In the best American political tradition, families and students from Success Academy charter schools are visiting Albany on a school day to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
This fact has made some charter school opponents apoplectic.
City Council Education Committee Chairman Danny Dromm is demanding answers. “No educator should be allowed to use children as pawns for their political agenda,” he thunders, his ire aimed squarely at Success founder Eva Moskowitz. “Serious questions arise about closing schools for political gain.”
In response to these “serious questions” about the loss of a single instructional day , we have some serious questions of our own.
Why is it that traditional district schools educate their students for only 27-and-a-half hours a week, whereas scholars at Success Academy charters get around 35 hours a week?
Why is it that, over the course of a K-12 education, kids in a Success Academy school get more than three-and-a-half years of additional instructional time?
Why is it that kids at Success Academy schools pass English and math proficiency tests at two or three or four times the rate of district schools?
The answer: The rigid teachers’ union contract prescribes precisely how long teachers in traditional public schools work.
Dromm and his allies are defending a school system that has inflexibly failed hundreds of thousands of students. The system means all to them.
On the other hand, the kids mean all to Moskowitz and charter proponents. That’s why she is right to force members of the Legislature to look the children in the face in the wake of Mayor de Blasio’s disastrous decision to cancel plans for two new Success Academies and to shutter a wonderfully successful school, throwing its kids back into the abysmal system so beloved to Dromm.
