When crowds go wild: 8 loud moments in education activism

A raucous Poughkeepsie parent crowd prompted Commissioner John King last week to cancel plans for future meetings with parents. But the disruption, in the video above, is just the latest instance of angry protesters derailing public events in recent years. In New York City, other meetings have long been the backdrop for battles over school closures, charter schools, overcrowding, teacher evaluations and testings have wages. Here are highlights caught on tape from event in recent years:

“Sex and the City” star gets jeered, then cheered

Educators 4 Excellence panel dissolves

June 2, 2011: A 2011 panel about teacher evaluations broke down after a small number of teachers in the audience demanded that their questions be raised during a Q&A portion of the event. In the video above, Stuart Kaplan also objects to a teacher evaluation policy paper — which endorsed tying test scores to performance ratings — released earlier in the day by the event’s host, Educators 4 Excellence. But Kaplan’s complaints were soon drowned out by another teacher — and the audience’s applause — who told him to leave and let the panel resume.

An angry parent confronts Bill de Blasio over co-locations

July 20, 2011: Public Advocate Bill de Blasio was just about finished with a 2011 press conference about a new report that examined the city’s contentious school space-sharing arrangements, known as co-locations. The report criticized the city’s handling of co-locations, but stopped short of calling for an all-out ban. Sonya Hampton, a parent from P.S. 149 in Harlem, which shares space with a Success Academy charter school, did not like what she was hearing and chimed in. She later said she was “extremely disappointed” that de Blasio’s report did not explicitly support putting charter schools in their own buildings.

David Coleman’s speech on Common Core gets occupied

Oct. 25, 2011: Invited to meet with parents to discuss about new learning standards that the city had adopted, David Coleman wasn’t too far into his opening remarks before conceding it was a lost cause. That’s because over 200 education protesters from an off-shoot of the Occupy Wall Street movement also attended the event and deployed their “people’s mic” tactic. Unable to compete with their decibel level, Coleman handed his own microphone to Chancellor Dennis Walcott and returned to his seat.

Eva Moskowitz’s charter pitch to parents falls on deaf ears

Oct. 29, 2011: Controversial Success Academy Charter Schools CEO Eva Moskowitz traveled to Cobble Hill in Brooklyn to make a pitch for a new outpost of her network, bringing along a couple of parents from her then-brand-new Upper West Side school. Protesters who were driven inside by foul weather interrupted the meeting repeatedly, shouting,“This district doesn’t have failing schools, it has successful elementary schools!” After a few false starts, Moskowitz told the protesters that she would not continue to shout over them before leaving the stage.

Union activists butt heads over protesting tactics

Feb. 9, 2012: Union leader Leo Casey took heat from activists from within his own union leader at a meeting where the city was voting to close low-performing schools. Casey was leading dozens of teachers in a walkout mid-way into the meeting, but opponents, buoyed by the prospect of preventing the closures from being approved, said they wanted to stay and protest using the “people’s mic” until it was called off.

Feeling the heat but staying in the kitchen

Sept. 30, 2013: Like King in Poughkeepsie, New York City Chief Academic Officer Shael Polakow-Suransky also took a beating from parents recently at a public meeting to talk about the Common Core. But Polakow-Suransky responded a little differently, sticking around after the event to talk to a smaller number of parents and teachers about their concerns with the new policies. Polakow-Suransky didn’t appear to sway anyone’s opinion, but his appearance did earn him credit from even his harshest critics.