Tough-to-swallow truths

In the name of equal treatment, Mayor de Blasio and Schools Chancellor Carmen Fariña are bucking the old saw about there being no such thing as a free lunch. This school year, for the first time, all 1.1 million New York City public schoolchildren can get fed without paying a penny. And it’ll be gratis to city taxpayers, says Hizzoner, thanks to a new state matching system that unlocks cash from the feds footing the bill for entire districts, provided they can document that a critical mass of their kids are poor enough to qualify. (We’ve got more than enough.) If only, on this first day of school, that same passion for fairness echoed not just in cafeterias but in classrooms around New York.

Via a far more aggressive commitment to integrating schools that remain among the nation’s most divided by race and class — which is a drag on student achievement. So far Fariña, under pressure, has agreed to piecemeal fixes, but far too little creative mixing of student populations.

There are hints of movement here. Cutting the ribbon last month on a new Upper West Side elementary school that will enable a hard-fought redrawing of district lines across formerly exclusive enclaves, Fariña signaled that “at least three or four other districts” would get similar treatment.

Via a new attitude toward charter schools, like those in the city’s Success Academy network, which are educating overwhelmingly black and Latino students so well, they outperform their white suburban peers. Charters deserve space in public school buildings wherever feasible — not the runaround they still get far too often.

And via policies with less patience for turning around schools that consign disadvantaged kids to lousy educations. Current turnaround efforts are scattershot, halting and expensive.

Some things are working in the schools. Test scores are rising slowly overall, as are graduation rates. But this year, it’ll be far easier to find equity in evidence on the lunch line than on English and math tests. There’s a painful lesson there.