Klein is Seeking to Lift the Limit on New Charters
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With communities across New York rushing to create charter schools that operate apart from the traditional education system, officials say the state will soon hit the cap of 100 charter schools unless Albany acts.
As the deadline lurks one or two years down the road, New Yorkers are taking sides and lobbying or plotting out their plans of attack.
The most active pro-charter forces are in New York City, where even the teachers union, which historically has been skeptical of the untraditional public schools, is thinking of starting its own charter school.
“We want to increase charters as we need them,” the city schools chancellor, Joel Klein, told The New York Sun last month in an interview. Mr. Klein, who has pledged to help open 50 charter schools in five years, could use up all of the 36 remaining slots on his own and more – even if no community anywhere else in the state tried to launch a charter school.
“My own personal view of this right now is that the cap doesn’t serve any function for our city,” Mr. Klein said. “We have families that are unhappy with the choices. We have got to create better choices for them, and charters are an important part of that strategy. We should have the flexibility to do that, and we’ve demonstrated that our charters work in New York City.”
Mr. Klein said he is working with “all of the key people” in Albany to accomplish his objective. He said that means the members of the education committees of the Assembly and Senate, as well as the governor’s office.
“We have to get this done,” he said. “It’s critical to us.”
Mr. Klein will find sympathy from one member of the Albany triumvirate: Governor Pataki, who was a proponent of the Charter Schools Act in 1998.
A spokesman for the governor, Todd Alhart, called the act’s passage “a major step forward in our efforts to bring greater opportunity and accountability to our education system.”
He said, “We will continue to work with supporters of charter schools and parents, teachers, and others involved in education to improve our system.”
The other players in Albany – who are heavily influenced by traditional local school boards and by teachers unions – might be harder to persuade.
The chairman of the Assembly’s Committee on Education, Steven Sanders, a Manhattan Democrat who is on the same page as most legislators in Albany, called lifting the cap “premature, given the fact that we haven’t reached the 100 yet.” He said he would be willing to consider lifting the cap only when “all charter schools are up and running and we have experience with them.”
Mr. Sanders described the initial data as mixed. Some of the schools have shut after five years because they weren’t up to par academically, while most reports have come in with positive initial findings.
A 2002 report commissioned by the State University of New York found, “Public charter schools have proven themselves to be educational havens, particularly in urban areas across the state, offering new educational opportunities to children and families who could not afford to opt out of their local public schools.”
A new study by the Progressive Policy Institute, a think tank associated with the Democratic Leadership Council, called New York’s charter schools “isolated examples of innovation and success” that act as “seeds of change” for other public schools.
The director of education policy at the institute, Andrew Rotherham, told the Sun that claiming a lack of data is an easy way for politicians to slow the pace of change. “There is enough evidence that a reasonable person can conclude there’s a lot of potential here,” he said. “It should not be artificially constrained.”
Despite some resistance in Albany to acting before the state hits a cap, pro-charter groups are not letting down.
The vice president of the New York Charter School Resource Center, Pe ter Murphy, predicted the remaining 36 schools would be approved “very, very quickly,” almost definitely within two years.
“An idea in Albany, particularly a good idea, can take years to become law,” he said. “It takes a long time to achieve one’s objectives and get good legislation passed. It’s not premature to talk about and to have movement toward this, even though we’re only about two-thirds of the way there.”
Said Mr. Murphy: “The only reason you’d want a moratorium is to protect the grownups, the adults in the system, that are not doing their job. It’s purely political. It’s purely to protect these school districts and their comfortable little status. There is no other reason to have a moratorium than that.”
Mr. Murphy’s group and similar ones are perpetually lobbying, they say, although they haven’t mounted any special drive to lift the cap.
The same is true on the other side of the table.
The president of Buffalo’s principals union, Anthony Palano, said, “There has to be a cap on charter schools.” He said charter schools are “depleting resources and gutting our schools.”
Mr. Palano said the only way he’d be in favor of new charter schools is if Albany financed them separately from the traditional school districts.
He said his union has had meetings with the Legislature and the Board of Regents to convince state officials that if the cap is lifted, “They’re going to see a continual erosion of traditional public education.” He predicted the debate will heat up next year.
The president of New York City’s teachers union, Randi Weingarten, said, “A lot of people outside of New York City think the financing needs to be looked at again. You see a lot of advocacy against allowing charter schools to be financed out of the local school district budget.”
Ms. Weingarten added that if and when the cap discussion heats up, she will “zealously advocate” to remove a “loophole” in state law that allows charter schools to avoid unionization by opening with less than 250 students.
“If you open up the cap,” she said, “you have to close that loophole on unionization.”
The New York City chancellor said he’s not concerned that other New York communities’ school officials may not regard the charter school movement with the same enthusiasm he has.
“Cities have to decide what strategies work,” Mr. Klein said. “If Buffalo finds a positive strategy, they’ve got to do what’s right for their students, too.”