Charter School Panel to be Held Tonight in Highland Park

Editor's Note: The following information is a press release from Speak Up Highland Park.

Save Our Schools New Jersey, Speak Up Highland Park and Education Law Center are jointly sponsoring a panel discussion titled The Promise, the Evidence, and the Politics of Charter Schools in New Jersey.  The event, which is open to the public, will be held on Tuesday, April 24, from 7 to 9 p.m. at the Bartle School, 435 Mansfield Ave. in Highland Park.
    
The panel will include:

• Michelle Fine, Professor of Psychology and Urban Education at the Graduate Center at CUNY and co-author of the book “Charter Schools and the Corporate Makeover of Public Education: What’s at Stake?”
• Julia Sass Rubin, spokesperson for Save Our Schools NJ, a nonpartisan, grassroots, all-volunteer organization of parents and other concerned residents;
• A representative from the Emily Fisher Charter School in Trenton, which has been threatened with closure by Acting Commissioner Christopher Cerf (Emily Fischer serves the most difficult to educate students who have not found success in Trenton’s traditional public schools, and the school’s closure is against the wishes of parents, teachers, students, recent school graduates, and state lawmakers);
• Assemblyman Patrick Diegnan, Assembly Education Committee Chairman and also primary sponsor of Assembly bill 1877, which would require local approval before the establishment of new charter schools.Highland Park is a natural choice of venue for the discussion.  The town’s struggle against an unwanted boutique charter, that was funded by a hedge fund demi-billionaire’s philanthropic group, and was earmarked for a $600,000 federal grant despite overwhelming community opposition, made national headlines.   
  
  Stan Karp, the Director of the Secondary Reform Project for NJ’s Education Law Center, and moderator of the event, has taken notice of this trend in the charter school movement:  "In the past 10 years, the character of the charter school movement has changed dramatically from community-based, educator-initiated local efforts that created alternatives for a small number of students to nationally funded efforts by foundations, investors, and educational management companies to create a parallel, more privatized system,” said Karp.  “This is eroding the common ground that public education in a democracy needs to survive."
  
  “In urban, suburban and rural communities throughout the U.S., parents and educators are fighting back -- unwilling to compromise democratic control over their public schools, unwilling to give up public real estate to privately governed schools and unwilling to reallocate precious public finances from local public schools to charter Schools, “ Dr. Fine added.
  
  Julia Sass Rubin noted that, “Our State's broken charter school law gives residents no say in whether a new charter school opens or closes in their community, leaving that decision entirely to the Commissioner of Education.  More recently, the creation of virtual charter schools that can draw students from across the state and divert their excess funding as revenue to discredited for-profit institutions, is only increasing the challenges that New Jersey’s charter school law poses for continued local democratic control of public education.”
  
  Dr. Fine put it succinctly when she said, “It’s critical that we hold public conversations about the future of our schools, our democracy and our vision for public education.”