Among other things in the disastrous State Budget that increases spending by $17 billion, an additional half-billion will be pumped
into the failing public schools, while successful charter schools will see funding frozen...compliments of Assembly Speaker Sheldon
Silver and his masters in the public education cartel.
Today from the Editors of the New York Post:
Want hard evidence of just who's driving the bus in Albany, and who's getting run over by it? Well, consider what De Facto Gov. Shelly
Silver and his confederates did to charter schools in the tax-a-palooza budget they're all so darned proud of.
As The Post reported yesterday, public-school aid will jump a half-billion dollars in the fiscal year that begins today.
But funding for charters, which have shown stunning success, is frozen. Silver & Co. refused to stick with a 10-year-old law that links
each charter's funding to the surrounding district's per-student spending.
Why single out charters -- the unorthodox, but publicly funded, schools?
Because they work so well that they're an embarrassment to the teachers' unions -- which demanded the freeze.
In testimony last January, Alan Lubin of New York State United Teachers insisted on what he called "real reform" of the charter law.
He whined of "inflated charter-school payments" -- though charters actually get far less than standard public schools.
The union, you see, can't compete with charters on an even playing field.
So it's looking to tie their hands -- if not strangle them altogether.
Indeed, labor has long opposed these innovative public schools, which use some taxpayer dollars but are largely free of government
bureaucracy, including union-imposed work rules.
Or, should we say, union-imposed make-work rules?
From the start, union bosses insisted that charters get less funding. They got lawmakers to cap the number of charters and to impose
myriad other restrictions.
Still, the charters work.
They blow away competing public schools -- and parents know it: Last month, some 5,000 of them rallied at the Harlem Armory in
support of charters.
Ah, said the United Federation of Teachers (a NYSUT subsidiary), this will never do.
So the union plotted a coup: It would try to unionize the charters.
Take a hike, said the teachers at KIPP Academy in The Bronx and KIPP Infinity in Manhattan. They fear union control could
undermine their success -- and they're right.
But the union stubbornly refused to accept that.
It's got Silver and his fellow lawmakers in its pocket. If it can't co-opt charter schools by unionizing them, it'll just steal their money.
As it's doing this week. (A claim Monday by UFT boss Randi Weingarten that "we have never distinguished between students in district
schools and students in charter schools" is a bald-faced lie -- as Lubin's testimony proves.)
Charter schools get results -- to the mortification of the unions.
That's why the unions -- and their Albany hirelings -- want to kill them.
It's as simple as that.
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