Document:New York Newsletter September 1999 Free New York
Free New York A Quarterly Publication of The Libertarian Party of New York September 1999
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Let your fellow libertarians know what you are doing to further the cause of liberty in New York State.
Elections and Party politics come first. But, we will consider other stories of interest to libertarians
Calendar
Calendar
September 14 Primary Elections
November 2 General Election
November 13 Deadline for Articles
November 20 (Sloatsburg) State Comm. Meeting
December Next Issue of FNY
April 29, 2000 LPNY Convention
Popkin Elected to Brooklyn School Board
by Gary Popkin
I was recently elected to the nine-member Community School Board 15 in Brooklyn, making me the only dues-paying member of the LPNY to hold public elective office. The voting was by a form of proportional representation and preferential voting in which each ballot helps to elect at most one candidate, that allows minority interests to be represented. After all the (paper) ballots had been counted, recounted, shuffled, and reshuffled, I ended up winning a seat with less than 7.2% of the votes cast. Six of the winners held more than 60% of the votes cast, and the remainder of the vote was distributed among the three other winners and exhausted ballots, ballots that did not help to elect any candidate.
I ran as a one-issue candidate and intend to make that issue the focus of my term in office. My issue was liberty as it relates to education. In New York State, parents can gain consider- able freedom in connection with their childrens education by invoking a little-known provision of the 1998 Charter School legislation that allows an existing public school to escape from the oppression of its central board of education and be run by parents and teachers as a conversion charter school. Charter schools are public schools that are free of all state and local regulations except health, safety, and civil rights. They have no captive customers as ordinary public schools do; their custo- mers must all ask to be there. Charter schools are funded from the public trough according to how many students they attract.
New York was approximately the 35th state to enact charter-school legislation. Minnesota was first, in 1991. There is already substantial evidence that giving parents and teachers freedom to innovate and compete leads to dramatically improved results, especially in the kinds of failing schools for which conversion was envisioned.
Among bloated, obsolescent, and useless bureaucracies, New York Citys Board of Education stands out as a particularly egregious example. Out of this years budget of $10 billion, only $4 billion will be used in instruction. The central board will manage to make $6 billion (more than the Gross Domestic Product of most nations) disappear. Worse, the central board is a detriment to education in that it mandates uniformity among the Citys schools in a way that is entirely unsuitable in a population as heterogeneous as New Yorks.
During the campaign, some of my hard-line collectivist reactionary opponents found the idea of increased liberty, no matter how slight, absurd. One thought it couldnt work; another was appalled at the idea that some people might benefit more from increased liberty than others would; and a third thought that increasing liberty was running away from the problem. There are, after all, still three strongholds of collectivism in the world: China, Cuba, and New York City. And even China is beginning to see the light. Sometimes running away from a problem is the best solution, as escapees from the Soviet Union found.