City’s Charter Schools Fear Having de Blasio for a Landlord By JAVIER C. HERNÁNDEZ Published: October 8, 2013 Charter schools in New York City have flourished over the past decade, attracting donations from Wall Street, praise from leaders in business and government, and free real estate from the city. But with a changing of the guard imminent in City Hall, many charter school leaders are concerned that the support they have enjoyed during the three terms of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg may be in peril. The leading candidate to succeed Mr. Bloomberg, Bill de Blasio, a Democrat, is a no-bones-about-it critic of charter schools who rose to prominence in part by berating the mayor’s educational agenda. By contrast, the Republican candidate, Joseph J. Lhota, is a fierce defender of charter schools. In one of his sharpest repudiations of Mr. Bloomberg’s tenure, Mr. de Blasio has said he would stop offering many of the city’s 183 charter schools free rent, a policy that has helped turn New York into one of the most vibrant hubs for charter schools in the country. Charter schools, often managed by nonprofit groups, receive public funding but operate independently of the school system and have more freedom in deciding scheduling, staffing and curriculum. The Bloomberg administration is concerned enough about their future in the city that it is racing in its final months to place two dozen more of them into public school buildings. The board that approves school space plans will meet twice this month, an unusual step. Mr. de Blasio contends that Mr. Bloomberg has focused on charter schools to the detriment of traditional public schools, pitting parents against one another and sapping resources that could be used for after-school programs and classes like art and physical education. “I won’t favor charters,” Mr. de Blasio said on Tuesday after a conference in Lower Manhattan. “Our central focus is traditional public schools.” At an education forum this summer, he said of charter schools, “It is insult to injury to give them free rent.” His aides said he was not looking to overturn all of Mr. Bloomberg’s educational policies. In recent weeks, he has arranged meetings with charter school advocates; in past conversations, he has sought to persuade them that he is not a zealot who will seek to drive their schools from the city. Still, many charter school leaders remain uneasy about Mr. de Blasio’s plans. Some have started preparing for a City Hall that is resistant to their efforts. They are seeking donations in case they are forced to pay rent, freezing hiring plans and prodding teachers and students to speak out. On Tuesday, thousands of charter school parents, students and educators marched across the Brooklyn Bridge to voice opposition to Mr. de Blasio’s rent plan and to demand more money for their schools, which serve about 70,000 children, or about 6 percent of the student population citywide. “De Blasio is just wrong,” said one marcher, Ieshia Sargent, a cosmetologist who sends her 13-year-old daughter to Girls Prep, a Lower East Side charter school. “Every other public school has free space. Why shouldn’t charters have free space, too?” James Merriman, chief executive of the New York City Charter School Center, said plans to charge rent were “schemes to destroy the charter sector” by opponents. “They consider charters to be, simply in their own words, parasites,” Mr. Merriman said. “Those kinds of proposals would be simply disastrous.” Mr. Lhota has accused Mr. de Blasio of seeking to “annihilate” New York City’s charter schools. Mr. Lhota, who has said he would maintain the free-rent policy, has pledged to double the number of charter schools in the city, which would require state approval. “If you oppose charter schools and other choice for minorities, inner-city kids and children of immigrants, you cannot call yourself progressive,” Mr. Lhota said in a speech before business leaders in Manhattan on Tuesday. The details of Mr. de Blasio’s approach to charter schools remain murky, so it is difficult to estimate how damaging it would be to start charging them rent. Mr. de Blasio has not said how much he would charge, only that schools with the fewest resources would pay the least. At many charter schools, wealthy benefactors supplement the money the state provides for each student. About two-thirds of the city’s charter schools are housed within public school buildings. The city’s Independent Budget Office estimates the value of free space for charter schools at about $2,400 a student, on top of the more than $13,000 in other public support they receive for each student. Beyond the issue of rent, Mr. de Blasio opposes increasing the number of charter schools. “We have the right amount now to foster a certain amount of innovation and competition,” he said on Tuesday. New York City can add as many as 66 more before it reaches the maximum allowed under a 2010 state law. The state oversees the creation of charter schools, but Mr. de Blasio could make New York City a difficult environment for any new schools to find a footing. Under Mr. Bloomberg, charter schools have received space freed up through the closing of low-performing traditional schools. But Mr. de Blasio has said he would seek alternatives to closing schools as mayor. As the city’s public advocate, Mr. de Blasio has criticized the so-called co-locating of charter schools inside regular school buildings, which has caused deep tensions in many communities across the city. Charter schools do not have leases, so they might have no legal protection if Mr. de Blasio began charging them to use city space. Across the country, a majority of charter schools pay rent to use public properties, according to a study of 1,472 schools last year by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, an advocacy group. But since charter schools in many places do not receive the same level of government financing as traditional public schools, some districts, including Memphis’s, have offered free rent as an enticement. In New York City, free rent has proved especially alluring given the costly real estate market. Mr. Bloomberg has championed charter schools in his effort to remake the city’s school system, arguing that the freedom to operate without many of the restrictions typically imposed on public schools has made innovation possible. His opponents, however, have said that charter schools have weak ties to their communities and focus too much on test preparation and strict behavioral regimens. After years of frigid relations with City Hall, Mr. Bloomberg’s rivals have begun to plan for his exit, with charter schools at the top of the list. The city’s teachers’ union, the United Federation of Teachers, sued the city in July in hopes of blocking Mr. Bloomberg’s efforts to find space for charter schools opening after the end of his term. Most charter schools are not unionized. “The mayor went out of his way to give charters preferential treatment and advantages,” said Michael Mulgrew, president of the union, which has endorsed Mr. de Blasio. The union faces the opposition of several new advocacy groups created in part to preserve elements of Mr. Bloomberg’s agenda. For instance, Families for Excellent Schools, a nonprofit group that helped organize the rally on Tuesday, has spent the past few months trying to mobilize the tens of thousands of charter school parents in hopes of pressuring the next mayor to adopt policies friendly to charter schools. Charter schools are popular among the families they serve, many of them poor, Hispanic and black. A New York Times/Siena College poll of likely voters released on Friday showed that 61 percent of black voters supported creating more charter schools, compared with 50 percent of white voters. Mr. de Blasio’s pledge to slow the growth of charter schools does not appear to be costing him political support; the poll showed black voters favored him by a wide margin. During Tuesday’s rally, marchers wore T-shirts and held signs with messages that included “Let My Children Learn” and the word “Rent” with a slash through it. About a dozen counterprotesters brandished their own signs that read “Pay Your Rent.” Al Baker and Kyle Spencer contributed reporting.
Posted on: Wed, 09 Oct 2013 04:14:55 +0000
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