The mayor continues his war on charters

After four years waging a campaign against public charter schools, last June, Mayor de Blasio, as he sought renewal of mayoral control, promised collaboration and a new willingness to work with the sector, to treat charters as the public schools they are — publicly created, publicly regulated, publicly funded.

But it is now obvious that this was just rhetoric, and that instead, the mayor is waging a war of attrition.

Last week, the city falsely announced — without Success Academy’s input or community engagement — that it had resolved Success’ requests for space to accommodate hundreds of our rising middle schoolers. But this woefully inadequate proposal leaves hundreds of graduating elementary students educationally homeless and discriminates against the highestachieving public charter students not just in the city and state, but in the nation.

That is why Success Academy is rejecting the city’s proposal.

The proposal is a partial solution, which for us is no solution at all. The Education Department offered space at two locations; six of our communities need middle schools.

And the locations offered in East Flatbush and the central Bronx are miles away from rising middle schoolers who currently attend Success elementary schools in Rosedale, Queens; Cobble Hill and Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and Washington Heights. We will not accept a proposal that benefits some of our scholars while leaving others educationally homeless.

Nor can we accept a proposal that kicks the can down the road on a long-term space crisis that could be solved today.

The Education Department’s proposal is temporary, for one year only, but our scholars need permanent academic homes. The 734 rising Success fifth-graders who need space next year will still need space the following year, when they begin sixth grade, but they’ll also be joined by a new class of fifth-graders. This pattern will continue as more of our scholars age into middle school. Within the next four years, we expect our overall middle school enrollment to top 8,000.

Once this level of growth is taken into consideration, the inadequacy of the Education Department’s 1,000-seat proposal becomes even clearer. There’s no excuse for the department’s failure to identify facilities that would work for them; there are 112 chronically underutilized school buildings citywide, with 65,000 empty seats.

Success Academy has even provided the department with a list of 10 buildings with anywhere from 450 to 1,000 empty seats each, all within reasonable commuting distance of our elementary schools.

The Education Department is required by law to provide charter children with “adequate, comparable and reasonable” space to learn. The city’s proposal clearly fails to meet that standard.

This outcome is especially disappointing given how hard our families have fought for their children’s right to viable space. It is not enough that our students routinely outperform their more affluent peers in Scarsdale and Chappaqua, and that our schools are the highest-performing option for the city’s highest-need families.

To try and get access to the space they need from the de Blasio administration, families must turn out for local town halls, send petitions to the chancellor, and rally on the steps of City Hall.

And every time the outcome is the same: The city drags out the process for months, then gives us the bare minimum.

But the proposal that the city unveiled last week is the most egregious example of this phenomenon yet. Identifying two middle school spaces is woefully inadequate when Success middle school enrollment is about to surge, and it assures that the Education Department-created middle school space crisis will grow even worse in the years to come.

Our network of 46 schools is now the size of the seventh-largest school district in New York State; it is also the highest performing.

But instead of encouraging the growth of Success Academy’s objectively outstanding schools and planning for our scholars who will soon need middle school seats, the Education Department has gone out of its way to hold us back.

Fortunately, the de Blasio administration can still make this right. The city can provide an alternative plan that addresses all six of our requests, allowing Success Academy families to continue sending their children to the public charter schools they love.

We know the space that our scholars need is out there. It’s up to the city to show that it recognizes the rights of public charter families and genuinely cares about their children’s futures.