Opinion

Mike Mulgrew meets Jim Crow

Every time this city lets a charter school share building space with a traditional public school, the United Federation of Teachers screams like a banshee.

Well, maybe not every time.

UFT boss Mike Mulgrew is on record saying that co-locating charters and district schools “perpetuate[s] injustice” and turns kids into “second-class citizens.” Which is more or less the same argument that civil-rights activists advanced when they successfully challenged Jim Crow claims of “separate but equal.”

That would explain why the UFT has been largely silent about its own co-location plans. The union seeks to move some grades from its Brooklyn-based charter into a space already occupied by a traditional junior high.

Its stated purpose is to improve the charter’s performance by putting grades K-8 all under one roof, thus making the school easier to manage. The UFT thought — rightly, it turned out — that this would help persuade state officials to keep the school open.

Clearly the need for improvement is there: Fewer than 10 percent of eighth-graders at the UFT charter school can read at grade level.

Of course, that wasn’t what the union promised would happen when it opened its charter back in 2005. It had hoped “to prove that a charter school with a unionized teaching force could not only succeed but thrive.” Instead, the UFT created one of the city’s worst-performing schools.

If Mulgrew believes his own rhetoric, shouldn’t the UFT be responding to the challenges of its low-performing charters by finding a building separate from regular public schools?

Remember, according to Mulgrew, co-locating isn’t about finding school space; it’s about perpetuating injustice.

In a column he wrote in 2011, he put it this way: “Six decades after . . . Brown v. Board of Education, it is outrageous that thousands of New York City children get a graphic lesson in inequality every day when they walk through the doors of their school.”

Brown v. Board, of course, was the 1954 Supreme Court case that ended school segregation. So what’s the message here?

That having charters and traditional public schools in the same building is evil when Mayor Mike does it — but just peachy when UFT Mike follows suit?