Why Corporate Ed Reformers Might Not Ultimately Prevail in NYC

While the Corporate Education Reformers may have enough money to buy off politicians, the press and some civil rights leaders, they don't have enough money to provide jobs, healthcare, decent housing, youth recreation, senior programs to the city's working class and shrinking middle class, especially in the outer boroughs. Although the elite is going full steam ahead with its program of school privatization, the wheels are falling off the neo-liberal bus, and protests are emerging around the stop and frisk and racial profiling tactics of the NYPD, cuts in transportation and senior services, evictions and foreclosures, and, in the education sphere, against school closings and charter co-locations, excessive testing, and police repression of student in high schools and the city university. None of these will stop DOE policies in the short run, but by the time Christine Quinn ( God help us) becomes our next Mayor, the level of political turmoil in the city will be of late 60's proportions and we will be able to stop some of these policies in their tracks and eventually reverse some of them. That's my scenario for where we are heading. And as someone who has been involved in protests around housing issues, civil liberties issues and racial profiling issues, I can assure you that a storm is brewing in the outer boroughs that the media haven't quite picked up on Hold on to your hats.