Opinion

Marie Antoinette Fariña

Think our schools chancellor is concerned about all the children in the city’s public schools? Think again.

Here’s how she explained Mayor ­­­de Blasio’s decision to renege on space promised for three charter schools, a decision that left hundreds of disadvantaged children without a school for next year:

“They’re charter schools,” she says. “They’re on their own. That is part of what they do, and that’s an independent structure, and that is how they function.”

Surely “they’re on their own” ranks right up there with “let them eat cake.”

Especially because Carmen Fariña went on to say “they have other options.” The truth is that for almost all these displaced kids, the only other “option” is an inferior public school.

Nor can they count on Mayor de Blasio, who apparently sees them as pawns in his class war. In a radio interview he put it this way: “A lot of [charters] are funded by very wealthy Wall Street folks and others, and that doesn’t mean the schools don’t do good work — but . . . there’s a very strong private-sector element here.”

Funny, Mayor Bill doesn’t begrudge the private sector that produced the $13 million endowment enjoyed by Brooklyn Tech, the elite public school his son Dante attends. But let the private sector help a black or Latino kid without political connections have access to a good charter school, and somehow generosity becomes a bad thing.

At the heart of the de Blasio-Fariña approach is an antiquated view of public education. This is a view rooted in the top-down, one-size-fits-all model that centralizes decisions, eliminates flexibility and, at least in New York, effectively puts power in the hands of the teachers unions.

Is it too much to ask that a schools chancellor be concerned about the education of all children in this city, no matter what schools their parents choose? Because the message Fariña is sending to the kids displaced by the mayor’s high-handedness couldn’t be any more clear: drop dead.