and drama kings. This is more than ridiculous. It’s about $$$$$, of course. There’s a term for people like this: MALE PROSTITUTES.
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