Opinion

Another reason charter schools do better: They get kids vastly more class time

New York City’s regular public schools start a new year today — two weeks behind the many charter public schools that opened last month.

Charters often have longer school days as well as longer years. It can total 20 percent in added instructional time, or more.

Yet Mayor de Blasio still tries to explain away charters’ superior results by suggesting they’re just overly focused on test prep.

Then again, his team can’t even get the facts straight on the schools they control.

Most recently, The Post caught massive misreporting of chronic absenteeism at the Renewal schools — the several dozen failure factories that de Blasio is trying to fix, rather than just closing them so a new school can open in the same spot.

Last year, schools Chancellor Carmen Fariña told state lawmakers that chronic Renewal truancy dropped from 25.3 percent in 2013-2014 to 23.9 percent the next school year.

In fact, it was 47.2 percent the first year, and 43.4 percent in 2014-5 — a far less impressive gain, as is the 39.2 percent rate for 2015-6.

As Fariña herself notes, “Two days of missed school [equals] a whole week of lost knowledge.” Apply that to the corrected statistics, and it’s clear that many Renewal kids are essentially losing the whole school year.
And even kids with perfect attendance records suffer — because dealing with chronic truants adds lots of challenges for teachers.

Which is one more reason why most charters move heaven and earth to combat truancy — and wind up with near-perfect attendance rates.

Time in the classroom is the fundamental building block of education — and all the added time in class is a prime reason why charters massively outperform regular public schools in the same neighborhoods.

And why 19 of the top 50 K-8 schools in the state are New York City charters.

That success is why the city’s charter sector keeps growing — to over 10 percent of the public-school population this year, with more than 106,000 pupils.

Even that growth’s not enough: City families have signed up another 45,000 kids for charters — but the schools just don’t have enough seats.

Imagine how much better off the city’s schoolchildren would be if de Blasio and Fariña stopped trying to stifle the charter-school movement — and instead started learning from it.