What a morning for New York: Nearly 20,000 moms and dads and kids marching across the Brooklyn Bridge to City Hall Park to demand good schools.
Like their forebears in Selma, they marched for freedom.
Meet New York’s charter movement. Ninety-three percent of charter-school children in this city are black or Latino.
On Tuesday, their parents carried signs saying: “My Child, My Choice” and “Charter Schools Are Public Schools.” And they have a message for Democratic mayoral candidate Bill de Blasio and his allies in the teachers union: Get off our schoolhouse doorstep!
The message is timely. Though de Blasio styles himself a defender of the underprivileged, he is working against these families by calling for charters to pay rent and for a moratorium on placing charters in unused space in traditional schools.
These are charter-killers, and de Blasio pushes them for a simple reason: Charters are good schools, and the teachers unions don’t like good schools outside their control.
They don’t like these schools because they eliminate excuses for failure. Every day, charters prove that with a good school, an inner-city child can learn.
No wonder 30 percent of Harlem kids attend charters — and parents of thousands more are desperate to get their kids in.
Front groups for the education monopoly, such as New Yorkers for Great Public Schools, will tell you they want charters “held to the same standards as traditional public schools.” What a laugh. The “same standards” would drag charters down.
There was a day when minority children faced politicians fighting to keep them out of good schools. It’s no improvement to have politicians who would keep them trapped in lousy ones.