With thousands of students on an advocacy field trip, Jennifer Hudson belting Dream Girls, and Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr. giving a speech shouting distance from Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams office at Borough Hall, yesterday’s pro-Charter School Rally had a surrealistic tint.
In total, more than 18,000 students, parents and educators from about 90 charter schools citywide crammed into Downtown Brooklyn’s Cadman Plaza for the rally declaring an end to inequality that traps 478,000 New York City children—90% of whom are black and Hispanic—in a separate and unequal system of failed schools.
The rally came on the heels of the pro-charter Families For Excellent Schools report, A Tale of Two Schools, that found 116,000 students attending the city’s top 141 schools are essentially guaranteed academic success because their elementary schools commonly feed into the city’s best middle and high schools. But in a separate, unequal, and effectively segregated set of 850 schools, 478,000 students (90% of color, 89% living in poverty) are consistently trapped in low-performing schools, with only a fraction able to escape and attend a quality school.
Conversely, it came about three weeks after De Blasio, with the United Federation of Teachers union support, released his own $186 million initiative to turnaround some 94 failing schools in 10 years.
Although no Brooklyn electeds spoke at the rally, Bedford-Stuyvesant City Councilman Robert Cornegy was there in support of his 11-year-old daughter, a sixth-grader at Excellence Girls Middle School Academy in the Northern Crown Heights end of his district.
“With all the advocacy I do, I was really there supporting my child and her advocacy for herself and the future,” said Cornegy.
“As a public official I feel the inequity we suffer in my district and districts like mine. And all the parents gathered were amazing. It was a mix of all these different minorities advocating for themselves. Aside from my daughter, I was in awe of how many different languages were spoken and the different backgrounds. That was incredibly powerful to hear, and I would be remiss to not say how many dads I saw out there. While we get this bad rap about not being engaged with our children there were plenty of dads out there.”
Cornegy who has six children, including four still in the New York City Public School System, said he believes in parents choice as to how their children are educated, but sees co-locating charter schools with regular public schools as problematic.
Co-locations often means more resources are put on one floor for charter schools and not giving the same resources on the next floor for the regular schools, which could lead to stigmatize the kids going to the regular school as feeling inferior, Cornegy said.
“In this web of inequity there are so many variables. While I want to get rid of inequity it doesn’t necessarily mean I stand for co-location,” said Cornegy.
Adams spokesperson Stefan Ringel said Adams was invited to speak, but had a scheduling conflict.
“Borough President Adams believes in school choice for families, supporting public, charter, private, and parochial schools alike,” said Ringel in an email. “Borough President Adams supports co-locations when they are supported in partnership with the local community. He does not support forced co-locations.”
Among the Brooklyn lawmakers who favor more charter schools is Central Brooklyn Congressman Hakeem Jeffries, who is often mentioned as a possible challenger to de Blasio in 2017.
“For decades, the school system has failed to provide many inner-city students with a high quality public education,” said Jeffries. “To reverse that trend, we need all hands on deck. Let’s figure out a way to work together so that the aspirations of all parents for their children can be brought to life.”
