Dear Charter School Friends,

What a crazy thing – the Friday of National Charter Schools Week, presidential candidate Bernie Sanders says that as president he will put an end to charter schools.

As my mother would have said, “the nerve!”

Sanders’ comments – yelling about transparency (which of course exists) or regulation (which charters have plenty of!) and accountability (which is the very essence of charters) – are almost as bad as when Randi Weingarten, AFT Union’s leader, called charters the polite second cousin of segregation.

We cannot let these people get away with this, friends!

While they have a tough job, it is a fact that traditional public schools are failing to educate more than 60% of students well in math, reading, history, civics, you name it. We also know that a charter school in any neighborhood puts pressure on the standard public schools around it to do better.

It drives unions crazy that charters do so well and are allowed to operate outside of their control, so the teachers unions have launched an all-out war on charter schools. Now they are spreading disinformation that charter schools are hurting kids in regular public schools, or are dangerously siphoning off public funding, or are in other ways “failures” — when nothing could be further from the truth.

When Sanders’ friends at the unions can’t shut down charters outright, they are trying to unionize them to control and redirect them from within. This is the major threat to charter schools in Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, and Washington, D.C. – and more are on their way.

Even in the midst of this bullying and disinformation campaigns, polls show a majority of the general public favor education choice, including when it comes in the form of charter schools.

That’s why we must fight back harder and more strategically than ever.   To get started, it’s simple:

• Raise your voice on Facebook, on Twitter and in your own social networks.  Say it out loud – we expect our leaders and politicians to help all students succeed and embrace all kinds of schools. Parents are a child’s first teacher – they should be able to determine what kind of education works best.  

• Write letters to the editor in your local paper. Get the facts on charters to share – at edreform.com we have information and links to data from all education opportunity focused groups.

• Your Congressman and Senators have to hear from you! Tell them you expect them to support all forms of education, that you will not tolerate these comments from Bernie Sanders or anyone else, and that your vote depends on their recognizing that charter schools work and are a critical part of education today and in the future.

These three simple things – from tens of thousands of people – will go a long way to putting the establishment on notice that the charter school movement and its supporters across the EdReform landscape will not tolerate charter school bashing anymore.Let us know if you have other ideas. We’ll be in touch soon. Thank you so much for the important work you do for children and America’s future.