Bed-Stuy: Stop the Charter Invasion!
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| The historic Boys High School in Brooklyn. |
All these schools and programs are vital to Bed-Stuy, addressing the obstacles of housing, poverty and racism that students face in getting a high school diploma. But the building is now prime real estate. Enter the charter invasion. The first to come in was a high school of the “Uncommon Schools” charter chain, which took over an entire floor. This year, Uncommon Schools wanted to move in its middle school, taking more badly needed space away from the other schools. (The middle school, Brooklyn East Collegiate, is currently located in the gentrifying Prospect Heights neighborhood in the building of PS 9, an integrated school, where parents wanted it out.) Teachers and students at Marcy were outraged, and they mobilized.
An article was published in Our Time Press (23 March), a popular weekly paper in Bed-Stuy, headlining “A GED Program to Be Cut in Half So Charter School Can Expand.” The article pointed out that “P2G has been a lifeline for young adults in need of an assist and is particularly successful at servicing young adults facing a number of challenges.” It noted that “P2G has been celebrated for its Bike Repair Program and Citibike just hired seven students from the program.” It also underlined that P2G once had two floors, then was reduced to one floor, and the new cut would remove half of that floor.
Nicole Greaves, a teacher at Marcy who fought against the charter assault, said at one of the first community meetings that after living in the area for 15 years, “I have seen firsthand the drastic changes that are taking place in the community. It is disheartening to see long-term residents and businesses being pushed out and relocated due to the ills of gentrification. The same is happening here within the old Boys High School. Our program is being pushed out the same way tenants are being displaced. Over 20 years, our school has serviced hundreds of thousands of Brooklyn youth. The services and resources we offer are invaluable to our students and their families.”
But the existing schools didn’t have the political clout that the charters have, including with the Brooklyn Democratic Party. Stock traders, venture capitalists, right-wing ideologues, union-busting outfits: these are the known wheeler-dealers chipping away at public education. So who is behind Uncommon Schools? The charter chain’s board includes financiers from Lazard and Bain, from the Soroban Capital hedge fund and the former CEO of Time-Warner Cable. A few years ago, when Brooklyn East Collegiate first moved into PS 9, the New York Times (11 April 2011) wrote:
“Besides the $13,527 per student in public money the charter receives, Uncommon Schools also receives millions of dollars in corporate donations from, among others, the Broad, Walton and Jack Kent Cooke foundations.”
But the main player here is New York’s Democratic mayor, Bill de Blasio. He first won election campaigning to end the “tale of two cities” and stand up to the charters. The United Federation of Teachers supported him and many teachers saw him as an agent of change. Class Struggle Education Workers, however, put out a leaflet at that time, saying “Despite the Hype, de Blasio Will Be ‘Bloomberg Lite’.” It’s not so lite anymore.
Once in office, de Blasio caved within weeks to the charter attack by Eva Moskowitz, backed by Democratic governor Andrew Cuomo and Republican state lawmakers. Moskowitz bused several thousand school kids from her Success Academy chain to Albany to lobby. The United Federation of Teachers (UFT) could have brought far more, but it didn’t. UFT leaders argued it would be illegal. So what? If Moskowitz could do it, they should have responded. Instead, union misleaders relied on backroom lobbying, to no avail. With bipartisan backing, the legislature passed a law requiring the city to provide space in public schools for the charters, or else pay for their rent in private buildings. So de Blasio is dutifully running out public schools.
New York City has “mayoral control” of the schools, meaning that they are run by a one-man dictatorship. To give a veneer of “community input” to the mayoral diktat, the DoE is required to hold hearings culminating in a vote by the 13-member Panel for Educational Policy (PEP), a majority of whose members are appointed by the mayor and the rest by borough presidents. The PEP routinely rubber stamps closing public schools and opening charter schools, of which there are now 216 in New York City.
At a PEP hearing on April 25, students from Marcy and other schools poured their hearts out. One young woman at Bed-Stuy Prep told how she came to the program at age 19 and now she would be attending college in the fall. “It seems to me that NYCDOE only cares about charter schools because charters have more money than schools like us,” she told the panel. A student from a school in the Bronx that is being pushed out said: “Just because our bank accounts may not match your own is not an excuse for making us feel like slaves, begging our masters for a chance. The people in the South Bronx will not be privatized, and will not give up on education.”
Another young woman, a senior at Brooklyn Academy, addressed Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza: “We are not like regular schools. We accommodate children who need a second, third and fourth, and even a fifth chance at completing something and being better in life. Mr. Carranza, you said that you cared to empower us, and yet … you don’t look at us and our 70% graduation rate, you look at the charter school and their money that they are accumulating, and their students that they hand pick. We deal with racism, gentrification, discrimination. This is an outrage even being here tonight. I shouldn’t even have to say this. I’ve been fighting every day in my school to make sure that this doesn’t happen.” But it did.
In the end, the mayor’s cronies of the Puppets for Educational Policy voted to install the second charter at the Marcy Avenue campus, squeezing the public schools there. It was a heartbreaker for the young adults at the four Marcy schools who spent months organizing, publicizing, going to community meetings, writing protest songs and finally coming out to make powerful speeches at the PEP supporting theirs schools, their teachers, their community. It was also a heartbreaker for the students at Crotona Academy High School in the Bronx, who spoke eloquently at the hearing but whose school was closed down entirely to make way for a charter.
At the April 25 PEP hearing, Marjorie Stamberg, a UFT delegate from District 79 and spokeswoman for Class Struggle Education Workers, told the PEP that “You are trying to squeeze us out, bit by bit, school by school, because there is an agenda here. The agenda is that you are trying to undercut public education to put in the charters. Now this is happening under the Republicans, under Betsy DeVos, but it happened under the Democrats, with Arne Duncan.” She ended her two minutes at the mike: “This is a guerrilla war against public education and we need to stop it now, with a mobilization of students, parents, teachers and all school workers.”
The war on public education continues. The drive for privatization is the demand of capital. To defeat that drive we need to fight it politically, against all capitalist parties, mobilizing the full power of the union and all working people.
Class Struggle Education Workers (CSEW) is part of the fight for a revitalization and transformation of the labor movement into an instrument for the emancipation of the working class and the oppressed rather than, as it is at present, an instrument for the disciplining of labor in the interests of capital. See the CSEW program here.