Even before Mayor de Blasio took office Wednesday, he was being yanked to his left on a key issue: charter schools. And he had a wise response: Not so fast.
The pressure came, ironically, from the very City Council member he’s backing for speaker, Melissa Mark-Viverito, and from newly installed Public Advocate Letitia James, among others. The two joined a lawsuit filed last month to stop the city from placing schools alongside other schools in some 40 buildings where extra space exists.
It’s part of an effort to strangle charter schools, which depend on “co-locations” because they lack space of their own. While de Blasio has opposed co-locations, the plaintiffs are suing to ensure the new mayor “keeps his campaign promise.”
Wisely, de Blasio prefers to keep his options open: “We have to assess the state of each [school],” he says. “Is it more productive or counterproductive” to scuttle the plan in each case? He says he hasn’t yet come up with a “hard and fast answer.”
Fact is, schools have shared space for decades. But the teachers union, threatened by charters that outperform traditional, union-run schools, thinks it can squash the competition by depriving it of real estate.
We’ve backed charters because they offer hope to students and parents stuck in failing public schools. But even if de Blasio doesn’t agree, it still makes sense for him to look at each school’s record before letting a court starve them to death by denying them space.
There’s a way for him to do that and show the council who’ll set the agenda: Denounce the suit and call for it to be withdrawn. Can these pols really argue they don’t trust a progressive mayor to make these decisions?