| Two-thirds of District 5’s elementary and middle schoolers, and 57% of students there overall, have spurned failing and dangerous Department of Education-run schools, making the district the only one of 32 in New York City where a majority of kids attend a publicly funded, privately run charter school.
“We’re so miserable,” Mariama, a junior at the DOE’s Frederick Douglass Academy in East Harlem told The Post. “Please help us!”
But the stark enrollment imbalance has now made District 5 the target of a poison-pill rule in the new state budget barring new charters in any such district.
Under Gov. Hochul’s April budget deal, no new charter schools can be placed in any district that already enrolls more than 55% of its students in the alternative learning institutions.
This is a stunningly idiotic policy!
In other words, if over half the parents think the local public schools are rotten, and they prefer charter schools – Hochul says many kids must be forced to attend the bad schools. Why don’t they just shut down every failed school? Remember: this is Harlem, with predominantly black families. It’s hard for us to conceive of a more racist policy than this. |
