Mayor Bill de Blasio stepped up his criticism of charter schools Thursday in response to their higher gains on state tests than traditional public schools — this time saying their advantage comes from excluding challenging students.
“Some charters, sadly, have a long history of exclusion,” the mayor told Brian Lehrer on WNYC radio.
“We don’t believe in excluding students with special needs and who are English Language Learners. We do not believe in excluding kids with behavior issues that have to be addressed or who don’t test well. There’s been plenty of reporting on this, Brian, I’m not going to rehash it.”
The unprompted dig came a day after Hizzoner attributed the higher test scores at charter schools largely to a focus on test preparation.
That comment prompted the advocacy group Families for Excellent Schools to demand an apology and to schedule a rally outside City Hall.
But the mayor repeated the same claim on radio, telling Lehrer, “Clearly there is a current within the charter movement that focuses heavily on test prep and I don’t think that’s the right way to go.”
In English, charter school students in grades 3 to 8 made a passing-rate gain of 13.7 percentage points in 2016 — compared to a 7.6 percentage-point gain for kids in traditional public schools.
In math, the gains were 4.5 percentage points for charter schools kids, compared to a 1.2 percentage-point gain for their public school peers.
Despite a decade of education reforms under his predecessor, Michael Bloomberg, de Blasio also insisted that nobody had paid attention to the failings of public schools before he took over at City Hall.
“We never as a society actually tried to fix public education,” he claimed.
He named a number of initiatives that were announced but that are far from full implementation — including expanding advanced placement courses and teaching every student computer science — to make his case.