Bloomberg's Autocracy Sued: Parents and Teachers on the Move to Resist

From the NYTimes:

By JAVIER C. HERNANDEZ

Published: March 25, 2009

The United Federation of Teachers and the New York Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit Tuesday charging that the city’s Department of Education violated state law by moving to replace traditional public schools with charter schools without proper consultation of neighborhood school boards.

The suit, filed in State Supreme Court on behalf of the teachers’ union and parents with children at Manhattan and Brooklyn schools, argues that the city needed approval from local school boards before it decided to close neighborhood schools and hand their buildings over to charters. Those schools are publicly financed but managed independently, and generally admit students via lottery. . . .

And this from Education Notes Online:

Will charter schools and small elite schools drain away the highest performing students, leaving the public schools and the teachers in them to be branded as failures because they are working with the students who need the most help but are denied the resources to do an effective job? Have we seen the end of the zoned neighborhood school in poor urban school systems? (See today's NY Times on how parents can't get their kids into kindergarten in their own neighborhood schools.)

Conference/Strategy Session on fighting testing/school closings/ATR

We see this conference as a first step in building a coalition of teachers, parents and students to plan campaigns to take back public education from the privateers.

When: Sat. March 28, 12 pm
Where: John Jay College, Room 1311 North Hall Building
445 W 59th St Manhattan