Give Bill de Blasio credit for getting right a key principle of education reform.
Or at least half right.
The mayor announced plans last week to make it easier for children with special needs to attend private schools at public expense. That’s in accord with state practice, under which parents can request that the city pay this tuition if the public schools aren’t meeting their child’s needs.
Under Mayor Bloomberg, this was the cause for recurrent litigation, because he guarded taxpayer dollars and was leery of parents cheating the system.
Bloomberg’s concern is legitimate: The provision opens the door to those who game the system to get an expensive private education at public expense. But it isn’t hard to believe that our public schools are not good at giving kids with true special needs the care and attention they need to learn.
But here’s our question: Why limit this to kids with special needs? Why not fix an amount — less than the public schools spend for each child — and give it to parents to pick what school best meets their children’s needs?
Clearly we’ve got a problem. Barely a quarter of our public school students from third through eighth grades pass their state exams in English. For math, fewer than a third pass.
High-school performance is equally dismal. The four-year graduation rate is 61.3 percent, meaning more than a third never see a diploma. For those who do graduate, only one in four is college- or job-ready.
Whatever else this is, it’s not a system that meets the needs of students.
In the 21st century, public education needs to move from a system where the government’s sole concern is about running its own schools to a system where the government gives every child more options by encouraging more good schools, wherever they come from.
On special ed, the mayor gets it that this is a progressive approach. We’d just like to see — in the name of equality — the same principle extended to every other kid.