Mayor de Blasio last week rightly reveled in the success of the NYPD on his watch, as 2016 brought new record lows in crime. Too bad he can’t make the same brag about the achievements of the city schools.
Let’s be clear here: The biggest credit for New York being the safest large city in America still goes to Mayor Rudy Giuliani and his first police commissioner, Bill Bratton (and then to their successors) — for proving that smart policing could bring crime under control.
For decades, New Yorkers were told that crime was something they just had to live with. Starting in 1994, the NYPD proved otherwise. After 20 years of record gains in public safety, the public knew that policing could work.
Which is why de Blasio took office knowing he had to keep it up — or he’d have no hope of winning re-election.
Contrast that with Chicago, which has never seen a similar policing revolution — so Windy City voters don’t revolt, although, even in a good year, their homicide rate is at least three times New York’s. (In a bad year like 2016, it’s six times the NYC rate.)
And never mind that Chicago’s crime has a huge “disparate racial impact” — meaning that the white parts of town remain safe, even as blood runs in the streets of minority neighborhoods.
Which brings us back to New York’s public schools, whose failure has the same disparate impact. That is: This city’s schools fail the underprivileged in the same way that the Chicago PD does, and for a similar reason: Because no one has yet proved to the voters that it doesn’t have to be this way.
Which is why charter schools are a threat to the vested interests of the school system: because they’re starting to provide that proof.
Though the charter sector now teaches just a tenth of New York’s schoolchildren, it’s showing that all students can reach the highest achievement levels — regardless of ZIP code. Poor, minority kids can achieve the same results as the best schools in the entire state.
The city Independent Budget Office found that NYC charter schools outperform New York state public schools by 30.1 percentage points in math, and 13.1 points in reading.
Charter students in Brownsville and Bed-Stuy now score higher than the city’s average in reading and math — and those charter kids are more than twice as likely as kids in regular schools in the same areas to score at the highest achievement levels. Charters in Harlem and the South Bronx also massively outperform the regular public schools in those ’hoods.
All this, when lotteries for entry guarantee that the charters can’t “cream off” the best students: The children start off equal; it’s the schools that make the big difference.
We’re not remotely saying that policing and teaching are the same — except that each is a primary job of local government, which can be done better or worse.
And that it’s up to the voting public to demand “better” — once it realizes that “better” is entirely possible.