Tonight thousands of New Yorkers will try their luck at the $600 million Powerball jackpot. Most won’t win a dime, but it’ll be OK. Life will go on as normal tomorrow.
Not so for the New Yorkers who lost out on a more vital lottery: the 50,000 kids whose dreams of attending a charter school have been crushed.
Charter-school organizers this week said 69,000 kids applied for seats in the city’s 183 charters for the coming year. But there isn’t enough space, so most are stuck on wait lists where dreams go to die. Fifty thousand kids were turned away.
For most of us, that’s just a number. But for families struggling for an escape from troubled public schools, the 50,000 are their sons and daughters. And the charters were their hope for a better education and a better life.
It’s no surprise the demand for charters is so high. They’re among the city’s few successes in an often squalid school system. Because they’re not bound by traditional rules of traditional schools, their days are longer, their discipline is tighter and their results sometimes seem miraculous.
For a sense of how desperately many parents want in, look at the Bronx Charter School for Better Learning.
Better Learning had only 50 open spots but received 1,500 applications. Even Harvard accepts a higher percentage of its applicants. And the parents of these Bronx boys and girls aren’t asking for the nation’s top university. They just want to send them to a kindergarten with a good environment.
Meanwhile, New York politicians want to make it even harder to open new charters. The leading Democratic candidates for mayor all pledged last week to use their power to keep the tight cap on the number of charter schools in the city.
The 50,000 turned away by charters indicates how desperate New York families are for better options for their children. While the Democratic candidates for mayor make clear: You’re not going to get them from us.