Bill de Blasio won election as mayor with 74% of the vote — an impressive achievement by any measure.
But we suspect that the roughly one-quarter of New Yorkers who didn’t back him include some of the city’s most vulnerable people: moms and dads with kids in charter schools.
These people fear de Blasio’s campaign promise of a moratorium on new charter-school co-locations. With good reason. According to Families for Excellent Schools, a charter-advocacy group, fully 15,817 city schoolchildren could lose access to a charter school if the moratorium goes through.
That includes 9,307 children already attending 23 different charter schools that are looking to add higher grade levels, and another 6,510 who are to attend 14 charters set to open in September 2014.
In other words, these are children struggling to get a decent education in a city whose traditional public schools are simply not getting the job done. That also makes them the kind of people de Blasio’s Tale of Two Cities implied he would be fighting for. Unfortunately, when it came time to choose, de Blasio came down squarely on the side of the rich and powerful teachers unions.
These unions hate charters because charters prove every day that poor, black and ÂLatino children can learn if they are in a good school.
In his defense, de Blasio said charters represent only 5% of the city’s school Âpopulation. He’s right about that, but it’s only because of anti-charter limits like the ones he’s proposing. The more accurate measure of charters vs. traditional public schools is the waiting list of nearly 50,000 children desperate to get into a charter.
We’ll see if de Blasio follows through on his anti-charter promises. Yes, it’s certainly in his short-term interests to please the unions that backed him. But in the long term, perhaps the greatest test of his promise to bridge the divide between the haves and have-nots in New York will be whether families that are neither rich nor well-connected will have the same educational opportunities that, say, Dante de Blasio has enjoyed at a public school with a $13 million endowment.
Killing off charters will only make the gap between these two worlds wider. Charters are not perfect but they are accountable. And that’s exactly why de Blasio’s friends in the teachers unions are so determined to stop them from growing.