UPDATE: Rally Monday - DOE Give Student Data to Charters: Did Charter Industrial Complex Get to Di Blasio? Where is UFT?

Monday Rally:

NYC Public School Parents

Come to rally on Monday to protest the Mayor letting charters access student information to help them recruit students - *Please come and show your support and share with others. Don’t let the Mayor chicken out on this important issue because he is more scared of the chart...

This morning [Thursday] at Tweed, Chancellor Carranza spoke about his opposition to the long-standing DOE practice of allowing charter schools to use the DOE mailing lists.  He said no final decision has yet been made to change this practice– contrary to what reporters had already been told about this as late as last night and parents this morning.  He asked for parents to make their voices heard about whether they wanted this practice to continue or not. 

For more on this issue, see our press release here, with quotes from parent leaders, which among other things points out that DOE is the ONLY school district in the country that provides this info to charters voluntarily, helping them recruit their students, take their space and their funding, which is now costing our schools more than $2.1 billion per year.  See also Diane Ravitch's blog, which hypothesizes that the Mayor chickened out when the news leaked out prematurely and he got blowback from the wealthy and powerful charter lobby.

Grace Lovaglio streamed Carranza's remarks to CPAC on Facebook live.  He addressed the student privacy and charter school recruitment issue for about ten minutes at 36.25 minutes in.  A rough transcript of his remarks follows: 

Carranza says that he has not gone to any parent meetings where he has not heard about the “predatory nature” of charters and all the mailings.   He tells the story of one parent who told him that only one of her children not to get the mailings is the one who tested gifted and not the ones w/ IEPs.  The Mayor has spoken that this is not okay. …now somehow this has become that the district is going to cut this off. I cannot speak to whether or not this is going to happen.

The press release below came out earlier in the day but there seem to be some backtracking by the chancellor and Di Blasio.
A dividing line in progressive Democratic Party politics will be standing up to the charter industry. Reports on this story from Leonie Haimson and Diane Ravitch.

This morning, there was the announcement below the latest updates. Then the chancellor seemingly changed his mind.

Leonie writes:

The DN editorial which apparently scared de BLasio off and once again insulted parents by calling them mushrooms and by claiming the opposition to the practice of letting charters use student info was led by the teachers union, which as far as I know has never said a peep about this.

https://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/ny-edit-de-blasio-vs-charters-again-20190411-smbwzldlavhq5hncjkd3gvu7z4-story.html

NYC Public School Parents

The Chancellor says no final decision has yet been made on the issue of providing student information to charters for marketing purposes - *More on this fast-developing and changing story here from the Daily News here.* This morning at Tweed, Chancellor Carranza spoke about his opposition to...

NYC: Faced with Charter Pressure, DeBlasio Backs Down by dianeravitch

Public school parents and advocates relieved that their family’s information will no longer be used to help charters market their schools

Public school parents and advocates relieved that their family’s information will no longer be used to help charters market their schools 

This morning, parents and advocates thanked the Mayor and Chancellor for finally reversing the long-standing practice of allowing charter schools to access their family’s information for mailings sent to their homes for marketing and recruiting purposes.

Said Johanna Garcia, public school parent and President of Community Education Council in District 6 in Upper Manhattan:  “It is unconscionable that this practice has gone on as long as it has.  For more than a decade, parents and advocates have complained about the privacy violations incurred by DOE allowing charters to access our children’s personal information without our consent; I filed a  FERPA complaint to the US Department of Education about this practice in November 2017.  Moreover, I am not aware of another school district in the country that voluntarily makes this information available to charter schools to help them boost their enrollment, diverting students and funding from our public schools.  “

Nequan McLean, co- chair of the Education Council Consortium and the President of Community Education Council in District 16 Brooklyn said: “The DOE never had our permission in the first place to allow charter schools to access this personal information. As a result,  I along with other parents. have been routinely inundated with two or three charter mailings a week, and our district has been overrun by charter schools.  These charter schools are allowed to flood black and brown communities with their promotional materials, often full of exaggerations and lies, that the public schools cannot afford.”  

Shino Tanikawa, the co-chair of the ECC and a member of NYC Kids PAC, said, “For years, DOE has ignored parents’ complaints about this practice, which started in 2006, when Joel Klein agreed to help Success Academy charter schools expand their “market share” as Eva Moskowitz put it in an email.  The result is that this year, more than two billion dollars has been diverted from our public schools, leaving our schools with less space and less funding for our neediest students.”  

Leonie Haimson, co-chair of the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy, pointed out: “In Chicago, after student information was disclosed to Noble charter schools without parent consent, resulting in parents receiving postcards urging them to enroll their children in their schools, this sparked a huge controversy and led to an investigation by the city’s Inspector General.  As a result, the Chicago staffer who released the information to Noble was fired and the district apologized to parents in mailings paid for by Noble.  And this occurred in a city where the Mayor controls the schools and is charter-friendly. Right now, Nashville school district is defying a state law requiring districts to make parent contact information available to charter schools, and last week appealed a court order to do so.  NY State has no such law, and in fact, the New York state student privacy law Education 2D bars the use of student data for marketing purposes.”

Naomi Peña, parent of four public school children and President of Community Education Council in District 1 in the Lower East Side, said: “For years, I along with other public school parents have been subjected to glossy flyers from charter schools, which have received millions of dollars from hedge fund billionaires to help them advertise in this way – though we never consented to our information being used for this purpose.  Charter schools are also able to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on social media buys, TV and radio ads, and to plaster their posters all over our subway, to boost their enrollment and waiting lists.  Meanwhile, our public schools don’t have the funding to promote themselves in this way.  This is an unfair advantage, and though I’m glad the Mayor and the Chancellor have finally decided to stop helping them market their schools to the detriment of our public schools, I only wish they had stopped this prior and not after this year’s deluge of charter mailings that I and so many other parents received.”