De Blasio Knew

For years, Post reporters Susan Edelman, Selim Algar and others detailed the failings of Mayor de Blasio’s Renewal Schools program — reports the mayor and his allies dismissed as ideologically driven. Now it turns out he was ignoring the same warnings from his own people.

Friday’s New York Times revealed internal City Hall communications that signaled Renewal’s failure early on. Yet de Blasio refused to end or even alter the program.

In December 2015, the Times reports, a Department of Education memo warned, “For these schools to reach their targets for 2017, the interventions would need to produce truly exceptional improvements.”

At the time, Eric Nadelstern, a former deputy chancellor, told The Post that Renewal should “reward success and penalize failure” but “does exactly the opposite.”

Rather than admit failure, de Blasio continued to trap children in schools that wouldn’t improve no matter how much money or “wraparound” social services he threw at them. Four years and $773 million later, he looks ready to throw in the towel — with no apology to the children left to rot in schools the mayor knew he wasn’t fixing.

Clearly, he didn’t care about delivering for the children, but only about having a program he could point to and pretend he was doing something. Only the politics mattered.

Which also explains de Blasio’s cold war on the charter schools that are delivering for poor and minority students. Charters outperform the regular public schools, and have even closed the racial achievement gap. That doesn’t matter, because the mayor sees them as the enemy.

Nor is he changing his approach. His new drive to impose quotas on the city’s top high and middle schools also has nothing to do with helping the kids. It’s all about scoring ideological points, and distracting from his refusal to focus on creating more good schools for all students. What a fraud.