There is a battle going on in New York. It's between newly elected progressive Mayor deBlasio and Eve Moscowitz. Eva who, you ask? She is the CEO of New York's charter school system, which serves 6,700 students who are predominantly from poor and minority families. Recent test scores showed her students performing in the top 1% in math and top 7% in English.
Matthew Kaminski writes,
Charters hire teachers who don't have to join and pay union dues, and who work outside the traditional system.
The schools are also mushrooming nationwide. Nearly half the public schools in Washington, D.C., and virtually all in New Orleans are charters. One reason the friction in New York is especially bad comes from the city's practice during the Bloomberg years of having charters share space with regular schools. The charters then often proceeded, embarrassingly, to outperform the other schools.
Already deBlasio has cut all funding for charter-school construction after 2015. He announced a "moratorium" on putting new charters inside existing schools. He is considering ways to roll back 25 co-locations already approved for the next school year, including 10 Success Academies.
While Mayor de Blasio can't stop the creation of charters, he controls access to the most treasured asset in New York City, real estate.
Ms. Moskowitz won't concede that charters must pay rent one way or another. Her schools, run by an independent nonprofit, don't charge tuition to students, who are enrolled through a lottery. The state gives charter operators $13,527 per student, less than what it costs to educate a regular public school student.
She says the charters take underutilized space in a school system with 200,000 empty seats.
