The rhetoric of civil rights in the charter-school debate
Eliza Shapiro
In their respective fights to expand pre-kindergarten and charter schools, the de Blasio administration and the Success Academy charter network have repeatedly invoked the Civil Rights movement in an attempt to stress the urgency of their cases.
Success staff have likened a trip to a pro-charter Albany rally to the 1961 Freedom Rides. Mayor Bill de Blasio, meanwhile, has consistently framed his education efforts as a matter of civil rights.
Quoting Frederick Douglass at a recent appearance in a black church in Bedford-Stuyvesant, the mayor said, “Didn’t the great man once tell us, ‘Power yields nothing without demand?’ So we, in this time, have demanded something different for our children and we won’t accept an education system that doesn’t support them.”
This appropriation, even in the service of what amounts to advocacy of the black and Latino students most directly affected by the state of the city's public school system, hasn’t sat well with some civil rights activists.
http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/magazine/2014/04/8542945/rhetoric-civil-rights-charter-school-debate
