We appreciate that state Senate Majority Leader John Flanagan wants to rein in Mayor Bill de Blasio’s misrule of the city’s schools, but his proposed “education inspector” won’t do much about the problem.
Flanagan has offered a bill to extend mayoral control by a year, with a few new strings: 1) a new ban on lobbyists serving on the Panel for Education Policy, which in theory oversees Schools Chancellor Carmen Fariña the way a corporate board does a CEO, and 2) letting Gov. Andrew Cuomo appoint an inspector.
But the inspector’s main powers are to 1) block new contracts that seem sleazy, pending the city’s appeal to the State Education Department, and 2) himself appeal to SED if he thinks Fariña and PEP have decided against the best interests of children — such as refusing to give space to charter schools that have requested it.
The problem is SED is controlled by de Blasio’s teacher-union pals, thanks to appointments by Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie. That makes the inspector a toothless tiger.
A year ago, Flanagan gave de Blasio just a one-year extension of control as a warning — yet the mayor has continued both his harassment of charters and his hapless policies on “failure factory” schools, which he insists on keeping open under his hapless “Renewal” program.
The sorry state of the city’s worst regular public schools is driving demand for charters. For the coming fall, over 68,000 students applied for the 23,600 available seats.
Yet de Blasio keeps trying to prevent charters from growing to meet this demand, routinely rejecting their requests to use public-school space that’s sitting empty.
Flanagan’s inspector can’t stop these core de Blasio abuses of mayoral control — only shine a light on them, and perhaps throw some sand in the gears.
If Flanagan fears to simply let mayoral control die, he needs to offer more. His inspector needs the power to force de Blasio to shut down terrible schools — and to stop standing in the way of good schools that want to open.
That may mean open political war with the mayor and the teachers unions — but it’s the only thing that might help the kids.
