The bat­tle over edu­ca­tion in New York has turned nasty in the past week, as ten­sions over char­ter schools and fund­ing for uni­ver­sal pre-kinder­garten boiled over in Albany and across New York City.

Moskowitz's decision to close schools on Tuesday, March 4, to bus students to Albany for a pro-charter school rally coincided with the scheduled Albany lobby day by de Blasio and supporters for his universal pre-kindergarten plan and its attendant tax increase for the city's rich.

This strug­gle is often por­trayed in the media as a con­flict between per­son­al­i­ties — new­ly elect­ed lib­er­al Demo­c­ra­t­ic NYC may­or Bill de Bla­sio ver­sus fis­cal­ly con­ser­v­a­tive Demo­c­ra­t­ic gov­er­nor Andrew Cuo­mo, whose pres­i­den­tial ambi­tions are hard­ly a secret. But the fight for pub­lic edu­ca­tion is much big­ger than the egos of these two men (and that’s say­ing some­thing). It’s also much big­ger than a spat between de Bla­sio and Eva Moskowitz, CEO of Suc­cess Acad­e­my, the char­ter-school chain whose three reject­ed co-loca­tions — sit­ing of a char­ter school in an exis­tent pub­lic school build­ing along­side the pub­lic school– inspired a civ­il rights law­suit filed this week.

Moskow­itz’s deci­sion to close schools on Tues­day, March 4, to bus stu­dents to Albany for a pro-char­ter school ral­ly coin­cid­ed with the sched­uled Albany lob­by day by de Bla­sio and sup­port­ers for his uni­ver­sal pre-kinder­garten plan and its atten­dant tax increase for the city’s rich. This was prob­a­bly not a coin­ci­dence, as Moskow­itz’s ral­ly man­aged to drown out atten­tion for de Bla­sio’s event.

Teacher Patrick Walsh of P.S. 149 tells In These Times, ​“If any pub­lic school prin­ci­pal did that, they would be auto­mat­i­cal­ly fired, pos­si­bly arrest­ed.” Char­ters, though, are inde­pen­dent­ly-run alter­na­tive schools that are pub­licly fund­ed and take pub­lic-school stu­dents — Walsh points out that because char­ters are not held to the same stan­dards as oth­er schools, this passed with­out much out­cry. ​“They get pub­lic fund­ing and get pub­lic space but they don’t answer to the chan­cel­lor and there is no pub­lic over­sight to any of their schools. They have a board of direc­tors as if they’re a corporation.”

Cuo­mo was more than hap­py to change the sub­ject away from a plan he wants no part of (the gov­er­nor’s bud­get is laden with tax cuts, not increas­es, for the wealthy), and turned up at the char­ter schools ral­ly instead. The tabloids oblig­ed as well—the New York Post ran a cov­er tweak­ing de Bla­sio with ​“A Tale of Two Ral­lies” and call­ing the chil­dren on the bus­es ​“sup­port­ers” of char­ter schools.

The debate in the media over the past week shows the still-nar­row range of pub­lic debate around char­ter schools. On one end are char­ter-school enthu­si­asts like Andrew Cuo­mo, who spoke to a cheer­ing crowd at the pro-char­ters ral­ly, pro­claim­ing ​“I am com­mit­ted to ensur­ing char­ter schools have the finan­cial capac­i­ty, the phys­i­cal space and the gov­ern­ment sup­port to thrive and to grow.” At the oth­er are skep­tics like Bill de Bla­sio, who took the mod­er­ate step of refus­ing pro­posed co-loca­tions of nine char­ter schools, out of 45 that were reviewed. New York Times writer Michael Pow­ell called it ​“a mild counter revo[lution].” But few politi­cians will say that giv­ing pri­vate com­pa­nies rent-free pub­lic space to pick and choose the stu­dents they’ll edu­cate is a prac­tice that should be com­plete­ly end­ed, though Pub­lic Advo­cate Leti­tia James is going for­ward with a law­suit oppos­ing 36 co-loca­tions (includ­ing 14 new ones) that de Bla­sio reaffirmed.

But the ques­tion of char­ter schools is much big­ger than the per­son­al­i­ties and polit­i­cal prospects of the offi­cials and exec­u­tives involved in the cur­rent fight. Char­ters are at the heart of the cor­po­rate-backed agen­da for edu­ca­tion reform, which Bar­bara Made­loni of the Mass­a­chu­setts Teach­ers Asso­ci­a­tion calls ​“preda­to­ry reform.” The reform agen­da backed by char­ter-school heads like Moskowitz and bil­lion­aires like Bloomberg often results in fun­nel­ing pub­lic funds into pri­vate hands, whether that’s char­ter chains or test­ing com­pa­nies, while crack­ing down on teach­ers unions (char­ter schools are most­ly non-union) and shrink­ing teach­ing time in favor of ever-more high-stakes tests.

Char­ters have also been wide­ly crit­i­cized for cher­ryp­ick­ing stu­dents already more like­ly to suc­ceed; the process­es for entry tilt the play­ing field in favor of par­ents who are active and engaged with their child. As Bertha Lewis of the Black Insti­tute wrote in an op-ed recent­ly at the New York Dai­ly News, just 3 per­cent of New York’s chil­dren attend char­ters, yet fund­ing for the oth­er 97 per­cent of schools has been cut repeat­ed­ly at the state lev­el. The heavy focus on char­ters masks the fact that the rest of New York’s stu­dents are get­ting short­changed. (Even the names of some NYC char­ters seem to acknowl­edge that fact — schools like ​“Uncom­mon Schools” almost seem to rev­el in it.)

Char­ter school co-loca­tions are the epit­o­me of this reform ide­ol­o­gy. Co-loca­tions are already com­mon in New York City, where char­ter schools explod­ed dur­ing the Bloomberg years — from 17 when the bil­lion­aire for­mer may­or took office to 159 in 2013. Some two-thirds of those schools are locat­ed rent-free in pub­lic school build­ings. Instead of tak­ing on the whole build­ing, which would per­haps come with some expec­ta­tion that they should edu­cate all the stu­dents, the co-locat­ed schools fill up half the build­ing, squeez­ing the oth­er stu­dents and teach­ers into small­er spaces. Even if you accept the premise that char­ters are auto­mat­i­cal­ly bet­ter (Moskowitz touts the high test scores of her Suc­cess Acad­e­my stu­dents), what does this say then to the oth­er chil­dren who don’t receive the same accommodations?

Under the co-loca­tion plan that de Bla­sio blocked, Suc­cess Acad­e­my would have expand­ed fur­ther into two con­joined pub­lic schools with which it already shares space, P.S. 149 and P.S. 811. The lat­ter is a school for chil­dren with autism and behav­ioral or emo­tion­al prob­lems. Par­ents at the pub­lic schools opposed the expan­sion, and even sup­port­ers of the co-loca­tion admit­ted it could bring the school over 130 per­cent of its capacity.

Moth­er Bea­jae Payne tells In These Times that co-loca­tion is unfair to spe­cial needs stu­dents like her son, who attends P.S. 811. ​“I think they need their own loca­tion. They should not be tak­ing up free space in pub­lic schools. If they’re going to be there, they should be pay­ing some­thing.” She notes that because of their spe­cial needs, her son and his fel­low stu­dents ​“can’t say ​‘We like our school and want to be here.’ They can’t speak for themselves.”

For those con­cerned about the encroach­ment of pri­vate enter­prise on pub­lic space, Suc­cess Acad­e­my makes a per­fect exam­ple, its cof­fers fat with pri­vate dona­tions as it demands to occu­py an already-crowd­ed pub­lic school build­ing. When Suc­cess Acad­e­my first moved in, Walsh, who’s been at P.S. 149 for nine years, says that his school lost its music room and a com­put­er room. Accord­ing to Juan Gon­za­lez at the Dai­ly News, if the co-loca­tion request for an addi­tion­al 375 or so stu­dents at the P.S. 811⁄ 149 build­ing had gone through, 20 per­cent of enroll­ment for the spe­cial needs stu­dents would be cut.

It’s stu­dents, like Payne’s son, that new schools chan­cel­lor Car­men Far­iña has said she’ll take into account in the future when approv­ing char­ters. She told Gon­za­lez she would no longer allow reduced space for stu­dents with spe­cial needs, who make up only 9 per­cent of char­ter stu­dents, a num­ber far low­er than the dis­trict average.

It’s not only spe­cial needs stu­dents who suf­fer when char­ters move in. ​“It’s my belief that [co-loca­tion] is sim­ply anoth­er wedge to dri­ve into the com­mu­ni­ty to set one part of the com­mu­ni­ty against anoth­er,” Walsh says. While the char­ter school stu­dents receive the best of every­thing, the pub­lic funds sup­ple­ment­ed with cor­po­rate dona­tions, the pub­lic school stu­dents suf­fer. It was a walk through the space at his school com­par­ing the facil­i­ties for Suc­cess Acad­e­my stu­dents to those for P.S. 149 or 811 stu­dents, he says, that inspired a law­suit by his union, the Unit­ed Fed­er­a­tion of Teach­ers (UFT), and the NAACP in 2011 over unequal con­di­tions for stu­dents.

That law­suit is still pend­ing, but Walsh and oth­ers were dis­mayed to see the char­ter school sup­port­ers using the lan­guage of civ­il rights this week — and fil­ing a fed­er­al civ­il rights law­suit against the New York City Depart­ment of Edu­ca­tion. The suit argues in part that de Bla­sio’s deci­sion to deny colo­ca­tions is ​“improp­er and arbi­trary” and that ​“If Harlem Cen­tral clos­es, stu­dents cur­rent­ly attend­ing one of the high­est-per­form­ing schools across the state will be forced to attend some of the low­est per­form­ing schools in New York City.”

Hazel Dukes, pres­i­dent of the New York State con­fer­ence of the NAACP, released a state­ment call­ing the law­suit ​“an affront to all pub­lic school par­ents in New York City.” She con­tin­ued, ​“This law­suit is an out­ra­geous and insult­ing attempt by Wall Street hedge fund man­agers to hijack the lan­guage of civ­il rights in their shame­less polit­i­cal attack on Bill de Blasio.”

If this whole bat­tle is over halt­ing the expan­sion of char­ters, we can see how hard it is to take back char­ter schools once they’ve been opened; few edu­ca­tors want to force stu­dents from one learn­ing envi­ron­ment where they’re thriv­ing to anoth­er, and no politi­cian wants to be seen as shut­ter­ing a school that some­one loves. Yet in the Bloomberg years, 164 schools were closed in New York City, and some stu­dents loved those schools too. Par­ents like Payne see their chil­dren thriv­ing in exist­ing pub­lic schools and don’t want to lose them either. In her son’s time at P.S. 811 he’s gone from speak­ing just a word at a time to full sen­tences — she calls his teacher ​“A match made in heav­en for him.”

Mean­while, some 200 teach­ers and par­ents gath­ered on Mon­day out­side of P.S. 149 and 811 to ral­ly against the co-loca­tion and in sup­port of their pub­lic schools, along­side Dukes, Man­hat­tan Bor­ough Pres­i­dent Gale Brew­er, and Rev­erend Michael Wal­rond of First Corinthi­an Bap­tist Church. How­ev­er, the protest did not get as much media atten­tion as the duel­ing Albany ral­lies on March 4. Walsh says ​“I’m furi­ous at the lack of press it received.”

Ulti­mate­ly, char­ter schools can trust that Cuo­mo will advance their cause, whether out of a sin­cere love for char­ters or sim­ply a result of the cam­paign dona­tions pour­ing into his pock­ets from the indus­try. But it’s unclear if the offi­cials who claim to oppose them will stop their expan­sion. On the cam­paign trail, de Bla­sio called for a ​“mora­to­ri­um” on co-loca­tions and sug­gest­ed that well-fund­ed chains like Moskow­itz’s (they have some $35 mil­lion in reserves) could afford to pay rent to the city. But now, he has backed off while shoring up his sup­port for pre‑K, and even James takes pains to point out that she is not opposed to all char­ter schools. Teach­ers unions can be count­ed on to con­tin­ue bat­tling char­ters, par­tic­u­lar­ly as New York’s UFT moves into con­tract nego­ti­a­tions and its par­ent union, the Amer­i­can Fed­er­a­tion of Teach­ers, looks to step up its fight against char­ter school chains on the nation­al lev­el. But it will take a real move­ment of teach­ers, par­ents, stu­dents, and sym­pa­thet­ic offi­cials to halt the steady march toward char­ters and rechan­nel mon­ey back into pub­lic schools.

​“Chil­dren are not some wid­gets that can some­how be dis­trib­uted. It’s not about ran­dom seats,” Moskowitz told reporters recent­ly, lament­ing what might hap­pen if her char­ters don’t open. Payne, on the oth­er side, would quite like­ly agree — but it’s not her chil­dren that Moskowitz is con­cerned with.