Students, parents and teachers rallied outside nearly 100 public schools Thursday in protest of the governor's education agenda. NY1's Lindsey Christ filed the following report.
At a grade school in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn, there was a protest against Governor Andrew Cuomo's education policies.
"Testing, testing, all we do it testing," said the principal of P.S. 10, who was standing next to city teachers' union president, Michael Mulgrew, and the union's national leader, Randi Weingarten.
The union organized this rally and coordinated as many as 100 simliar protests across the city Thursday.
The union is battling Cuomo's education agenda, from his support for charter schools to his demand that student test scores play a bigger role in teacher evulations.
With Thursday's protests, union leaders hoped Cuomo would feel more heat if the criticism came from parents.
"The parents have to be out there with us and you saw today that they are," Mulgrew said.
So in every borough, but mostly in middle-class neighborhoods, teachers, parents and students formed human chains around the entrances to schools, saying they were "protecting" the schools from the governor's policies.
It's a message that really resonated in certain communities, particularly brownstone Brooklyn, where there's already a strong parent movement against standardized tests.
The teachers' union has long accused charter schools of using students as props at political rallies, and just like at those protests, many youngsters at Thursday's rallies did not seem fully aware of what they were protesting.
Boy: To stop Governor...
Boy's father: Cuomo.
Boy: Cuomo from stopping the funding of public schools.
But for teachers, the issues are clear. They're not just opposed to the governor's policies but to the message they say he's sending them.
"I feel like we're being told that we're not doing a good enough job, and I'm wondering why," said Megan Amorese, a teacher at P.S. 333.