The battle over charter schools raged in Albany on Wednesday, with advocates rallying by the thousands on the statehouse steps for additional schools and more funding.
“School choice matters!” shouted some 13,000 charter-school parents, faculty and students, many wearing red sweatshirts reading, “Don’t Steal Possible.”
“Raise the cap!” chanted the crowd, including thousands of children who woke before dawn to board buses with their teachers and parents.
“I’m down with ‘Don’t Steal Possible,’ ” R&B star Ashanti told the delighted kids during a 30-minute set.
“Being smart is so cool; going to school is so cool; being dumb is so whack,” she said, to loud cheers.
Charter advocates gathered to push lawmakers for higher per-pupil funding and a lifting of the cap on the number of charters statewide. “The schools around us, they suck,” one parent from a Bronx charter school shouted, in summation, to the crowd.
Meanwhile, teachers-union naysayers sniped from the sidelines.
In a meeting hall three blocks away, about 1,100 union members and supporters gathered for their annual Lobby Day, amping up ongoing protests against charters and against Gov. Cuomo’s proposed tightening of teacher evaluation and tenure rules.
“There’s a little show going on up here, correct?” United Federation of Teachers head Michael Mulgrew told his crowd, referring to the much larger pro-charter rally.
“Would we think it’s a good idea to put all the children of New York City on a bus for six hours in the middle of winter and drive them up north?” he goaded the group, which shouted back, “Noooooo!”
“We are the adults,” he said. “We do the work of the children. We don’t use children as props.”
The dueling rallies were timed to catch lawmakers’ attention as state budget negotiations begin in earnest ahead of an April 1 deadline. Education funding remains a political football that is often tossed directly between Albany and New York City.
Gov. Cuomo has proposed increasing the statewide cap on charter schools from 460 to 560, a move opposed by Mayor de Blasio and the UFT. Charter supporters are also hoping for higher per-pupil funding from the state. Union officials have vehemently attacked both the cap change and funding hikes as sapping valuable resources from the city’s regular public schools.
Among the dignitaries addressing the pro-charter rally were Lt. Gov. Kathy Hochul, who stood in for Cuomo as the governor traveled to promote his minimum-wage proposal. “Failure in our classrooms is not an option,” she told the crowd.
Sen. Majority Leader Dean Skelos (R-Nassau) looked out at a sea of “Don’t Steal Possible” posters and shirts and promised, “Nobody is going to steal possible from you.”
Charter staffers defended the day away from school as a civics field trip.
“We’re taking school on the road,” Principal Candido Brown of Success Academy in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, told his kids. “We canceled school, but don’t think you’re off the hook.”