The United Federation of Teachers takes its approach to charter schools straight from Bob Marley’s Sheriff John Brown: “Every time I plant a seed, he say ‘kill it before it grows.'”
In the Bronx, UFT lackey Assemblyman Jeffrey Dinowitz supports efforts to block construction of the International Leadership Charter Middle School in his Riverdale district.
The related high school, founded in 2006, is nationally recognized and has sent graduates on to the Ivy League. It’s also a member of the Black, Latinx, Asian Charter Collaborative.
The objections to the middle school? A sinkhole in a parking lot next door, vague worries about “traffic patterns” and various conspiracy theories.
Seriously.
Last year, the UFT sued to block the opening of a Bronx charter high school (Vertex Academies) on the grounds that it was a joint venture of two K-8 charters, Brilla College Prep and Public Prep and this somehow violated the state’s charter cap — even though the law clearly allowed each school to open its own high school, so the deal meant one less charter.
The court tossed the suit last August, but it still burned the schools’ money and built uncertainty for students’ largely low-income families.
Most recently, the UFT sued to block city-approved co-locations of two Success Academy charters — one in Far Rockaway and another in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn.
The union claims that letting Success use space in these buildings could lead to violations of the class-size law the UFT got its pawns in the Legislature to pass last year — arguing, essentially, that other schools in each building might need the space a few years down the line.
“It’s outrageous, ridiculous. The UFT is working against the parents and the students,” said Chanee Mitchell, whose daughter, Monay Bradley, is a fifth-grader at the Success Academy Far Rockaway Middle School.
Indeed, the union doesn’t care about parents or kids — at least not families that seek the best for their children and not for the UFT.
The union’s fingerprints are also all over the “poison pill” in the new state budget that could prevent the Mission Society (the city’s oldest anti-poverty charity!) from opening the long-awaited Minisink charter school in Harlem.
Over the last two decades, the UFT’s gotten a host of minor rules written into law to give it chances to quash new charters.
It’s as relentless as Sheriff Brown, figuring the largely low-income, minority families that rely on charters will never be able to fight back effectively.
The union might want to remember the sherriff’s fate: It was self-defense.