Opinion

Times hit piece on charters misses the real story on schools

We’re not sure when The New York Times decided to outsource its reporting on the city schools to the United Federation of Teachers, but the Gray Lady’s regurgitation of UFT propaganda is now routine. The latest: a story that went online Friday morning on how charter schools enroll fewer homeless kids than the regular public schools.

The great irony here is that the UFT routinely attacks charters for sins that actually are common in the larger city system — including the one implied in this report.

The Times story opens with an anecdote about two schools that share a building on East 111th Street: Success Academy Harlem 3, a charter, and Mosaic Preparatory Academy, a regular “district” school. Mosaic’s student body is 42 percent homeless; the Success school, 10 percent.

But here’s the thing: Citywide, just under 10 percent of city schoolchildren are in temporary housing. Which means the Success school had enrolled its “fair share” of such kids — it’s Mosaic where something fishy seems to be going on.

Yet the Times didn’t bother to do an exposé about the massive inequalities among district schools when it comes to serving homeless children. Instead, it went after the charter sector.

We’ve written before about the separate-and-unequal rules for the regular city schools: If you can find a way to afford to live in the right neighborhood (and that can mean a middle-class family squeezing four people into a one-bedroom unit), you’ve got a good chance of decent public schooling for your kids.

But if you can’t afford it, you run a strong risk of your children attending a “failure factory” — full of hard-to-teach kids and with too many substandard teachers and staff whom the system has eased out of schools where parents’ complaints can’t be ignored.

Charters, in fact, make real efforts to recruit and retain homeless children — and often do a remarkable job of teaching them.

At Success schools in The Bronx and Bed-Stuy, for example, 92 percent of homeless students passed the state math exam this year, and 72 percent scored at the advanced level. This compares to 36 percent of all city students who passed the test and just 17 percent who managed an “advanced” result. And the numbers are similar when it comes to English exams.

If the Times wants to shine a light on a school system that fails to serve homeless children, it should ask the city Department of Education why none of the regular public schools can match those results.