City Hall denies it, but Team de Blasio has been looking at blocking charter schools’ recruitment mailings to prospective students and their parents. The mayor’s minions seem to think people shouldn’t hear about opportunities for a better education.
In a scaremongering lie typical of anti-charter propaganda, critics have suggested that charters are somehow getting parents’ private information to do the mailings. That’s nonsense: The schools use Vanguard, a direct-mail vendor chosen by the city Department of Education.
The charters never see any information about the students or their families. Vanguard simply sends out their literature to relevant families on the DOE’s database.
The DOE itself spends more than $10 million a year on its own such mailings. Last year, it laid out $12 million to tell parents that the regular public schools offer “options and opportunities to get the kind of programming that they want.”
But the special interests that hate charters have created a semblance of parental outrage over the charter mailers, with parents at Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza’s staged, invitation-only “town hall” meetings complaining about the literature.
It was at one such event that Carranza revealed the real grievance, namely that charters dare to say that they’re better than the regular public system for many kids.
“Do what you got to do,” the chancellor warned charter operators. “Do your enrollment thing. But don’t talk about our schools.”
Funny: He’s supposed to support all public schools, including charters.
De Blasio & Co. hope that stifling alternate voices will stop the hemorrhaging of regular public school students and families looking for better educational experiences.
At a recent rally with charter school supporters, Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams slammed City Hall’s bid to change a “measure that gives families and parents the ability to decide where they want their children to go.”