The state’s most powerful man has now come to the rescue of New York City students who are about to have their good public schools taken away from them.
The man is Andrew Cuomo, and he did so at a rally in Albany attended by 11,000 parents, kids and teachers from New York’s charter schools. “I feel fired up,” Gov. Cuomo told the cheering crowd. “We are going to save charter schools.”
It was the best news these children and their parents — mostly black and Latino — could have heard. For several hundred have been left in limbo by Mayor de Blasio’s mean-spirited decision to nix plans for three new charter locations.
In sharp contrast, the governor said he’s “committed to ensuring charter schools have the financial capacity, physical space and the government’s support to thrive and grow.” If that is to have any real meaning, it will require a permanent fix that addresses the charters’ biggest impediment: no public funds for their buildings.
That’s forced them to share space with traditional public schools in the city. Which leaves them highly vulnerable to politicians in bed with the teachers unions.
Cuomo saluted one charter in particular: Success Academy in the South Bronx, part of the network de Blasio targeted for closures. The message to the mayor was unmistakable.
As for the kids who trekked to Albany to make their case, what a lesson they received in the workings of democracy. And they didn’t even miss out on regular instruction: This page’s Robert George rode up with them and observed the kids doing their math drills and taking up subjects such as Newton’s Third Law of Motion.
Cuomo hailed the presence of these kids at the rally as “a tremendous step in the right direction.” So was his. The next step must be a law to put the fate of charters into the hands of moms and dads weighing the results they deliver — not some pol acting on an arbitrary whim.