Low-income parents in Brentwood and Central Islip who were jumping for joy at the opportunity to send their children to high-performing charter schools that would be established in their area had to be highly dismayed when they read that the New York State teachers unions are suing to stop the charter schools from opening.
The unions make the false claim that the community doesn’t want them.
Of course, the teachers unions don’t want them, and they are always able to rally up their built-in network of support from other teachers and spouses to come to meetings to create a ruckus.
But they don’t represent the overall community.
The average parent within many of these communities are longing for alternatives to schools that are underperforming and often violent.
The waiting list for these charter schools are longer than the lines that accumulate for a Star Wars opening.
And the appointments come about through a lottery system
The unions claim that the charters are draining money from the public schools, but that’s a farce. Why should a school receive aid for a student who is no longer in the school?
In many states around the country, parents are now able to take their tax dollars and have the mobility to allocate those funds toward a school of their choice.
And why not? Rich folks can do it. So can the Marxist head of the Chicago Teachers Union who decries school choice, but nevertheless sends her child to a private school.
As noted in the extensive white paper on school choice prepared by the Center for Cost Effective Government, charter schools outperform many local schools and do so at a much lower cost.
We’ve learned that throwing more and more money at failing schools does not fix the problem of low student achievement.
We have found that states such as Mississippi and Florida, which once had some of the worst schools in the nation, are now leading the pack in student performance, in large part because competition within the school system has raised everyone’s game.
The union shouldn’t be able to stifle the will of the people. If there wasn’t support for these charter schools, the list to get in them wouldn’t be winding around the school building.
Perhaps the most disturbing part of this whole affair is that the representatives from the area who should be supporting the needs and desires of the minority population they serve have abandoned these African-American and Hispanic parents to curry favor with the union. So sad.