Opinion

Beating the Dromm

At Tuesday’s City Council hearing, Education Committee Chairman Daniel Dromm put on a bright orange T-shirt. He did so to underscore his complaint that Coney Island Prep charter students are being singled out for “stigma and humiliation” because they have to wear such shirts and sit apart from classmates when they break the rules.

What Dromm, a teachers union ally, didn’t mention is that though Coney Island Prep has a ways to go, it reports its students “consistently outperform their peers across New York City.” The school adds that its eighth-graders “outperformed every other eighth-grade class in Coney Island.”

Tuesday’s hearings were supposed to be about holding charters accountable. But the kangaroo court citizens saw suggests the real motive: an effort to stigmatize the very public schools that show children written off elsewhere as unteachable can learn in the right classroom.

As for accountability, charters have more of it than any other public school. That’s because instead of being beholden to the teachers union or a city bureaucracy, charters are accountable to moms and dads. No one is forced to go to a charter, and if kids don’t achieve, their parents can yank them out. A waitlist 50,000 long to get in speaks to what these parents have concluded vis-à-vis the traditional district schools.

So here’s our answer: Until our City Council starts asking hard questions about a public school system in which 85 percent of its African-American and Latino children are failing their state proficiency tests, every council member should have to wear an orange T-shirt and sit in the back of the room in silence.