Having clouded the future of charter schools, Mayor de Blasio and Chancellor Carmen Fariña would make a fateful error for thousands of children by curtailing one of the most successful experiments in urban education reform in decades.
De Blasio is among those who treat charters as something other than the public schools that they are. The mayor sees them as both having special advantages over traditional schools and somehow damaging them at the same time. Fariña appears to share the sentiments.
While neither urges abolition of charters, de Blasio has called for charging many rent for the space they occupy in public school buildings. This is akin to demanding payments from public schools to occupy public school buildings. Under these constraints, in the long run, the expansion of charters would come to a halt, if not reverse.
Mayor Bloomberg wisely encouraged charter schools as a means to deliver parents greater educational choice. Top operators opened networks, as did individual sponsors. Some have performed spectacularly, and overall charters delivered better results than traditional schools. Failing charters closed as the law demands.
Opponents have been led by the United Federation of Teachers, which loathes the fact that most charters are not unionized. These critics have gotten a lot of mileage out of portraying charters as usurpers.
In fact, charters are open to all students with admission by lottery, they disproportionately serve low-income and minority students , they get no public money to rent or build facilities, and they are held accountable to authorities.
No matter, the opponents rail that Bloomberg “co-located” charter schools in buildings that also housed traditional schools, the accusation being that the district schools got squeezed out.
Back to the facts: The Department of Education co-locates all sorts of schools in its buildings. There is an uproar only when one of the schools happens to be a charter, no matter how stellar its educational record has been.
De Blasio’s dodge is to charge rent only to those charters that could supposedly afford it, however the mayor would make such a determination. He’s keying on the fact that some of the best charters raise private funding.
Fariña went one further in expressing the us-against-them mentality. When interviewed on WNYC this week, she said: “If there’s money for some things, there’s got to be money for rent as well. I don’t know. I think right now we need space for our own kids. You’re going to have a large pre-K initiative.”
Her added thought was that charters would compete with de Blasio’s universal pre-kindergarten plan. The idea is absurd, because the charter school kids will need desks whether or not they stay in charters. Still more, Gov. Cuomo’s education reform commission has called for allowing charters to serve pre-k children.
As well they should. Parents, especially parents struggling to pay the rent in this exceedingly expensive metropolis, crave more quality alternatives. Proof: There are 50,000 students on New York City charter school wait-lists.
De Blasio and Fariña should learn from charters’ success and seek to replicate it, not resent it or wish it away.
