New York City’s innovative, high-performing charter schools are bracing for impact as Chancellor Carmen Fariña, due to meet with school leaders Saturday, gets set to determine their fate under Mayor de Blasio.
The mayor’s well-documented bias against the independently run public schools, along with Fariña’s ill-informed beliefs about the charters’ track record, suggest that they are about to curtail the charter movement to the harm of potentially thousands of students.
Both officials approach charters as if they are somehow detrimental to traditional public schools, never mind that collectively their students learn more than peers in neighborhood schools, with some matching the achievement levels in top suburban districts.
Rather than applaud charters for providing greater educational opportunity to 70,000 kids — who come overwhelmingly from poor and minority neighborhoods — de Blasio has stripped them of building funds, imposed a moratorium on letting them share space in school buildings and called for requiring some of them to pay rent.
Each of those actions will threaten the schools’ viability. Worse, charter leaders fear that Fariña is about to shred building-sharing plans approved under the Bloomberg administration that would enable 28 charters to open or expand this September, and another four to do so next year. Up to 5,600 children could lose their seats.
The schools are the product of years of planning and survived a lengthy public approval gauntlet. Official impact statements have been filed. Hearings have been held. Children have applied. Teachers and principals have been hired.
Candidate de Blasio blasted this exhaustive process as “a cynical effort to lock communities into permanent changes while ignoring community voices.”
Now with everything ready to go, de Blasio appears poised to cruelly pull the plug — on exactly how many schools is anybody’s guess.
That would be a tragic affront to parents who sought better educations for their kids, and it must not happen.
Should de Blasio and Fariña carry out even a fraction of the total bloodletting possible, they will demonstrate that they can destroy excellent educational programs without ever showing that they can build equally good opportunities for the city.
What will de Blasio and Fariña offer the children? Only a return to schools that their parents have rightly judged to be inadequate.
Charter schools are publicly funded, independently run schools that are open to all comers, with seats filled by random lottery. In most cases, their teachers aren’t unionized.
Though charter performance runs the gamut, many schools are delivering their kids an absolutely world-class education.
Last year, at seven schools run by Success Academies, 58% of students passed the tough new tests in reading — a rate more than double that for public schools as a whole. In math, 82% of Success kids passed — a whopping 52 percentage points higher than the citywide rate.
And despite rampant myths about charters churning through their kids at a rapid clip, a study released this year by the Independent Budget Office showed that students stay at charters at a significantly higher rate than they do at nearby district schools.
Those are the facts. Not that they are of importance to Fariña, who said this week: “I don’t feel you should take in kids by lottery and then make sure they leave within the next two years. Some have a tremendously high rate of kids they send out.”
Accountability is one of the great virtues of the charter movement. A school that lets kids down can be shuttered. If Fariña has evidence that any school is dumping children in order to appear successful, she should get on the individual case, not trump up an excuse for a wholesale, ideologically driven winnowing.
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