Massive failure in the city’s public schools. Parents fleeing in droves. Tens of thousands of kids on charter-school waiting lists begging for a seat.
So how does our City Council’s Education Committee respond? It demands a dead halt to new charters, ensuring that kids trapped in the failing schools have no good public school to turn to.
“We oppose any further expansion” of charters, 10 of the committee’s members wrote last week in a letter to State University of New York trustees, who under the law can grant a charter.
Meanwhile, at the same time these council members were demanding death for new charters, a new study from the Family for Excellent Schools spelled out the horror of the schools they are willing to keep open. At 371 New York City public schools — nearly a quarter of the total — more than 90 percent of the kids cannot read or do math at grade level.
Ninety percent.
The report also shows there is a mad dash among parents trying to help their children escape these failure factories. Over the past decade, enrollment at the failing schools fell 46 percent, even as the city’s overall student population remained roughly constant.
Clearly, parents and pols are on opposite sides. Parents are desperate for good alternatives to these failing schools. The most popular are charters, which at least go out of business when they fail.
Unfortunately, our pols are invested in failure.
And so we have the wretched system that is New York: where the City Council fights to prevent good public schools from opening — and bad public schools from closing.