Among the wild shenanigans at last night’s charter school public hearing, a Working Families Party plant, District PAC president Tammy Boyle, could be seen coaching young students as they testified against Dr. Steve Perry’s application to launch the Capital Prep Harbor School.

Really? Feeding students words to support your agenda? This is wrong for so many reasons.

But the saddest part is, these kids couldn’t read the testimony they were handed. That really happened. A Working Families Party shill shoved anti-charter school testimony under kids’ noses and those kids couldn’t read it.

The Working Families Party tried to use and manipulate students, but they made the case for high-quality public school options better than any charter school supporter.

The kids could not read their own testimony. Why? Because more than half of Bridgeport’s 3rd grade students aren’t reading at grade level. When it comes to 10th graders, the number of students able to read at grade level drops even further.

But beyond the sheer hypocrisy and hubris displayed last night and daily by the Working Families Party in Bridgeport, someone might mention that the illusion is broken when you can see the puppeteer’s hands.

Those kids probably don’t even know what a charter school is, let alone whether or not they are against it. And the Working Families Party thinks that’s a valid way to express their (nonsensical) opposition?

The strategy in Bridgeport has been to manipulate and badger, to tell lies when necessary and play ostrich when a lie won’t serve. With folks like Maria Pereira and Sauda Baraka in charge of our schools, you can be sure of one thing: Nothing will change anytime soon.

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