This year’s Path to Possible March marks something remarkable: Truly equal educational opportunity is now in reach.
Thousands of charter students, parents, teachers and prominent elected officials will march Wednesday. Heading the parade are such prominent voices for justice as Rep. Hakeem Jeffries and actor/activist Common.
It really is a civil-rights issue. The regular public-school system offers little hope in lower-income neighborhoods. Even kids who want to learn get stuck in failure factories.
But charters deliver. For example, one study looked at three years of test scores in the city’s eight worst-performing school districts: The 38,000 kids attending charters in those neighborhoods saw three times the gains in math and English proficiency as the kids stuck in regular public schools.
Charter schools now teach 10 percent of New York City public-school kids — more than 100,000 children. And the movement is pushing to double those numbers: progress that could well eliminate the racial “achievement gap” — ending a core injustice of public education in this town.
This year’s march is a call for ensuring that students in every community have access to high-quality public schools — by letting charters expand to meet the demand.
Team de Blasio remains hostile, resisting charter requests to expand to space in underused district schools, where 150,000 seats sit empty. Yet the mayor could start really doing something about the “two New Yorks” by OKing the requests of 25 or so charters looking to open or expand next fall in the city’s most education-needy districts.
The moment is now — and the only thing missing is the will to achieve the possible.