Heastie vs. Kids

Messy as this year’s state budget talks have been, nothing is uglier than Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie’s disgraceful effort to try to starve charter schools. Time and again, Heastie reportedly blew up tentative deals with his insistence that per-pupil charter funding for these public schools remain frozen at 2009 levels.

To preserve this unfairly low funding for these students — about a tenth of the city’s public-school population — Heastie apparently was even willing to sacrifice Raise the Age, supposedly the top priority of Assembly Democrats.

Raise the Age aims to keep 16- and 17-yearolds out of adult criminal courts. But Heastie seemed willing to abandon those teens . . . in order to slap other children, the ones who attend charters.

By all accounts, he was pushed to this obscene extreme by New York’s teachers unions — an adult special interest.

Back in 2009, the unions got the Legisla- ture to freeze charters’ funding: Ever since, state aid has kept rising for regular (unionfriendly) public schools, while charters have seen only token increases.

By law, the freeze was to end this year, so charters’ per-pupil support would finally (nearly) catch up to the regular-school average.

That means about $1,500 more per charter pupil — which Heastie started calling a “windfall” for charters. And Gov. Cuomo, to his shame, also wound up using the term.

Sorry: It’s no windfall when you finally get taken off a starvation diet.

And the “compromise” Cuomo offered Thursday night still lets Heastie win: It extends the freeze another year. Some reports suggest charters would get $1,450 per pupil in extra state aid this year, but not as “baseline” funding they can be sure will continue.

Officially, the freeze would truly end next year — but Heastie could try the same stunt again. After all, the speaker seems determined to maintain two separate and unequal classes of public-school students.