Opinion

De Blasio has a moral duty to support charter schools

The city Department of Education just beat a temporary retreat from its clumsy plan to desegregate schools on the Upper West Side — but the whole sorry tale exposes DOE’s more fundamental failure to offer good schools in minority neighborhoods.

DOE was originally to present its “final” rezoning on Wednesday, but has now kicked the can down the road. It was facing too much anger over its draft District 3 plan, which would force many kids now attending PS 452 on West 60th Street and PS 199 on West 70th Street to instead go blocks away to PS 191, an underperforming school near a public-housing project.

It was a ham-handed effort at desegregation — yet the resistance wasn’t a question of race, but class: Parents who spend big to live in an area with good public schools won’t let their children get sent to a bad one.

Poor parents flee bad schools, too — many PS 191 families had already gotten their children into other schools. But all parents worry far more about school quality (and safety) than any bean-counting racial ratios.

Yes, diversity is a real value — and there’s nothing wrong with the Park Slope parents working at a school-redistricting that will mean diversity and quality schooling.

Yet the core problem remains the ugly fact that the city’s worst schools are overwhelmingly in minority neighborhoods — and that too many parents in those areas have no good choices for their children.

The obvious answer is choice — or, rather, more good choices for all. Charter schools are delivering hope and change for disadvantaged kids all across the city. If Mayor de Blasio and Chancellor Carmen Fariña would just stop fighting against the charter revolution, every family would have more options.

Going all the way back to Brown v. Board of Education, the point of school desegregation was always to ensure that government gave real educational opportunity to minority kids.

It’s not about the bean-counting — it’s about offering good schools to all. Unless de Blasio and Fariña can find some other way to do that, they have a moral duty to support the charter revolution.