On Monday, Mayor de Blasio took his war on charter schools to Albany, where he bashed Gov. Cuomo’s push to equalize funding for these public schools and to lift the cap on charters in the city. When he didn’t dodge the truth, he denied it.
On the issue of equal funding, de Blasio testified that the “state is [abruptly] proposing to increase and shift charter-school costs it has been paying previously,” which he claimed will cost city schools $198 million.
It’s the tired old claim that charter kids “drain resources” from public schools — which ignores the fact that charters are public schools, albeit ones run outside the traditional system.
And public-education outlays are supposed to be for the kids — not for the educrats who control them in the regular system. Funding should always follow the student.
As for de Blasio’s nonsense about an “abrupt” change: Sorry, the shift has been scheduled for four years.
Anyway, it’s the charters that have long been shortchanged — for example, denied the state funding hikes that regular schools have gotten these last five years.
Despite the ever-wider funding gap, charter kids continue to largely outperform their traditional-school peers on state exams.
Cuomo is doing the right thing by pushing to treat all public schools, charter and traditional, equally.
As for the mayor’s money worries: He’d save a lot if he’d quit denying public space to charters. State law obliges the city to cover the rent in such cases, so de Blasio’s spending millions needlessly, just to show spite.
Ironically, most requests for new space come from the high-quality charters that provide the only hope for quality schooling in the city’s toughest neighborhoods.
Fair funding, plus an end to the cap and other barriers to charter growth (like the mayor’s new-space freezeout) would let charters do even better — and give more families the chance to escape the city’s worst “failure factory” schools.
Of course, that would require the mayor to admit that the point of state education funding is to help the kids — not to bolster his dominion.