Speaking at a Martin Luther King Jr. commemoration, Mayor Bloomberg charged today that the state Assembly's last-minute attempt to overhaul charter schools would "gut" a successful system and dishonor King's memory.
"Tomorrow, unbelievably, our state Legislature may actually vote in a bill that would basically gut the law and make it harder to open charter schools," the mayor told 400 people gathered at City Hall to mark what would have been the revered civil rights leader's 81st birthday.
"Dr. King told us that a right delayed is a right denied and this bill would continue to deny those children the quality school options that they deserve. The bill really is an insult to parents and children and Dr. King and his legacy," added the mayor.
The mayor said that the Assembly bill, while doubling the cap on the number of charter schools to 400, would also impose new requirements that would make it difficult to open any new ones.
Refusing to lower class sizes even when the state gives you extra funds and mandates you do so, closing schools and dumping at risk students into other schools without providing extra resources to help them, turning over public schools to your hedge fund buddies and calling that a civil rights victory, stealing space and resources from the public schools for charter schools run by your hedge fund buddies -that's not dishonoring MLK.
But limiting charter schools to 10% of all public schools in the state and forcing them to educate the same body of students the non-charter public schools have to educate - that's dishonoring MLK.
What jive.
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