A ‘Passion’ for What?

‘We need the school system to look entirely different in the coming years,” Mayor de Blasio said the day after he’d won a second term. “That will be the issue I put my greatest passion and energy into.” Problem is, he spent his entire first term

resisting change, when he wasn’t looking to roll the clock back.

Consider his signature school-turnaround effort, the Renewal Schools program. As The Post’s Selim Algar noted Thursday, 24 of the 32 Renewal high schools are far short of the 67 percent graduation rate that Chancellor Carmen Fariña set as a key benchmark.

Eight of those 24 may be close enough, with grad rates of 63 percent or better, but the other 16 were below 59 percent — with six under the 50 percent mark. Yet Fariña is only closing two of the 16, and reorganizing two others by making all school staff re-apply for their jobs.

As we’ve noted before, most Renewal schools below the high-school level have made similarly slight progress, despite all the extra cash and outside consultants showered upon them. Fariña has only closed one of these schools because of plummeting enrollment.

A gain,

Renewal is de Blasio’s central program for trying to fix failed schools. It’s not doing the job — so how is he going to manage to transform the entire system?

It’s all well and good to renew his pledge to have all children performing at grade level in reading and math by third grade, but he’s shown nothing that will make that happen.

Meanwhile, Team de Blasio remains hostile to the “entirely different” school system the city already has: the charter sector, which is delivering markedly better test scores at every grade level.

In particular, the city is now months past the legal deadline for responding to charters’ requests for space for the 2018-2019 school year. And several of the requests are for middle-school space, leaving families whose kids have prospered in charters to fear they’ll be dumped into the regular system because their charter literally has no place to put them when they move up.

At

a town-hall meeting in Brooklyn last week, Fariña for the first time set a deadline for a response. Addressing parents who’d shown up to protest the stall, she said, “I just want to be clear, for the people here with the signs, that we have full expectation to, within the next week or two, before Thanksgiving, giving you a placement, and we will be announcing it soon.”

Yet that’s no guarantee that what she offers will be reasonable — space in the right neighborhood, for example, and with room for the middle school to grow so that these families don’t face the same crisis next year.

Make no mistake: There’s plenty of room. Department of Education records show the city has 112 chronically underused buildings with 65,000 empty seats — more than enough space to allow each would-be middle school to have all the classrooms it needs not just next year, but in the years to come.

If

the DOE instead offers cramped, oneyear quarters in neighborhoods far from where the rising middle-schoolers now attend class, count it as proof that the mayor is putting his “passion” into crushing these children’s dreams for a quality education.