Sara Mead penned a must-read piece on Mayor de Blasio’s pre-school proposal in Slate yesterday. Mead asserts that if we look to places like New Jersey where pre-K is living up to the lofty promises being made about its potential to help kids, we must, as New York already does, allow families to access pre-K through a diversity of providers. And that has to include charter schools. A key test of de Blasio’s leadership will be whether he does what’s right to maximize New York City schoolchildren’s opportunities to get the basics they need to succeed in K-12 or instead lets his antagonism toward charter schools compromise that agenda. For more, see the paper that Mead, who is a DFER Board Member, wrote for us on how charter schools are a key component to improving early childhood education.
