Charter schools that got shortchanged when Albany provided extra aid to the system found a booster Monday in House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, who visited a Bronx charter to call for a level playing field.
The Bronx Charter School of Excellence posts test scores far above those of other schools in its district and has a long waiting list of would-be students.
But it is not eligible for additional funding from the state to pay for its lease in a private building.
New charter schools are eligible for additional state funding if the city can’t find space for them in public buildings and they have to go into the private market.
“Schools like this located in private locations where they have to pay for the lease or purchase of this site is something we have to address,” Cantor (R-Va.) said.
Charter operators caught in the bind are calling on Albany to amend the law to include them.
“If you’re a school in private space, you are getting no help in your building, and your per-pupil funding will be diminished over time,” Northeast Charter Schools Network director Bill Phillips said.
Cantor touted his own federal bill that expands grants for charter-school facilities, and said he hoped Congress, Mayor de Blasio and Gov. Cuomo would work together to improve the system.
The state budget doesn’t provide facility aid for 128 charters — about 40 percent of all in the city — which serve 30,850 students.
Meanwhile, the high-profile leader of the city’s largest charter network said she might run for mayor someday.
“I thought I was leaving elected office and politics in order to focus on schooling, but as you know, schooling turns out to be even more political than politics,” Success Academy CEO Eva Moskowitz — a former council member — told radio host John Gambling.
Moskowitz clashed with de Blasio earlier this year when he scuttled her network’s plans to place three of her schools into public-school buildings.
She and the mayor have toned things down after the city found space in three Catholic school buildings for her displaced classes.
But Moskowitz still took a swipe at “progressives” who resist reform.
“We don’t want ZIP code to determine destiny. That’s why we open world-class schools in the most disadvantaged neighborhoods, and yet the progressivism somehow does not apply to charter schools, even though that is intellectually dishonest, even though it should,” she said.