A middle finger to N.Y. families

Mayor de Blasio’s recent anticharter rant in Texas at a gathering of the National Educational Association — the nation’s largest teachers union — was a big middle finger raised to tens of thousands of black and Latino parents who are desperately trying to get a sound education for their kids.

“I’m going to be blunt with you, I am angry about the state of public education in America,” said the leader of the largest school district in America.

Was de Blasio angry about the achievement gap that has left black and Latino kids behind in every year of his mayoralty? No.

Could it be that the mayor’s rage was personal frustration at the expensive failure of his administration’s Renewal Schools program? What started as a $150 million effort to boost low-performing schools ballooned to a price tag of $773 million by the time de Blasio acknowledged defeat and pulled the plug on the project.

No, it turns out that the shortcomings of his administration are not why the mayor is angry about public education. The thing that sets de Blasio

off, he told the assembled union reps, is charter schools.

Charters are public schools run by outside nonprofit organizations and allowed to develop their own curriculum, admissions policies and work rules. New York’s 253 charters serve 123,000 children, about 10% of the total public school enrollment.

Charters routinely outperform other public schools and have proven to be a lifeline for working-class black and Latino parents looking for a sound education.

In the 2017-18 school year, according to the New York City Charter School Center, an astounding 58.6% of black students in city charters scored at or above state achievement levels in math, compared with only 25.4% in regular district schools. For Latino students, 56.9% hit the mark in math at charter schools compared with 30% in district schools.

Parents know where they have the best chance of steering their kids to success. Last year, 79,000 students applied for 26,900 charter school seats, leaving 52,700 kids on waiting lists.

Here is what de Blasio told the audience in Texas about these parents: “Get away from high-stakes testing, get away from charter schools. No federal funding for charter schools,” he told the NEA.

No federal funding? I was hoping I’d misheard Hizzoner.

Did you really mean you want to deny federal funds to charter schools, I asked him, when 81% of charter kids in New York qualify for free or reduced lunch? If elected president, would you want to cut back on Title I funding, the main source of federal money targeted to schools serving low-income students?

“I’m not saying take away the existing Title I, that kind of thing,” the mayor told me. “I’m saying we have watched an administration that has tried to favor everything but traditional public schools. It’s dangerous to the future of this country. My focus would be to invest in traditional public schools, because just the numbers alone say that’s where the vast majority of American children realistically are going to get educated.”

That doesn’t answer the question of what’s likely to happen to charters. In fact, the Democrats who control the House of Representatives have been trying to cut $40 million of the $440 million in federal dollars that currently go to charters.

De Blasio has clearly signaled he plans to join and perhaps expand such efforts if elected president. The candidate who says he wants to help the middle class says he wants “no federal funding” for high-performing schools in his own city.

From the moment he floated the idea of running for president, de Blasio drew criticism from New Yorkers who predicted his national political ambitions would, sooner or later, run directly counter to his duty to look out for the interests of the city he has sworn to lead and defend.

Unfortunately, it seems that moment has arrived.

Louis is political anchor of NY1 News.