The charter lobby in New York State had a clever strategy: Invest campaign cash in Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo and in the Republican-controlled State Senate. For years, it worked. Cuomo gave the charter industry whatever it wanted. The Republican Senate showered favors on charters, even requiring the City of New York to give them free space in public school buildings, and if they didn’t like the space, to pay their rent in private buildings. NYC is the only city in the nation that is compelled to pay the charters’ rent in private space.
However, the charter industry’s cushy arrangement fell apart last fall when progressive Democratic candidates beat Republican incumbents and took control of the State Senate, thus assuring Democratic control of both houses. The new leader of the Democrats in the Senate, Senator Andrea Stewart-Cousins, was insulted in 2017 by the billionaire hedge fund manager Daniel Loeb, who was then chair of the board of Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academy charter chain.
The charter industry wants more charters in New York City, because they have reached the cap. There are still unused charter slots in the state but not in the city. So the lobbyists want either to lift the cap or to let the city have the unused charter slots from the rest of the state.
Peter Goodman, long-time analyst of education politics in New York, predicts that the industry will get neither because the politicians they backed are no longer in office:
Not only will the charter school cap not be lifted it is possible legislation hostile to charter schools may be folded into the “big ugly.”
A few bills dealing with the reauthorization of charter schools and the auditing of charter schools have just been introduced.
Factions will advocate, seek allies, lobby electeds and as the adjournment date, June 19th approaches totally disparate bills will be linked, factions will find “friends,” at least for the moment.
Elections have consequences, charter PAC dollars “elected” Republicans who used their leverage to pass charter friendly legislation; an election cycle later Democrats defeated the charter PAC endorsed candidates, elections have consequences, the leverage switched, and, we can expect that legislation more friendly to teacher unions and public school advocates may become law.
I hope Peter Goodman is correct.
Right now, the majority of the oversight of charters has been done by a group of cheerleading white men (finally got one white woman to join them) at the SUNY Charter Institute. Back when Pedro Noguera was on that oversight board, it actually cared about charters fulfilling their legally mandated mission of serving at-risk students. But once Noguera resigned after seeing the board having no interest in doing anything but cheerleading, it truly embraced the same definition of “oversight” that the Republican Senate gives Trump. Ignore all issues brought to your attention until the media makes it impossible to ignore, at which time say “tsk tsk” and claim concern. Then go back to ignoring.
Success Academy long-time board chair and major funder Daniel Loeb’s racism demonstrated exactly how much racism is embedded in the charter movements’ expensive lobbying to take money from public schools and direct it to their high suspension charters,
Every time I hear the very same charter CEO who embraced Betsy DeVos appealing to the most racist Americans with her ugly innuendo that the Kindergarten children who win their lotteries are disproportionately violent (but only in schools with virtually no white students), I understand why Daniel Loeb was their leader for so long and so embraced by the CEO.
I hope Goodman is right.
It is time that racism is called out. ALL students are deserving of a well-funded education. Not just the ones a charter finds profitable to teach. It’s time to stop allowing charter CEOs and their promoters to insist that they should decide who is deserving and who is not because they refuse to accept that all students deserve a well-funded education.
All students deserve a well-funded education and it’s a shame that right wing billionaire charter supporters insist that only chosen students do and lobby hard to take funding away from the rest.
The pendulum has swung.
Interest in charters cannot be statewide – only pockets.
This is NY, not Pennsylvania, Arizona, Florida or oddly “liberal” California.
“Everyday people” in those and other states are finally beginning to dig deeper and waking up to the ugly underbelly of most (not all but most) charters – they are the billionaires, the privatizers, the kill-public-educationers. AND they are seeing how their local districts, tax capped and all, are and will lose funding.
The best thing NY has going is hundreds of thousands of “everyday people” who do not need a wake up call like other states.
They have bonded and rallied … to OPT OUT of testing.
They like their public schools!
They probably don’t want their districts losing funding to support charters and tax credits.
They VOTE.
And, with the exception of a district here and there, they outnumber the privatizers in every sector. And, many of those conservative voices aren’t as interested in charters as they are taxes.
The anti-public education voices in NY might like the charter anti-government attitude, but they know killing public education in NY would leave millions of kids behind and only cost the state (their tax dolllars) more down the road.
Those conservative voices are interested in tax credits and vouchers possibly more than charters.
If the opt outers alone each wrote or called – a few hundred thousand of them – Albany would pay attention.
I agree with you but I don’t think there is a single district in NY that wants charters. Not one.
Certainly not the Republican Districts; they have zero charters. Charters are what Republicans do to Democrats.