Please say no to this budget deal; Call the Speaker & your Assemblymember NOW!

According to today’s NY Post, the legislature is about to make the worst possible deal imaginable: considerably more per pupil funding for charters, including more than $1100 per student over three years, and free space or rent paid for by NYC  for any new or expanding  NYC charter going forward – just in NYC, by the way, where we have the most overcrowded schools in the state, with more than half our students sitting in extremely overcrowded schools by the DOE’s own metrics, which we know are an underestimate.

Thousands of kids on waiting lists for Kindergarten each spring, thousands more sitting in trailers, and the capital plan provides less than one third of the seats needed to eliminate current overcrowding and address future enrollment growth.  But charters will be guaranteed the space to expand – paid for by city taxpayers, while our public school students  are crushed into larger and larger classes with less space to learn.

Call the Speaker’s office now:  tell him to say NO to the deal forcing the city to pay for facilities forever for new or expanded charters, while public school students will sit in increasingly overcrowded buildings.

Speaker Silver: (518) 455-3791

Then call your Assemblymember and urge them to say NO to this deal as well; find their contact info here:

If this deal goes forward, this will truly create a two tier system in which the charter schools will  be the only ones in uncrowded facilities, with the rent paid for by NYC taxpayers, and all parents will be forced to apply to charter schools whether they want to or not,  just to guarantee a seat for their child in a school that is not hugely overcrowded.

Please call the Speaker's office and your Assemblymember now.

Post and News Editors Attack Shelly Silver Over Mayoral Control

The owners of the Daily News and NY Post, Mort Zuckerman and Rupert Murdoch respectively, are staunch supporters of Mike Bloomberg's reign here in NYC. So when State Assembly Speaker Shelly Silver commented on potential changes in the school governance law, it was no surprise that the papers clobbered him in their Saturday editorials. In a move clearly coordinated out of City Hall, the editors of the Daily News and Post make the same points on the same day.

The Post suggests that behind Silver's concern for public school parents looms some grave danger:

Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, for example, told this newspaper in September that he favors mayoral control with "tweaks" to focus on helping "the parent who has a problem ... as it relates to their child." He said this week that he envisions changes to enhance parental input.

While his aides declined to elaborate on what he has in mind, his remarks are fraught with danger.

More fear mongering in the Daily News version:

But . . . what does Silver want?

That's the tricky part: His answer - he wants more input for parents, he told The Post's Carl Campanile this week - sounds a lot like the rhetoric of those seeking to gut mayoral control entirely.

And Silver, as usual, is short on details.

The News goes on to express concern over proposals to establish fixed length terms for the Panel for Educational Policy (Board of Ed) members. Mayor Bloomberg has previously fired members who threatened to disagree with him. Clearly the idea of making the PEP more than a rubber stamp has stoked serious fear in the administration.

Unfortunately, the sagacious editors of the Daily News couldn't figure out how to spell "predictable" in their editorial, spelling it "predicable" instead. If the mayor's friends will lecture us on how our schools should be managed while they privately school their kids, they ought to learn to spell, or at least how to find the spell-check button.

Despite the bad editing, the message certainly comes through. The Post and News have previously attacked pols who called for more school construction and an end to excessive standardized testing. We will hear more as the mayoral control law comes up for renewal this year. It's clear the Post and News are sharpening their knives for those who stand up for public school parents.