Such is the power of special interests in New York that the Legislature won’t allow more charter schools to open in the city — while the city bureaucracy won’t give available school space to charters that plainly need and deserve it.
And so kids at the Success Academy High School must hold choir rehearsal in a crammed staircase and clarinet practice in a broom closet.
While thousands of other city children are stuck on waitlists, unable to escape the regular public-school system for a charter — even though high-quality organizers are eager to meet the demand.
The state’s teacher unions have the Legislature’s leaders eating out of their hands, not only refusing to lift the cap on new charters but also steadily chipping away at mayoral control of the city Department of Education.
Which leaves DOE bureaucrats reluctant to make room even for existing charters.
Thus Success Academy Charter HS of the Liberal Arts on Manhattan’s East Side must shoehorn its scholars into closets and hallways in the 33rd Street building, even as the three traditional public high schools that share the site have plenty of elbow room.
The 888 students at Success outnumber the kids at the other three schools combined; Success HS is over 100% capacity of its allotted space; the other schools are at 39%, 61% and 74% of enrollment.
State law requires the DOE to provide charters with space available in public-school buildings but in practice allows shameful squeezing of charter kids all across the city (and not just at Success schools).
The unions even got the Legislature to pass the New York City-only class-size law in part to use up space that charters could otherwise occupy.
And so Success HS classes average 26 to 27 students, vs. 16 at three other schools.
Mayor Bill de Blasio’s DOE did its best to completely stifle charters; Mayor Eric Adams is far more supportive in principle of the choices parents make in enrolling their children in charter schools — but is also hemmed in by teachers-union pets in Albany (and on the City Council).
Gov. Kathy Hochul, meanwhile, is in teachers-union-appeasement mode as she eyes her re-election run next year; she didn’t even call for lifting the charter cap in her $252 billion budget proposal.
Even though lifting the cap would offer more kids a real chance to earn their way into college.
But union power can’t trump academic excellence or parents’ demands for their children’s future: The school-choice movement is growing stronger even in New York as traditional public schools continue to underperform on all objective measures — and as families flee the regular system.
Squeezing charter schools only forces them to flee elsewhere — private or Catholic schools, if they can find a scholarship or other funds, or even out of New York altogether.
And lawmakers who continue to deny choice to families purely to reward their special-interest pals are courting a political revolution.
One way or another, New York’s charters — and the students who love them — will breath free.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
