Poor, minority and immigrant parents and students rallied in the thousands last week on behalf of charters schools — so the charter-hating United Federation of Teachers ordered some of its pet politicians to push state education officials into making the charter operators feel some pain.
After last Thursday’s 15,000-strong pro-charter march, Democratic state Sens. John Liu (Queens) and Sandy Mayer (Westchester) wrote the state overseers of charter schools demanding an investigation of the charter operators for alleged coercion, misuse of public funds and kids illegally missing school.
Of course, the senators never peeped when regular public schools encouraged students to skip to attend climate and anti-Trump protests in recent years; nor do they seem to care that most city charters do instruction for weeks longer than the state minimum of 180 days, while city Department of Education schools this year offered only 176 days in class.
Nor was this a political rally, as opposed to an issue-based one: Organizers told political candidates not to attend.
The politicizers were the UFT minions who showed up to protest wearing Mamdani t-shirts, passing out anti-charter propaganda.
Notably, members of the Black, Latinx, Asian Charter Collaborative answered Liu and Mayer with their own letter slamming the senators for siding with failure and inequality by launching a “defamatory and dismissive” attack on charter leaders and parents who’ve simply “exercised their right to choose.”
“Where are your hearings into the systemic failures that rob children of opportunity every single day” in DOE schools? they fumed, challenging the union-pawn pols to “join us in expanding opportunity, equalizing funding and removing restrictions on excellence and charter growth.”
These educators and parents aspire for their children to be more than grist for the ineffectual public-education mill.
New York City parents want good options for their children’s schooling — and public charter schools are the most affordable choice.
If they have any conscience left, Liu, Mayer and their fellow teacher-union pawns would get out of the way of parents fighting for their kids — or, better still, lock arms with them in building better futures for all New York’s schoolchildren.