Last night, State Senate voted to continue to keep profit in public education, 45-15

Last night, the NY State Senate approved the expansion of the charter school cap last night by a vote of 45 to 15, without any of the necessary accountability and transparency provisions and without protection of parent and student rights. Check out how your Senator voted here.

As the NY Post reported this morning, “Privately, they [the Senators] conceded that passing the measure was an attempt to derail a threatened big-ticket political campaign against them by Mayor Bloomberg and other prominent charter-school supporters that could cost them their razor-thin majority in the November elections.“

As the Daily News reported, “charter school advocates… have threatened to spend $10 million to unseat opponents.”

Now only the Assembly and Speaker Silver are standing in the way of this unprecedented move to privatize our public school system and force more charters into our already overcrowded school buildings. On Monday, Assemblymember Karim Camera of Brooklyn introduced an identical bill in the Assembly.

Sign our petition now, to send a message your elected leaders that they need to stand up for the rights of public school parents, children and taxpayers, rather than the charter school lobby and the hedge-fund managers who appear to have determined the outcome in the Senate.

As of this morning, after less than two days, our petition already has more than 800 signatures, but it needs even more if we are going to get across our message strongly enough to rival the millions that the charter school lobby is willing to spend to achieve their goal of putting more profit and unregulated greed into the running of our schools. The petition is posted here.