(From The Wall Street Journal, May 29, 2010)
By BARBARA MARTINEZ
New York would more than double the number of charter schools allowed to operate in the state under sweeping legislation passed Friday after a bitter battle between the teachers unions and Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s administration.
Ending weeks of suspense, legislators settled on a plan that lifts the charter-school cap to 460 from 200, bans for-profit charter operators and preserves most of New York City’s policies regarding the schools.
“It was classic Albany sausage-making: at the end of the day everybody got something,” said Joe Williams, executive director of Democrats for Education Reform, which spent millions of dollars pressing legislators to lift the charter-school cap without adding rules that it believed would strangle the charter industry.
State lawmakers first approved charter schools in 1998, when George E. Pataki was governor. Under the new cap, the number of charter-school students in the state could grow to about 125,000 in a few years from about 44,000 currently. If current trends continue, close to 10% of New York City’s public school students will be enrolled in a charter school by the time the state hits the higher cap.
The charter deal marks the second time in less than a year that Mr. Bloomberg was able to reach a point of cooperation with the Assembly speaker, Sheldon Silver, on a key education initiative. Last June, the speaker helped shepherd through the Assembly a bill that renewed mayoral control over New York City schools
Albany lawmakers said Mr. Silver, who has been a reliable ally of the teachers union, adapted to a shift of the political ground around charter schools, which have the support of not just the mayor and President Barack Obama, but the Democrats’ candidate for governor, Attorney General Andrew Cuomo.
Peter Murphy, policy director for the New York Charter Schools Association, credited Mr. Silver with “balancing off a complex set of interests coming from multiple directions. It wasn’t easy, but he pulled it off.”
Mr. Silver said he was “pleased with the result. I am pleased we put this coalition of members together, that we were able to find purpose in the bill, satisfy some of the objections to charters, and permit New York to submit a strong application for the $700 million.”
The legislation, which awaited Gov. David Paterson’s signature Friday afternoon, also affords New York the opportunity to submit a competitive application for funding under Race to the Top, the federal education department’s push to entice states to adopt aggressive education reforms. New York could win up to $700 million if it can show the federal government it is more serious than other states about making sweeping changes to its educational system.
Once it becomes law, the plan “drastically improves New York’s chances,” said Mr. Williams, who has been watching similar moves among other states in the competition. “New York was far behind, but we made up a lot of ground today.”
The Legislature also passed a bill that would tie teacher evaluations to student test scores, an area where New York lost points in the first round of the Race to the Top competition. New York’s charter-school cap of 200 was widely viewed as a big impediment to success in the federal competition.
In addition to the ban on for-profit organizations, the legislation paves the way for more financial scrutiny of charter schools, including a mandate for the state comptroller’s office to audit the schools. In addition, the bill requires that traditional public schools housing a charter school get matching renovations if the charter school is getting improvements worth more than $5,000.
The legislation would also force charter schools to do a better job of attracting children with disabilities and English-language learners, areas where charter schools have been criticized.
Despite the new rules, the bill was cheered by the mayor and the city’s Department of Education, which had been dealing with anxious weeks as various charter proposals threatened to strip the city of many of its freedoms to recommend and place charter schools.
One possibility, for instance, was that parents of non-charter school children could veto education department’s decision to place a charter school in any school building.
For the most part, the bill keeps intact the key elements of the mayor’s charter-school growth strategy.
“We hit every goal, and that will benefit the 100,000 kids these charter schools will serve,” said John White, deputy chancellor of the New York City school system.
Mr. White said that the city preserved its ability to recommend charters for approval and said the system used to place charter schools in district buildings is largely unchanged.
Currently, parents or schools that object to a charter school’s taking space in an existing school can appeal to the state’s education commissioner. That policy will continue.
The city’s teachers union had a more tempered reaction to the news. “We’re happy about the reforms we were able to get,” said Michael Mulgrew, president of the United Federation of Teachers.
He said his “favorite” was the ban on for-profit operators of charter schools.
“I don’t like people who are in this business to make money off the backs of kids,” he said.
But he added that his side “fell short” on limiting the growth of charter schools, particularly in neighborhoods where many charter schools already exist.
With the charter-cap battle over, Mr. Mulgrew said, “we need to get back to the other 97% of children in New York City” who don’t attend charter schools, and focus energy on limiting the cuts in state aid to city schools that are contained in the current budget proposals in Albany.
Even if New York state wins money in the Race to the Top competition, Mr. Mulgrew noted, “not a single penny can be used to plug a budget hole.”
–Jacob Gershman contributed to this article.