Anyone who genuinely cares about advancing equal opportunity and economic mobility should cheer Mike Bloomberg for gifting $200 million to Success Academies and Harlem Children’s Zone, exemplary charter school networks that educate 23,000 kids in parts of New York City where high-quality options are few and far between.
And right after applauding the billionaire former mayor’s largesse, those same hands should point fingers at politicians in the state Capitol who refuse to raise New York’s charter cap. Because for all their newfound wherewithal, these and other innovative nonprofits can’t serve many more children unless and until the state lifts its arbitrary limit on the number of independently run public schools.
Today throughout the five boroughs, there are 140,000 youngsters attending 271 charters, which are open to all by random lottery and which frequently offer stricter school cultures and more rigorous instruction than nearby district-run schools. Eight in 10 of those kids are economically disadvantaged, and 90% are Black or Hispanic. Average student proficiency at the schools far outpaces that at district-run schools: For the most recent year for which test data is available, 62% of kids in city charters were proficient in math and 57% in English, compared to 46% and 47%, respectively, in traditional public schools. (At Success Academies’ 47 campuses, proficiency rates are in the 90s in both subjects.)
Yet even though charter demand has grown throughout the COVID pandemic, as K-12 enrollment at Department of Education schools has dropped, the charters are frozen in place. Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academies has a handful of charters in the pipeline, but after that, she can’t open a single additional school. Ditto Geoffrey Canada’s Harlem Children’s Zone, which has two charter schools among a range of services offered to youngsters and adults in one of Manhattan’s neediest neighborhoods.
As Mayor Eric Adams and Schools Chancellor David Banks have made clear, all kids deserve support, whether they attend regular public schools or charters. For starters, that ought to mean getting Albany to raise its draconian cap.
