Who drives the education agenda in this town? Ask most New Yorkers, and the answer will probably be: either the mayor or the schools chancellor.
That may be true when it comes to setting policy. Carrying out policy, however, is another matter. At this critical point in the city’s struggle to reform a failing school system — not to mention the pending election for mayor — the make-or-break decisions will increasingly be made by two largely obscure fiefdoms within the Department of Education.
The first is the Office of Space Planning. The other is the Division of Portfolio Planning.
Whatever our new mayor might say, starting next year these two departments will effectively determine the fate of school reform. For a simple reason: They’re the ones that get — or don’t get — new charters the space they need.
Charters, of course, aren’t the only reform in town. But for the moment they’re the most practical. For kids now languishing in failing public schools, charters provide the most immediate and tangible relief. That’s especially true for black and Latino children, who are just written off by the miserable status quo.
The city’s mothers and fathers understand this. When Mike Bloomberg became mayor, there were only a handful of charter schools. Now there are 159 — with a waiting list of 53,000 children whose parents are desperate to get them in.
Each new charter means more kids and more teachers working outside the suffocating blob. Even where charters aren’t performing up to standard, two things still make them superior to their traditional public school counterparts: the freedom to do what they need to improve, and the certainty that they will lose students and be shut down if they don’t.
In addition, charters are in a good position to expand. Notwithstanding the roadblocks, New York has some advantages that make it tailor-made for charters. For one thing, both the number of available students and the per-pupil funding — about $13,500 — are significant. And this is a city loaded with human talent, making charters easier to staff.
So why the huge wait list? There are many reasons, but perhaps the greatest constraint is space. Unlike traditional public schools, charters get no money for facilities. So they have to rely on the city to find them their classrooms.
That’s what makes those two DOE departments so critical. The Office of Space Planning is akin to a surveying team that finds unused or underutilized buildings — now estimated at 200,000 seats. Its head is Thomas Taratko, an official who almost never makes the news.
The Department of Portfolio, by contrast, assigns the space. If you want to be loved, this is not the office you want to lead. Among his many unpleasant duties, department chief Marc Sternberg has to sit through the community meetings where the usual suspects come out to call you a racist and rant about your plans to co-locate some charter in a traditional public school that feels threatened. (Isn’t it telling that it’s never the charter that feels threatened by the comparison?)
A Bloomberg successor serious about school reform might start by consolidating these offices. Right now, the split responsibilities makes an intimidating process even more slow and frustrating. The larger point is kids and parents won’t get reform until the bureaucracy that dictates space is tamed and can deliver in a timely and efficient manner.
The enemies of reform understand this more keenly than some of the advocates of reform. The last thing these people want is a growing constituency of ordinary moms and dads demanding charters from politicians the unions now have in the bag.
Charter enemies also recognize that their best strategy isn’t the full frontal assault. It’s to choke off charters where they are most vulnerable: when they are looking for space. That’s why we now have a phony debate over charters and co-location — when the overwhelming number of co-locations put two regular public schools in the same building.
Here’s another way to think about it. In the weeks between now and November, our candidates for mayor will each be asked many things about education: about their plans for new contracts with the unions, about the Common Core standards, about teacher evaluations and so on.
All worthy questions. But the one that will tell us what we need to know about a candidate’s commitment to school reform is this one: Who will you appoint to head the offices that control space for new charters?