John Thompson: One Sided Hardball in New York Charter Fight
Guest post by John Thompson.
When Bill de Blasio was elected mayor of New York City in a landslide, new hope came to New York City schools. De Blasio named a veteran educator, Carmen Fariña, as chancellor. He risked offending loyal constituencies by offering a generous compromise to charter schools. De Blasio set to work planning and funding pre-kindergarten. It looked like de Blasio marked a sea change from the scorched earth edu-politics of the Bloomberg years. And, it must be emphasized, there remain many reasons to be just as hopeful about de Blasio's new approach to school improvement.
But elite backers of competition-driven reform, like Eva Moskowitz of the Success Academy charter chain and Governor Andrew Cuomo, counter-attacked with a venom that is shocking even for them. Ironically, despite the moderation of de Blasio's first charter school decisions, Moskowitz's and Cuomo's worst assault on the new mayor was directed at his decision on school co-locations. De Blasio inherited 17 applications by charter schools seeking to share the space of existing schools. The new administration approved 14 of those applications, including two by Moskowitz's Success Academies.
In response, Moskowitz did something that public school educators would never consider. She
