Don’t be impressed by the turnout of charter school consumers and investors at their pro-privatization Mardi-Gras on Oct. 2. It is guaranteed to be big. The crowd is spoken for and the extras are on call.
Like a movie set. Except it is a captive cast.
Attendance is mandatory. Dire consequences await any student, parent or teacher who doesn’t participate.
Belief in education “choice” doesn’t allow the option of being excused from staged demonstrations. After all, charter schools revel in their freedom from regulation. In at least one documented case of gentle persuasion, parents were warned to pick up their kids on time or be reported to the Administration For Children Services for child abuse and neglect.
Now you know why charter school separatists are so proud of not being part of the public school system.
Accountability.
Expect plenty of orchestrated passion. There will be copious soundbites, photo-ops, slogans and logos. There will be hamming for cameras and hogging of microphones.
The high priestess of the charter school insurgents, Eva Moskowitz, will practice ventriloquism by projecting her talking points into the throats of the zealots she has drafted and rented. As she whips up her audience she will for the moment cast from her mind the nearly seven-figure salary that is at the root of her conviction.
There will be no school for her scholars that day. Her network of properties will be padlocked. Instead of learning in classrooms, her exploited kids will impersonate sales associates, pitching the charter school manifesto while learning the lesson of taking to the streets and performing on cue.
If public schools were closed and everyone who served in them or was served by them were commanded, as though by electrified prods, to storm the barricades with unified chorus in support of their agenda for education justice, there would be an outcry.
Moskowitz would blame the Department of Education for its “business as usual” knuckling under to the teachers union whose members will stop at nothing to get its members a day off at the expense of children. Charter schools have set a new standard and that’s why they’re successful, she’d explain.
Public schools will be open on Oct. 2.
Thank goodness for the double standard!
Ron Isaac
Fresh Meadows
