Merriman's appeal: political payback time for the charter school lobby

James Merriman of the Charter School Center sent out an alert to charter school leaders over the weekend, urging them to attend an important meeting tomorrow with Deputy Mayor Walcott to which the Mayor is invited as well.

At the meeting, the charter school lobby will ask the city to voluntarily increase funding for charters out of the city’s discretionary funds, if the state maintains the freeze on per pupil charter funding that occurred last year.

Merriman’s appeal is nakedly political, and he writes that the mayor needs to pay them back for their support for his re-election and extension of unlimited mayoral control (as well as the charter cap lift, though why that benefited him more than them is unclear.):

The Mayor has been a strong supporter, but it is your unprecedented record of success that has allowed him to hold up New York City as a model of educational achievement. It was your results that helped make such a strong case in Albany for the recent cap lift. It was your parents who rooted him on during the mayoral control battle and his re-election campaign. We've been there for him and now he needs to be there for us.

Meanwhile, even if charter schools have suffered a one year freeze, our district schools have had their budgets slashed to the bone. If the 4% cut now being proposed goes through, their budgets will have been cut by 12% since 2007.

As it is, the overall charter school budget is still growing fast -- because of increased enrollment, which is estimated to grow another 31% next year. Even if the per student freeze is maintained, charter school funding will cost the city an estimated $545 million next year.

If the mayor accedes to the charter lobby’s demands, it will be yet another sign how politics rules at City Hall; and how charters continue to get favorable treatment compared to district schools.

Announcing the new Mayoral control troll in town!

Remember when there was an anonymous person who left pro-mayoral control comments on our blog, and other blogs, without identifying himself? And we accurately guessed he was probably from Learn NY, a lobbying organization set up by Bloomberg to retain Mayoral control? His identity was subsequently confirmed by his own confession, as well as an article in Gotham Schools, which outed him as Brian Keeler, a consultant for Learn NY.

Well, there’s a new Mayoral control troll in town named “Abby,” who on March 24 wrote on the WNYC blog:

When the Mayor and the government were not involved in our education system, NYC schools failed our students. To ensure education is a top priority, we must continue to make our leaders responsible for its success. People who believe the Mayor has too much control, are not considering the growing number of schools and students who succeeding.

On the same day, "Abby" left her comments on Gotham Schools– saying that the Mayor has allowed one hundred charter schools to open, and if only we maintained Mayoral control, “NYC will eventually reach a point where all students are receiving a quality education” (presumably through the further multiplication of charter schools).

And then on March 26, she was at it again on Gotham Schools, saying that it's “time to put petty bickering and politics aside and make students and education the focus” by continuing Mayoral control. (No matter that the Mayor and Klein are the ones who engage in non-stop political spin, and spend precious taxpayer money to try to keep their chokehold on our schools.)

I was feeling a little suspicious of this Abby, even though she identified herself as a “citizen” and didn’t link to any organizational website. Paid representatives of Learn NY and the Mayor tend to produce obviously canned talking points rather than arguments that engage realistically with the matter at hand. Their comments lack substance and conviction, and read like something written for the back of a cereal box.

Sure enough, a few days ago, someone from Learn NY named Abby Sugrue sent around an email to parents, including several on our NYC education news list serv who had never signed up with the organization, bragging that in a recent article about the Assembly hearings on school governance, “The New York Times called our supporters and coalition a "heavy weight parent group"!

Clearly, if Mayoral control trolls are trolling for emails among our subscribers, a known hotbed of parent activists, acutely aware of the damaging effects of mayoral autocracy on our schools, they must getting desperate.