Three mayoral wannabes are now openly promising to perpetuate failure in the schools. That’s right: Ex-Comptroller Bill Thompson, Public Advocate Bill de Blasio and current Comptroller John Liu are vowing, if elected, not to shut failing schools.
They’re also pledging to make it harder for good schools — i.e., charters — to open.
No joke: Shutting schools is “an admission of failure,” Thompson says, vowing to ban the practice. Better, we guess, for folks to just hide their eyes, admit nothing and keep depriving kids of a decent education.
Why would they want that? To please teachers union boss Mike Mulgrew, whose support they covet and who stood with them as they made their vows Wednesday. (All that was missing were puppet strings.)
The union, you see, seeks to protect teachers — even those who can’t teach — from being reassigned when schools close (it’s near impossible to fire them). To Mulgrew’s dismay, the city has been eager to shut lousy schools. So he got the three to promise, if elected, to end the practice.
Anywhere else, candidates who so publicly agreed to uphold failure would be drummed out of the race. In New York, they are no doubt preparing bumper stickers: “Vote for me — I’ll keep failing schools open.”
It gets worse. Lacking space, most charters (public schools with primarily non-union staffs) must share quarters with traditional public schools. But the union despises charters, which often outperform and shame their union counterparts. So the three also vowed to ban “co-locations” — and effectively stop any new charter.
Space-sharing, argues Liu, creates “friction.” For once, he’s right: Charters are clean, bright, successful; union schools are nightmares. Put them side by side for all to see, and of course there’ll be “friction.”
Frankly, New York could use more of that.
Indeed, we’re waiting for the candidate who’ll vow not to banco-location but require it — so taxpayers can see for themselves the difference between schools accountable to unions and schools accountable to parents.