‘Community’ Failure Mills

Parents who hope Mayor de Blasio will soon fix the city’s failing schools can keep right on hoping — because it’s looking increasingly unlikely he ever will. That’s the takeaway from a growing consensus of skeptics of “community schools” as a way to help turn around chronic student-failure factories.

The idea is to provide a wide host of social services at schools in highly disadvantaged neighborhoods. Which may be worth doing — but doesn’t actually improve schooling.

As Politico reported Thursday, there’s “widespread agreement,” even among advocates of the concept, that community schools just aren’t “adequate” for boosting academic outcomes.

And focusing on social services could “come at the expense of other urgently needed improvements.”

“Community schools only address things outside of teaching and learning,” notes Drema Brown of the Children’s Aid Society, which helps districts across America set up and run such schools. Cincinnati hosts a large community-school program, but has yet to see dramatic academic gains after a decade.

Yet the concept has been at the heart of de Blasio and Chancellor Carmen Fariña’s “vision” for education since Day 1. And Gov. Cuomo jumped aboard the bandwagon in January, pledging $100 million “to transform every failing school in New York” into a community school.

The gov even vowed this would “stop the cycle of incarceration.” Please.

Again, the approach may improve delivery of social services — but it’s no more likely to cut crime than to improve education.

And it’s no good reason to keep a failing school open. Yet de Blasio and Fariña are using it as an excuse to do just that. And that’s what the teachers union wants: That way, none of its members — no matter how incompetent — need fear for their jobs.

Meanwhile, City Hall continues to snub a better approach: charter schools. The union hates charters — which keep doing a far better job educating kids than the regular, union-dominated public schools.