Kudos to state Senate Majority Leader John Flanagan for standing up for every child’s right to a first-class education.
Flanagan says he won’t extend mayoral control of the city’s regular public schools unless the city’s charter public schools get a fair shake — including the chance to keep growing.
It’s an utterly fair demand: Mayor de Blasio has been using his power to squelch the alternative schools — denying them space, bad-mouthing them, lobbying the Legislature to refuse them fair funding, etc.
As Flanagan noted this week, de Blasio has even flouted state law by refusing to let charters use vacant city-controlled space. The State Education Department has overruled the mayor on the issue multiple times.
High-quality charters expand opportunities for kids in communities where regular public schools just aren’t succeeding. And de Blasio’s “Renewal” program to fix such failed schools is itself a failure.
Here in the city, 216 charters across the five boroughs now serve 106,000 students — 10 percent of the public-school population. The waitlist for charter seats is up to at least 44,400 kids.
Yet just a few dozen new charters can open in the city under current law — nowhere near enough to meet that demand.
Why condemn thousands of children to bad schools that will never prepare them for college? (And so, incidentally, leave them unable to make use of Gov. Cuomo’s new Excelsior Scholarships?)
Flanagan will have to face down Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie, who insists the charter cap and mayoral control not be linked. Of course, he wants the cap to stay.
We detest the obvious alternative to mayoral control — the return of the old Board of Education, which left parents with no one they could hold to account for failing schools.
But state lawmakers also have a duty to oversee public education, and they can’t ignore the fact that de Blasio is abusing his control to crush the best hope for countless city children.
Flanagan should stick to his guns — and every leader with a conscience, from Gov. Cuomo on down, should back him.