Parental Choice in Education-Key Issue for 2016
By Frank J. Russo, Jr.
Everyone wins with school choice—parents, children and taxpayers. The opposition comes primarily from public school teacher unions which want to keep their government school monopoly. Half the states have passed legislation to provide some measure of choice in education, but not New York.
The question is: will our state legislature act to get this bill passed or will they yield to the teacher unions who oppose even this small step in the direction of justice, providing school choice for parents and tax relief for hard-pressed taxpayers? Well, this bill has overwhelmingly passed the Republican controlled NY Senate many times, but has never even been allowed a vote in the Democrat controlled NY Assembly, even though many Assembly Democrats and Gov. Cuomo supported the bill. The reason is obvious—the Democrat leaders of the Assembly fear the teacher unions, who are major financial donors to their Party, and place the teacher union interests above those of low and middle income students who would benefit with this legislation, and also above the interests of taxpayers. What’s sad, too, is that most minority voters, who want school choice even more than white voters, are not aware that the Democrats they vote for place their children’s educational interests below those of the teacher unions.
James Trent, our club’s board chairman and president and founder of the Queens County Farm Museum, gave the lowdown on Mayor de Blasio’s bogus zoning plan ostensibly for the purpose of building housing for the poor.
