Charter school foes act like children

Hear, hear!

With just four working days to go in the legislative session, Assembly Dems are blaming the ad campaign for setting back their efforts to broker a compromise. But the real problem is that too many lawmakers are under the sway of old-school educrats, especially the teachers union, who want to keep their monopoly on public funds and resent being shown up by the competition.

It's not too late to do the right thing for the kids.

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Charter school foes act like children NY Daily News editorial, 6/17/06 http://www.nydailynews.com/06-17-2006/news/ideas_opinions/story/427294p-360382c.html

Assembly Democrats have seized on a new and particularly lame excuse for blocking the expansion of charter schools: Their feelings are hurt. Speaker Sheldon Silver and his members got bent out of shape when a group called Parents for Public Charter Schools spent a million bucks on TV and radio ads exposing the anti-charter politics of three Assembly members - Ron Canestrari of Albany, Susan John of Rochester and Francine DelMonte of Niagara Falls. The spots feature testimonials by angry charter school moms and accuse the pols of wanting to "cap our children's future" - a fair enough statement, since the three lawmakers have supported keeping the limit of just 100 such schools in all New York State. Note that the three pols represent cities with failing public schools. Their constituents - especially low-income, minority families - are lining up by the thousands to enroll their kids in independently run, publicly funded charters which are the only affordable option available to them. And standardized test scores confirm that charter schools in general deliver superior educations...