Thousands of parents and children are set to rally Wednesday in Brooklyn to urge New York City to help more independently run, publicly funded charter schools take root and have every chance to succeed.
Hear their voices, like the voice of this Queens parent. Join their cause. The nation’s largest school system — where charter students account for 95,000 of the city’s more than 1 million public-school kids — desperately needs more injections of innovation.
BILL DE BLASIO RIPPED FOR LACK OF SPACE FOR CHARTER SCHOOLS
The protest will take aim at a city government that has, in the shift from Mayor Bloomberg to Mayor de Blasio, gone from helping charters find and occupy space to increasingly telling them they’re on their own.
Case in point: Despite promising the city’s largest and highest-performing charter network, Success Academy schools, that it would present plans for a batch of new site-sharing agreements by this week — so they can be approved by the end of November — City Hall has yet to do so.
The de Blasio administration says it will make good on its pledge to find the schools space. But for now, the broken promise keeps families in limbo.
DE BLASIO ISN’T HELPING WORST SCHOOLS, CRITICS SAY
That’s especially egregious when the network has a proven record of helping kids learn, as the Success Academy schools unquestionably do.
The mayor’s foot-dragging is a reminder of the hostility he expressed toward Success Academy founder Eva Moskowitz during his election campaign and at the start of his term. Gov. Cuomo and the Legislature responded with a law that required de Blasio to co-locate charters in school buildings or give them funding to rent space.
Since then, in 44 of 45 cases in which de Blasio turned down charter school applications for space in public buildings, the state found the school eligible for taxpayer-funded private rent. The number is substantially inflated by the inclusion of some schools that were required by law to ask for space while they actually planned to operate in private facilities.
Still, the figure is easily read as a sign of continued charter opposition and will surely play against de Blasio in a fight to renew mayoral control of the schools in Albany next year.
He and Chancellor Carmen Fariña compound the crime by failing to explain their rationales for denying space to charters and putting taxpayers on the hook for millions of dollars in rent.
On average, charter schools have outpaced district schools on math tests and lagged them in English. But some are doing extraordinary jobs while being denied the support they deserve, even as 43,000 kids are stuck on waitlists.
The mayor and chancellor must open the doors far wider, especially to the best schools .
