Anyone who’s read The Post exposé on Murry Bergtraum HS won’t be surprised to learn how badly its students write. The question is, why is a school so manifestly failing its students still open?
Alas, Murry Bergtraum is all too typical of a public-education system that looks the other way so long as it’s black and Latino children who aren’t learning. Here’s just a small taste of the rotten status quo:
- At 53 city-run public schools, zero African-American students passed the state’s most recent math tests.
- At 48 schools, zero Latino students passed those tests.
- At one Bronx middle school — MS 203 — not one of the 210 Latino or 75 African-American children who took the tests passed.
- At PS 194 in Harlem, none of the 50 African-American or 46 Latino test-takers was proficient in English Language Arts.
- There are 105 schools where the math proficiency rate is 5 percent or less.
- There are 69 public schools where the English Language Arts proficiency rate is 5 percent or less.
So what’s Mayor de Blasio doing? He’s punishing the public schools that prove these kids can be taught: charters. And he’s doing it by taking away their space and making it all but impossible for them to give more children the benefit of a good school. After a Saturday morning meeting between charter officials and schools chancellor Carmen Fariña, the head of the New York Charter School Center, James Merriman, posed the only question that should matter about the mayor’s approach:
“Can [the mayor] look every parent in the eye who expects to send their child to these schools in the fall and say to them, ‘The school that I will now force you to go to is going to be better than the school I am taking away from you’? ”
The answer is that de Blasio is going to keep failing, traditional public schools open no matter how badly they do — and make it difficult to expand charters no matter how well they do. You can call this many things, but you can’t call it progressive.