The campaign to lift the cap on charter schools in New York looks less and less likely that it will bear fruit this year, and in the final analysis, there is only one party to blame – charter school advocates.
But don’t look for a lot of introspection from those quarters, much less for an admission that the strategy and tactics they are employing, and the allies they have chosen, have done great harm to their cause. No, when they have failed, you will read all of the predictable castigations and remonstrations, such that we could prophesy them in advance, word for word, right now. The demon will be the “powerful teachers’ unions,” and the evil laid at our doorstep will be that we have thwarted the desires of needy students and families to exercise school choice.
Never mind that the leader of this “powerful teachers’ union” has had a public offer on the table for months, to support an increase of the cap for charter schools in New York City if it was accompanied by a ‘card check’ union recognition procedure that secures the right of charter school teachers to be represented by a union, should the majority of them so desire. [Edwize readers may recall our previous discussions of this offer, here and here.] And never mind that there has been not a single response to that offer from within the ranks of charter school advocates.
Instead, charter school advocates have decided to enter into political cohabitation with a Mayor and a Chancellor whose primary objective is the creation of an entire legion of non-union public schools under their control. To that end, the Mayor and Chancellor have convinced a lame duck governor running hard to the right in a Presidential campaign that he should combine a call for raising the cap on charter schools with an entire bevy of ill-conceived and destructive changes to charter school law. Consider just a few of the worst features:
· In the place of two authorizing entities that have performed well, the Regents and the SUNY Board of Trustees, the proposal would allow virtually any not-for-profit corporation in the state to become an authorizer, creating an unaccountable free for all.
· Although the Chancellor has the authority to create a charter-like status for any NYC public school, by simply exempting them from his own regulations, the proposal would give him the power to authorize 50 charters on his own. This power would allow him to do only one thing he can’t already do now – create schools under his authority and control, but without union representation.
· The proposal would exempt the Chancellor from the requirement of obtaining the consent of parents before a New York City public school could be converted to charter status. Since there are no ‘caps’ on conversion charter schools, eliminating parental consent would give the Chancellor the power to create unlimited numbers of charter schools through conversion.
A little thought on the part of charter school advocates might have suggested that this last feature was, as a matter of politics, particularly problematic. Families with children in the New York City public schools are already chafing under a Mayor and a Chancellor that treats them the same way they treat educators, with the same arrogance, condescension and complete unwillingness to work together, cooperatively and collaboratively. Just think of how such families might react to the knowledge that the number one item on the Mayor’s and Chancellor’s lobbying agenda in Albany was not a resolution of the Campaign for Fiscal Equity lawsuit, not bringing badly needed and legally mandated operating funds and capital expenditure funds in the billions of dollars to New York City public schools, but a proposal which would, among other things, take away their voice in the process of converting public schools into charter schools. Is there anything that could have made the promise of parental school choice ring more hollow than a proposal to expand charter schools by disenfranchising parents and turning their power over to the chief New York City educrat?
So when the first page of the New York Times’ Metro Section [$] announced that the Chancellor’s Parent Advisory Council, the group that the Department of Education itself established for parental input, had enough of this treatment by Bloomberg and Klein, and would now work with the UFT rather than the DOE, when it came to lobbying Albany, it surprised only those who had eyes, but refused to see. Why wouldn’t parents with integrity, who cared about their children’s education, want to join with the UFT’s lobbying effort in Albany, where the number one agenda item was resolving the CFE lawsuit and getting badly needed state funds to city schools? And why wouldn’t they oppose the Mayor’s and Chancellor’s charter school proposals which eliminated their voice in the conversion process?
What was surprising was the complete lack of political acumen in the response of charter school advocates. One would have thought that Bloomberg’s and Klein’s alienation of New York City parents, on top of their alienation of New York City educators, would have finally clued charter school advocates in on their poor choice of political allies, political strategy and political tactics. Instead, in a remarkable demonstration of how NOT to win friends and influence people, they have mounted a full-scale attack on the parents and their organizations, to match the perpetual drumbeat against teachers and their organizations.
The usual suspects on the editorial boards were mobilized, and the usual over the top New York Post and New York Daily News editorials were written, with the usual disregard for the most elementary of factual truths. [The Daily News editorial opined that the UFT wants charter school teachers to be “automatically unionized.”] The usual suspects in the blogosphere were mobilized, with Andy Rotherham of Eduwonk issuing ex cathedra announcements that the parents were “shills” for teacher unions, and Joe Williams of the New York Charter School Association’s Blackboard blog proclaiming that the elected representatives of parent organizations don’t speak for parents, he does. If one wanted to see New York City parents permanently alienated from charter school advocates, one could not have asked for a better scenario, a more politically truculent response to this challenge.
New York charter school advocates seem intent upon convincing all doubters, including those of us who would like them to establish friendly relations with teachers and students’ families, that their primary loyalty is to the Bloomberg and Klein project of creating non-union charter schools under their control in New York City, and not to establishing quality educational choices for New York City families and students.
