Tonight's vote on charter expansion and co-locations; neither parent choice nor the free market at work
This evening the Panel for Educational Policy -- or as it is sometimes called, the Panel of Eight [mayoral] Puppets -- will rubberstamp 23 new co-location proposals and two expansions, including many for charter schools that have not even been approved yet by the state.
These proposals will uniformly disadvantage the children in the existing schools, cause even more overcrowding and larger classes, and push disabled students out of the spaces they need for special services.
Some of the examples have been described in newspaper accounts. Here is how the severely disabled children in the Mickey Mantle School in PS 149 have already been affected by the co-location of Harlem Success Academy in their building, according to Juan Gonzalez of the Daily News:
Originally, these children had a “cafeteria, playground, library, and cluster rooms (for specialized activities).” In 2006, when the charter school moved in, they lost their library and a bunch of classrooms. The following year, according to a teacher,
“We lost our technology room, our music room, our art room and we had to start sharing the cafeteria, the gym and playground,” Manuell says.
Now she is “teaching theater at Mickey Mantle in a former office with no windows. A fellow teacher conducts four periods a week of