Cuomo to target public education even more in his second term

Rss@dailykos.com (laura Clawson)
Thursday, January 22, 2015, 8:59 pm

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New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo is ratcheting up his war on public education. He's looking to expand charter schools, create a back-door voucher program through tax credits, and make it easier to fire teachers. Cuomo has already forced New York City to provide free space for charter schools after Mayor Bill de Blasio tried to block charters from taking space from kids in public schools located in the same buildings. Now, Cuomo is pushing to raise or even eliminate the cap on the number of charter schools that can exist in the state, and:
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Mr. Cuomo has also voiced support for a bill, backed by the Catholic Church and advocates of vouchers, that would offer tax credits to individuals and corporations who donate money to public schools, or to scholarship programs that help poor and middle-class students attend private schools. The governor also expressed support for the bill last year, but it failed in the face of opposition from the State Assembly speaker, Sheldon Silver, a Democrat.
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It's the private school scholarship programs that are key here-giving tax credits for people who send kids to private school is a move toward vouchers. A similar tax credit in Georgia has funneled money to schools that expel kids for being gay. And, of course, Sheldon Silver probably isn't going to be in a position to have much of an effect this time around.
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Cuomo has received millions of dollars in contributions from corporate education policy advocates, but it's not that he's been bought-it's that he really believes that privatization is the way to go. Cuomo is on the side of charter chains with highly paid executives, chains that force special needs kids out, leaving the special needs kids and homeless kids and English Language Learners to the public schools, which are then slammed for underperforming as they try to educate a more challenging group of students. But hey, there's a lot of money to be had in privatizing schools, from those charter executive salaries to test company profits. So of course that's the side Andrew Cuomo takes.
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