While the new New York City Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott was busy denouncing the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) yesterday, charter schools continued their rampage through the City’s educational system. Two well established day care centers in Park Slope, Brooklyn are being muscled out of their current location in order to temporarily house the Brooklyn Prospect Charter School. Nearly simultaneously, Walcott was providing cover for 19 other charters who wish to open up similar turf battles throughout the city.
Brooklyn Prospect Charter School is a veteran of the school building takeover. Charter advocates prefer the more benign “co-location,” but the results are the same – a privately owned publicly funded charter comes in and a public school either is moved out or squeezed into an even smaller space. Brooklyn Prospect carried out such an invasion during its opening in 2009 as the Department of Education allowed it to slam itself into Sunset Park High School – despite the protests of parents, administrators and teachers.
The twist this time is that the Brooklyn Prospect Board of Trustees pulled the lease out from under two well recognized day care centers – Strong Place Day Care and Bethel Day Care. The move will displace dozens of children and send their parents scrambling to find alternative day care sites. In perhaps the ultimate act of arrogance, the day care centers have until this Friday to move out. This illustrates the negative consequences of having privately owned charter schools that both receive public funding and are able to carry out any real estate deal they wish regardless of the consequences to the community.
Meanwhile, in the editorial pages of the Daily News, Chancellor Walcott was busy pledging his allegiance to these same charters. Or, more specifically, using print space to slam the NAACP. The target of Walcott’s ire is a lawsuit filed by the United Federation of Teachers and the NAACP that seeks to prevent 19 charter schools from invading existing public schools. Walcott claimed that school space “does not belong to a school, it belongs to the students.” This was his way of saying that the invading charters, because they will have students, somehow therefore have the right to displace existing public schools.
And, in Walcott’s mind at least, the NAACP is to blame for holding up the invasions and employing “disrespectful and in no way productive” rhetoric to the discussion. This is, of course, a reference to the NAACP’s New York State Chapter President Hazel Dukes’ comment that pro-charter school parents were “doing the business of slave masters.” For Walcott, resistance to the invasions amounts to “the NAACP…turning its back on thousands of families across New York City.” Yet, when Dukes issued the “slave master” comment she also went on to advise such parents to “keep your facts [straight].”
The facts are precisely what Walcott seeks to avoid in his op-ed. The fact that charter schools have had, according to recent studies, mediocre performances even on standardized tests. The fact that the Kingsbridge Innovative Design Charter School recently closed down because of fiscal management issues thereby displacing 140 students in its school – something that would never happen in a public school. And the fact that, as NAACP President Benjamin Todd Jealous so correctly stated, the charter schools are an attempt to re-build a school system using the old cover of “separate but equal” that defined segregated schools before the Civil Rights movement.
The message here is that Walcott needs to get it straight. Remember, he is supposed to be the more rational choice for Chancellor after the corporate flunky Cathy Black left the building. Yet, his soft-styled demeanor can no longer hide the fact that he is doing the bidding of the politically powerful and economically well-heeled charter schools. He does not represent the interests of New York City public school students or their parents or their teachers. If he did he would be signing an order to eliminate all charter schools, to convert their facilities to public schools and to create a commission to re-think a curriculum and a school governance plan that is administered democratically. Until then, Walcott appears satisfied to live up to the category Dukes created for pro-charter school parents. New York parents should resist, by all means available, the separate and unequal school system the charters wish to create.
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Billy Wharton is a writer, activist and the editor of the Socialist WebZine. His articles have appeared in the Washington Post, the NYC Indypendent, Spectrezine and the Monthly Review Zine. He can be reached at whartonbilly@gmail.com. Become a FAN on Facebook.
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