BLAS’ UNION-LED EDUCATION FAILURE
RATHER than abandon his failed Renewal Schools program, Mayor de Blasio has decided to rebrand it. Standing side by side with teachers-union president Michael Mulgrew on May 11, he doubled down on the community-schools program — best known as the faulty blueprint behind the administration’s failed Renewal Schools initiative.
Community schools — a favorite of the mayor’s union allies — provide wraparound services like health screenings and dental care to students. No one disputes that these resources are vital for children’s health. But when it comes to student achievement, community schools aren’t producing any meaningful growth.
But thanks to de Blasio and the union, the city will add 69 new community schools next year, bringing the total to 215 schools enrolling over 100,000 students — including tens of thousands of students trapped in failing Renewal Schools.
Until last year, many Renewal Schools lacked even basic performance benchmarks designed to track student improvement. Even now, many of the benchmarks are set so low they suggest to the students that officials have disturbingly low expectations of them. Overall, just one in 10 Renewal School students can read or do math on grade level — despite nearly $550 million in spending on the program since it was launched in 2014.
The broader category of community schools is hardly any better. Last year, only about one in 10 community-school students scored at grade level in math and just 15 percent could read at grade level. Even with this perilously low starting point, there hasn’t been much improvement. Students’ math scores crept up by just two points in the past year.
New York City is also home to another school initiative of an almost identical size: public charter schools. Together, the city’s 216 public charter schools enroll 106,600 students. But the similarities end there. Where community schools have failed to produce results, public charters are delivering a world-class education to the city’s highest-need communities, and have real classroom results to back it up.
In the city’s public charter schools, stu- dents are over four times more likely to read at grade level, three times more likely to do math at grade level and are improving at double the rate of their peers in community schools.
Charter performance has been so impressive that the de Blasio administration and the United Federation of Teachers tried to recreate it in-house with the PROSE program, establishing district schools that supposedly have more freedom to innovate with scheduling and grading systems. Yet all we’ve seen from the PROSE program is more evidence that UFT-run schools produce minimal gains for children. According to a recent StudentsFirstNY report, ELA proficiency in PROSE schools only grew half as fast as in charter schools from 2014 to 2016, and math proficiency at PROSE schools actually declined.
It’s no wonder that the number of families calling out for more public charter schools hit an all-time high this year. For the 2017-2018 school year, 73,000 students applied for 25,200 seats, leaving almost 48,000 students on the waiting list. That means for every one student that got a seat, another two were forced to stay in district schools because the charter sector hasn’t been allowed to meet demand.
Which raises a question: Why weren’t New Yorkers greeted May 11 by news that the mayor is committed to doubling the size of the public charter sector?
The answer, sadly, comes back to politics. De Blasio has effectively handed over the city’s keys to his allies at the teachers union. Instead of heeding the call from parents and embracing public charter schools, the mayor has squandered hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars on teachersunion priorities that have yielded almost no tangible results for children.
Given the overwhelming evidence that shows students from underserved communities have the best opportunity to learn at the city’s public charters, it’s tragic that they remain trapped in low-performing alternatives like Renewal Schools. It’s time for de Blasio to acknowledge the data, and the demands of his constituents, by expanding New York’s public charter sector.