State & city budget update, and how you can help prevent further cuts to our schools

April 12, 2023

Dear all:

The state budget is now nearly two weeks overdue, with negotiations showing little evident progress so far. As a result, Gov. Hochul’s controversial proposal to raise the NYC charter cap is still up in the air, that the city says would cost another $1.3 billion, over and above $3 billion that charters already subtract from the DOE budget each year.

Charter co-locations also take up increasing space in our public schools, space that is desperately needed to lower class size, as pointed out by a new lawsuit filed on March 28 to block charter co-locations in Brooklyn and Queens. My affidavit in that case, as well as other legal papers are here. A court hearing is scheduled on May 12 before Judge Lyle Frank, who previously ruled for parents and against the DOE by ordering that that this year’s budget cuts to schools be restored, before the Appellate Court reversed his ruling in November.

Speaking of budget cuts, last week the Mayor announced his intention to cut the DOE’s budget by another 3% next year, amounting to more than $400 million . This is in addition to school budget cuts that DOE officials admitted they had already planned during Council hearings last month. Yet the City is expected to have a surplus of more than two billion dollars, and our schools are due to receive an additional $568 million in state Foundation Aid next year. The City Council released a preliminary budget response that allocates more funding for some important school-based programs such as arts and mental health services, but does not clearly oppose any more cuts to schools.

We have drafted a resolution against any further cuts to school budgets and the capital plan, and that urges the Council to restore the cuts already made; please consider forwarding it to your CEC, Presidents Council or other organization to consider.

We are also scheduling briefings for NYC Council Members on these issues and are looking for parents and other constituents who’d be willing to join us. If you’re able and interested, please sign up on this google doc today.

Thanks Leonie

PS The Gates Foundation recently revealed a grant of $6 million to the Fund for Public Schools, NYU, and Amplify, a for-profit ed tech company, “to develop R&D tools and related instructional strategies” in NYC schools.

According to the DOE website, there are 15 Amplify programs that students already use in our schools; and yet they have failed to disclose what personal data these programs collect, how the data is used or how it is protected, as required by law. More on this here, including a sample letter you can send DOE to demand this information for your child.

Take 5 minutes to help stop the expansion of privatization of education in NY State!

June 16, 2017

Only a few days are left in the NY legislative term, and the NY State Senate leadership and now Gov. Cuomo are pushing a deal to exchange the extension of Mayoral control in NYC for more charter schools and/or a tuition tax credit for religious and private schools.

One of the bills introduced in the Senate would extend mayoral control for five years while expanding charters & tax credits for private and religious schools. The other bills would offer one- or two-year extensions for more charters both statewide and in NYC.

Please take five minutes to call your Assemblymember and your State Senator TODAY, and tell them do not make any trade that would allow the further privatization of our schools and the diversion of precious education funds to private schools and charters.

Message to your Assemblymember: As your constituent, I want to thank you for holding tough against a deal to trade mayoral control in NYC with more charters or tuition tax credits – and please continue to do so. Can I count on your support? You can find his or her phone no. by filling in your info here.

Message to your State Senator: As a constituent, I want to strongly urge you to vote against any deal that would allow for the expansion of charters or a tuition tax credit for private and religious schools in exchange for extending mayoral control in NYC. Can I count on your support? You can find his or her phone no. here.

You can call either their Albany or district offices if the other phone is busy or not answering. Please also let me know how they or their staff responds by replying to this email.

Thanks so much, Leonie

PS A few seats are still available for our Skinny dinner Tuesday – but the room is almost full. If you want to come, please be sure to reserve your seat now!

Resist privatization! presentation tomorrow in Westchester, Education Justice marches and great debate on charters

1.     Leonie Haimson will be speaking on the national and state push to privatize public education tomorrow Saturday, March 4, 2017 at the Westchester-East Putnam PTA Advocacy Breakfast. The event is free; just RSVP to magerbxv@gmail.com

What: Westchester-East Putnam PTA Advocacy Breakfast
Where: The Education House, 5 Homeside Lane, White Plains, NY
When: Saturday, March 4, 2017, begins at 8:30 AM; I will be speaking at about 10 AM.

2.       There is also a People March for Educational Justice happening tomorrow Saturday in NYC and throughout the state.   Governor Cuomo has proposed a terrible budget that essentially eliminates foundation aid after this year – which was created after the CFE lawsuit to make education funding more equitable and send more resources to high-needs districts. His budget would also significantly increase funding to charter schools and raise the charter cap in NYC, as well as make NYC pay more for charter school rent or force us to squeeze even more charter school students into our already overcrowded school buildings.

NYC already pays over $1.7 BILLION annually to charter schools, and over $40 million a year for their rent. To spend any more would be a supreme hardship and would drain even more funds from our public schools. Meanwhile, it was announced today that Success Academy charters is renting Radio City Music Hall for their annual test prep rally, and last year spent over $68 million for their new headquarters in Manhattan.

For more information on when and where to meet across the state to March for Educational Justice and against privatization, please check out http://www.aqeny.org/march/ In NYC, the march starts in front of Trump Hotel at Columbus Circle at 9:30 AM.

3. On Wednesday Leonie had the pleasure of attending an IQ2 debate on charter schools. Please check out the video here and below.  The debaters included Gary Miron, Professor in Evaluation, Measurement, and Research at Western Michigan University and Julian Vasquez Heilig, Sacramento State Professor and a founding Board Member, Network for Public Education vs. Jeanne Allen, CEO of The Center for Education Reform and Gerard Robinson, Resident Fellow, AEI & former Florida Commissioner of Education.

The proposition under debate was whether charter schools are overrated.  The audience members voted at the beginning and the end.  After the debate was over, 21% changed their mind to agree with the proposition compared to 9% changed their mind in the other direction, for a total of 54% to 40% who now believed charters were overrated. More on the debate here and here.  Please watch if you have the time to see if you will change your mind!

Letitia James: a new national star in educational justice takes the stage

There were many great speeches last night at the Panel for Education Policy, protesting the awful
long list of co-locations that will damage our schools and hurt NYC children, pushed through by a lame duck administration to give away maximum space to   their cronies among the charter school operators. Council Members Chin, Fidler, Recchia and Greenfield were all eloquent, incisive and compelling, as were the parents, teachers and students of Murry Bergtraum HS, Seth Low, and Roy Mann, and so many others. 

There was one electrifying moment in which CM Letitia James, our future Public Advocate, spoke against charter co-locations, showing how these proposals would create "separate and unequal" conditions that were ruled unconstitutional in Brown Vs. Board of Education.  In case you are wondering about her comments that they shouldn't dare delete their emails, see this DNA info article about how the DOE is considering erasing all its communications before Bloomberg leaves office; James has tried to forestall this by FOILing them.

But watch this awe-inspiring speech below in which Leticia James, in which I predict a new national star for educational justice is born.

Journey for Justice and "School choice" week; just whose choices are being respected??

Last week was “School choice” week.  The entire concept of “school choice week” was invented by Jeb Bush  to promote the expansion of charter and vouchers,  supposedly to allow for more parental choice in selecting their children's schools.  Meanwhile, it was just revealed that Bush's organization, Foundation for Excellence in Education (FEE), promotes the business of for-profit companies, including several that donate to the organization and at least one corporation in which Bush has stock.

The reality is that the corporate reformers pushing “school choice,” including Arne Duncan, Jeb Bush, Bill Gates, Michael Bloomberg and Michelle Rhee, are not interested in the real-life choices of parents;  but instead in privatization.

When thousands of parents repeatedly turn out across the country to oppose the closing of their neighborhood schools, are their choices listened to?  No, they are ignored, or else the people in charge, like Bloomberg, say that parents are too uneducated to understand the value of a good education.

When parents say that their first priority for their children’s schools is reducing class size, are their choices listened to?  No, instead, the same people who say they believe in parent choice vehemently oppose  lowering class size: Bill Gates insists that class size doesn’t matter, Michelle Rhee pushes for eliminating any caps on class sizes, and Bloomberg say he would double class sizes if he could.

When parents say their children are over-tested and they should be allowed to opt out, do the authorities listen?  No, instead they plan to subject them to even more frequent and longer tests.

Let’s all admit it; “school choice” is a myth,  meant not to give public school parents the choices they want for their children, but instead represent the choices of corporate raiders who want to give our public schools to private interests, like hostile takeover artists who took over companies in the 1970’s and 1980’s, in order to dismantle them and sell them off piece by piece.

Coincidentally during “School Choice” week, on Tuesday, as part of the "Journey for Justice" campaign, parents, students and activists from 18 districts all over the country traveled to DC, testified at the US Department of Education, and demanded a moratorium on the mass school closings that are occurring with the encouragement of the federal government, on the grounds that  their children’s civil rights were being violated.  See videos below by Jaisal Noor of The Real News of Tuesday's events. See also this week’s Village Voice, about the invasion of charter schools in Williamsburg, Brooklyn run by Eva Moskowitz and her husband, despite the vehement opposition of parents in that community.

Journey for Justice: Parents and Students from 18 Cities Demand Nationwide Moratorium on Schools Closings and demand US DOE investigate Civil rights violations

Part 2: Chicago Parent and Activist Jitu Brown at "Journey for Justice" Hearings in DC 

Part 3: New Orleans Parent and Activist Karran Harper Royal at "Journey for Justice" Hearing in DC 

Parents throughout the nation: use your vote wisely on Tuesday to protect and support your public schools; do not let the privatizers buy your elections!

There are critical elections taking place on Tuesday throughout the country that parents, education advocates, and others who care about preserving and strengthening our public schools need to take notice of and cast their ballot appropriately.  Out-of-state money from billionaires and astroturf groups like Students First are flowing into state races, like this one in Tennessee  and local school board elections, like these  in New Orleans and  New Jersey, to push damaging policies to privatize and digitize our public schools. 

There are also referendums and initiatives on the ballot in many states and cities that will affect the future of our public schools for years to come.  In each case, there is tremendous private money being used to facilitate the expansion of charters and vouchers, promote budget cuts, and impose mayoral control, and against allowing elected school boards to protect and support their local public schools.  The hedge funders, billionaires, for-profit charter operators, and right-wingers are using their vast resources to impose their political will, and in most cases are dramatically outspending the good government organizations, education advocates, teachers, and other concerned citizens, who would rather save and strengthen our public schools rather than dismantle them.

For example, there are two statewide referendums on charter schools that people need to vote AGAINST.  The individuals and groups who are pushing them are outspending the opposition in Georgia  twenty to one   and in the state of Washington, more than twelve to one.  If the privateers win out, it will show how the influence of big money can buy elections in the face of local sentiment and good public policy.    

•  In Washington State, parents should vote NO on Initiative 1240, which would authorize charter schools to be established in the state for the first time.  Charter schools have already been voted down by the State Legislature six times, including as recently as 2012, and three times by Washington voters.  Yet Bill Gates and his cronies remain determined to overturn the popular will, and have contributed nearly $11 MILLION to achieve this end.  Gates himself has given more than $3 million to the campaign, Alice Walton of Walmart fame has kicked in another $1.7 million, and Gates’ buddies Paul Allen of Microsoft and the Bezos family at Amazon.com have donated millions more.  91 percent of the funding for the massive campaign of this initiative has come from just ten people, all of them billionaires.   

Meanwhile, those opposing the initiative include the Washington State PTA, the State Democratic Party, the League of Women Voters, the state Association of School Administrators, the state’s principals, the state teachers union, the Seattle NAACP, El Centro do la Raza, the Seattle Public Schools superintendent and countless school boards. They point out how this initiative would further drain resources from the public schools, which have already been found to be constitutionally underfunded by the courts, and would take accountability out of public hands.  The measure would also allow the privatization of any public school as long as 51 percent of parents voted for it, in an even more radical permutation of the so-called Parent Trigger. In the latest poll, the pro-charter supporters are ahead by nearly 20 points because of the “very lopsided advertising campaign” financed by these ten billionaires; don’t let this Initiative pass!  For more on 1240, visit the No on 1240 website.

• In Georgia, parents should vote NO on Amendment 1, which would create an appointed commission with the power to authorize charter schools over the opposition of democratically-elected local school boards and the state Board of Education.  This constitutional amendment is opposed by the state PTA, the state School Superintendent, the Georgia School Boards Association, and many civil rights groups,  who explain how this measure would divert hundreds of millions of dollars annually from the public schools, and into the hands of for-profit corporations, many of them with a lousy record of the schools they currently run, like K12 Inc. According to one report, these new charter schools would also be eligible to receive more state money per pupil than regular public schools.  The vast majority of the contributions  financing the amendment are coming from outside the state, mainly from charter operators, Michelle Rhee’s Students First, Alice Walton, the Koch brothers, and other individuals intent on weakening and privatizing public schools.   Don’t be fooled: here is an explanation of how the amendment has been misleadingly phrased to trick voters, which has already triggered a lawsuit.  For more on why you should vote no on this damaging amendment, see Vote Smart Georgia.

• In Idaho, parents should vote NO on Propositions 1, 2, and 3:  Proposition One would limit the rights of teachers to collectively bargain over working conditions like class size, would effectively eliminate their job security and base their evaluation largely on test scores.  Proposition Two would implement damaging and wasteful merit pay. Proposition Three would spend yet more funding on requiring online learning for students, which was passed into law after substantial contributions from for-profit virtual learning companies to the state’s Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Luna. Many of the same companies, including K12 Inc., have given funds to push this proposition, along with NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who contributed $200,000.  Their involvement was only disclosed after a court order demanding that the shadowy group pushing these propositions reveal its donors. 

•  In California, parents should vote YES on both Propositions 30 and 38, to enable the state to raise revenue to prevent hugely damaging budget cuts to public schools, which are already critically underfunded.  More on this from the group Educate the State.  Parents and other concerned citizens should also vote NO on Proposition 32, which would prohibit unions from spending money for political purposes, while exempting Super PACs, hedge-funders, billionaires and thousands of big businesses. The League of Women Voters, among many other good government groups, urges a No vote, as do we.

•   In Arizona, parents should vote YES on Proposition 204, which would make permanent a temporary one percent sales tax, with most of the proceeds going to public schools.  Arizona already has seen the most drastic budget cuts to schools in the nation in recent years, resulting in some of the highest class sizes, and its children cannot afford any more cuts to school funding.  Supporters of Proposition 204 include the Arizona State PTA, Voices for Education and the Southern Arizona Leadership Council; opponents include the state Chamber of Commerce. For more on this Proposition, see the Quality Education and Jobs website. 

•  Finally, voters in Bridgeport CT should Vote NO on changing the city charter to eliminate their elected school board, which would allow their mayor to wield unilateral control through an appointed school board.  Earlier last year, the hedge-fund backed, pro-charter lobby group ConnCAN conspired with Teach for America and the mayor of Bridgeport, along with the state’s Governor, to oust Bridgeport’s elected school board in what was essentially an illegal coup.  Their actions were later overturned by the courts.  So now, the pro-privatization lobby is spending a record amount to impose mayoral control through a referendum, with Michelle Rhee’s Student First contributing $97,000 and Mayor Bloomberg another $20,000. 

As Diane Ravitch has pointed out, mayoral control has a lousy record; our analysis shows that two cities under mayoral control, Cleveland and NYC, have made the  least progress in raising student achievement since 2003 of any the large urban districts on the national assessments called the NAEPs. Here in NYC, after ten years, mayoral control is hugely unpopular, for we have seen how Bloomberg has ignored the priorities of parents in cutting school budgets, increasing class size, closing neighborhood schools, expanding charters and putting them in existing school buildings where they have squeezed out our public school children. In a poll conducted earlier this year, only 13 percent of New Yorkers said the mayor should retain sole control of the public schools. In Chicago, where mayoral control has existed for 17 years, polls show that the system is equally unpopular: 77 percent of Chicago voters oppose continued mayoral control. In fact, on Tuesday in Chicago, there is an advisory referendum on the ballot, urging the state legislature to allow the city to return to an elected school board.    

Kevin Johnson, a former NBA basketball player, who used to run charter schools and who is now mayor of Sacramento and is married to Michelle Rhee, came to Connecticut to campaign for the mayoral control referendum.  John Bagley, also a former professional basketball player who is now an elected member of Bridgeport’s school board wrote a great letter to Johnson a week ago, which concluded this way:   

“Maybe "KJ" and his `reformers' can explain why the city of New Haven, which has an appointed board, has more failing schools than Bridgeport. This is true, despite the presence on their appointed Board of Education of the former director of CONNCAN, the Connecticut leader of takeover policies. I have only one final piece of advice for `KJ', don't come into my house and mess with my right to vote!” 

This is a message we should all take to heart.  

Use your vote, Bridgeport residents and all others throughout the nation who care about public education, while you still have it!  Do not give up your democratic rights and allow the billionaires who send their own children to private schools to buy these elections so they can dismantle, plunder and privatize your public schools.

Michael Duffy and Tweed: we don't listen and we don't care

Michael Duffy, head of the charter school office at DOE, in an interview said that he learned nothing from speakers at the hearings about the controversial expansion of Girls Prep Charter school:

"… I think, for my part, in a couple of hours of comments, I didn’t hear anything new from the public that wasn’t already known prior to the start of the hearing. I know it’s important that people have a chance to speak their mind, but I don’t think there’s anything that wasn’t known to the Department prior to the proposal for the expansion of Girls Prep."

Obviously he wasn't listening and doesn't care what parents or members of the community think. He is not alone.

Here is an excerpt from DOE's "amended" Educational Impact Statement for the proposed closing of Alfred E. Smith HS, summarizing the public comment so far:

Thirty-eight oral comments and 315 written comments regarding this proposal were received between December 3, 2009, and January 25, 2010. The comments came from current students at Alfred E. Smith, alumni from the school, teachers, community members, and companies that employ Alfred E. Smith alumni. All comments opposed the closure of Alfred E. Smith. At the January 11, 2010, joint public hearing on the original proposal, 100 members of the public noted their opposition.....One oral comment and sixty-one written comments were received between January 26 and February 23; all of these comments also opposed the DOE’s revised proposal.

More than four hundred people sent in comments opposed to the closing and not one in favor.

So did the DOE change its proposal in any way to close Alfred E. Smith?

No. So much for public process.