,Charter School Corporation Organizes Protest Against Mayoral Candidate DeBlasio

http://www.alternet.org/education/despite-common-sense-proposals-ny-mayoral-candidate-deblasio-charter-school-corporation



Late last month, parents at some New York City schools received an alarming letter:

Dear Parents,

Your child’s education is threatened. Our very existence is threatened. Opponents want to take away our funding and our facilities. These attacks are a real danger—we cannot stand idly by.

In a city that has seen over 150 schools close in the last decade, this isn’t a new sentiment.

The letter wasn’t for traditional public school parents, though. It was for parents of children at some of the city’s 183 charter schools, most of which have sprung up since Michael Bloomberg became mayor in 2002.

“You and your scholar, your friends and relatives,” the letter insisted, “must join us” in a march across the Brooklyn Bridge in support of charter schools. Several charter networks canceled classes on Tuesday to bring students and teachers to the rally.

Instigating this burst of activism was the insistence of Democratic mayoral hopeful Bill de Blasio that charter schools, which are publicly funded but given regulatory leeway in instruction and staffing, should pay rent in the DOE space they occupy—a repudiation of Bloomberg’s current charter policy, which operates in contravention to a New York state law mandating that charters offered public space lease it “at cost.” De Blasio has instead proposed a flexible rent scale for the 108 charters who do not currently pay rent, and a moratorium on new charter co-locations in public school space.