New York Post, Tuesday, August 27, 2019nypost.com21POSTOPINION
D
ESPITE their enormous suc-
cesses, charter schools in
New York and across the
country are in a precarious
spot heading into the new school
year. In New York, state test re-
sults last week showed that char-
ter schools in every region out-
performed traditional public
schools in English and math pro-
ficiency — by double digits.
Yet leading Democrats, in the
Empire State and nationally, are
increasingly hostile to charters.
This, even though polling suggests
the schools are broadly popular
with the disadvantaged minorities
they claim to speak for.
New polling, also out last week,
shows that nationally, 58 percent
of Hispanic Democratic voters
and 53 percent of black Democrats
support charters, while only 30
percent of white Democrats do.
The same poll found that overall
support for charter schools has
climbed to 48 percent, from a low
of 39 percent in 2017.
Yet 2020 Dem presidential
hopefuls sound like they’d sooneryank out their own eyes with rusty
spoons than back charter growth.
Even one-time charter hero Cory
Booker has jelly legs. Mayor de
Blasio vents “hatred” for the char-
ter world, even though in his city,
the charter-school student body is
91 percent black or Hispanic and
80 percent low-income.
The candidates’ desire to win
over the notoriously anti-charter
and overwhelmingly white
teachers’ unions is a driver. And
there’s the political imperative to
oppose anything supported by
the Trump administration.
But if Joe Biden, Kamala Har-
ris, Bernie Sanders & Co. took a
peek into the classrooms of
America’s charter schools,
maybe they would reassess. In
New York City alone, visiting
just three schools would burst
their ideological bubble.
The candidates could start in
America’s poorest congressional
district, in the South Bronx, home
to the highest concentration of
New York City’s 235 charters.
They might visit Bronx Global
Learning Institute for Girls, a K-8
school focused on technology,
music and social-emotional learn-
ing for young women and girls.With a student body that often
comes to school exhausted from
having to parent younger siblings
(Mom was working a double
shift), BGLIG outperformed its lo-
cal district on the state test.
Afterward, the candidates could
cross the Macombs Dam Bridge
and head south 10 blocks to visit
New York’s first charter school,
the result of an odd-bedfellows
partnership between a one-time
Freedom Rider who became Mar-
tin Luther King’s chief of staff and
a Wall Street financier, and
named after Nelson Mandela’s
partner in overthrowing apart-
heid in South Africa.
In today’s hyper-divided world,
the collaboration between the
Rev. Wyatt T. Walker and Steve
Klinsky might never be allowed
to happen. But on Harlem’s 145th
Street, the Sisulu-Walker Charter
School outscored its local city
school district in five of six test-
ing grades this past year.
Next, the candidates could
head to Brooklyn, to MESA
Charter HS on Palmetto Street.
Now in its seventh year, MESA
might be the best charter high
school in the state.
MESA is exactly the kind of
school even charter opponents
have difficulty hating. It’s not
part of a charter network. Class-
rooms and hallways are orderly,
yet decidedly not of the “no-ex-
cuses” model that has caused
handwringing among many.
Almost all the students who
enter in the ninth grade graduate
on time. Dropouts are rare.
Its most recent seniors were
accepted into some of America’smost selective schools, including
Wesleyan, Boston College, Bos-
ton University, Howard and
Brandeis in addition to the top
state schools and the best CUNY
schools. Others have decided to
serve in the military.
MESA is diverse in the way
New York politicians like. Gradu-
ation emcee Bryan Cuzco-Sinchi
introduced himself in June as “a
proud gay, Ecuadorian, soon-to-
be-first-generation college stu-
dent.” He has received a full
scholarship to Skidmore, which
has a lower acceptance rate than
New York University.
Almost all of MESA’s students
live in Bushwick, where housing
costs are up, but the public-high-
school graduation rate isn’t. That
rate languishes at 60 percent,
under the statewide rate of 80
percent and far below MESA’s 95
percent. For students with dis-
abilities, MESA’s graduation rate
is 85 percent, compared to 47
percent for the local district and
29 percent for the state.
MESA has been OK’d to open
another high school just like this
one, but can’t, because the Legis-
lature won’t lift an arbitrary cap
on the number of charters in
New York City.
Charters in New York have
strong support from Gov.
Cuomo, who last year easily won
a third term in one of the nation’s
most progressive states. Perhaps
America’s other Democrats will
see they’re not all that bad.
Robert Bellafiore, a public-strat-
egy consultant, has been involved
with charter schools for more
than 20 years.Where Kids Win
What Dems would see on a tour of NYC charters
Success factory: Students at the Sisulu-Walker Charter School of Har-
lem outscored their district peers in five of six testing grades last year.Warzer JaffDefense beat: How We Lost the Hypersonic Race
Washington badly lags Moscow in developing hypersonic weapons, Dov
Zakheim warns in The Hill, and is just at “the starting gate” when it comes to
building up defenses against such weapons. Russian strongman Vladimir Pu-
tin says his government is building six new hypersonic weapon systems, and
one of them may have been involved in a nuclear explosion that left five mili-
tary engineers and two servicemen dead this month. “Russia is almost certain
to introduce almost all of its new hypersonic weapons well before they will ap-
pear in the American arsenal,” Zakheim notes, leaving the United States with
“no means of defending against strategic hypersonic systems.” And with Mos-
cow “unwilling to renew and expand the 2011 New START agreement, due to
expire in 2021, to include its new hypersonic weapons,” Putin will be able to
“achieve his long-held objective: to undermine the US strategic-defense pro-
gram that President Ronald Reagan first envisaged three decades ago.”2020 watch: Bernie’s Cardi B Card
One of Sen. Bernie Sanders’ “most powerful political allies” may be celeb-
rity Cardi B, writes Holly Otterbein at Politico. Sanders called and chatted
with her before the first Democratic primary debate, and they also had a
much-viewed video conversation this month. While the 26-year-old ex-strip-
per and the 77-year-old socialist make an unusual pair, their partnership is
based on “shared progressive ideals, a favorite former president” — FDR —
“and a similar devil-may-care attitude.” Plus, Sanders’ advisers surely hope
Cardi B can help him tap into young voters and, especially, voters of color.Foreign desk: Macron’s Amazon Blunder
French President Emmanuel Macron “jettisoned all the carefully laid plans
for the G7 meeting” and announced instead that the summit should focus on
“the record number of fires ravaging the Amazon jungle,” Roger Kimball
notes in The Spectator USA. Oops: Not only have there been “far fewer” fires
this year than in “many recent years,” the photo Macron tweeted was, in fact,
from 1989. “The moral of this little exercise in international virtue signaling,”
Kimball snarks, is that “climbing on to the climate change bandwagon...
comes at the pronounced risk of making oneself look foolish when the lies,
exaggerations and profound ignorance of scientific fact [are] exposed.”Marco Rubio: Upholding the Dignity of Work
At First Things, Sen. Marco Rubio laments how “economic stability for
working-class families is not a feature of today’s economy”: The greed of
“transnational corporations” has sent too many working-class jobs overseas
and damaged “competitiveness of American industry.”
An ideological consensus holds that the only goal of
“enterprise is to maximize financial return for share-
holders,” and “it is easy to see how this belief would
lead to lower physical investment. Returns from finan-
cial engineering are easier, quicker and more certain for
shareholders than long-term investment” involved in
the “creation of actual goods and services.” To reverse
course, Rubio concludes, America needs a new moral
political economy dedicated to defending “the inviola-
ble dignity of every human person, the work he or she
does, and the family life that work supports.”From the Left: A Progressive ‘Sweatshop’
“Underpaid and overworked canvassers” at the Fund for the Public Inter-
est, a top fundraising group for the environmental movement, are “accus-
ing management of busting their attempt to unionize after the group shut
down a North Carolina office where workers announced they had orga-
nized,” Alexander Kaufman and Molly Redden report for The Huffington
Post. While the fund’s management denied messing with organizing, “the
would-be union organizers see their effort as a critical test of progressive
values — and the fund’s pushback as exactly the wrong message.” Condi-
tions at the fund are so “notorious,” Kaufman and Redden note, that the
left-wing group has been nicknamed “the liberal sweatshop,” with workers
accusing the group of “refusing to pay minimum wage, dodging overtime
payments and forbidding canvassers from taking adequate breaks.” As
Kaufman and Redden note, the “clash” is only “the latest to put young pro-
gressive activists against the legacy organizations that count on them for
an endless supply of low-cost organizing and fundraising labor.”
— Compiled by Karl Salzmann & Sohrab AhmariMarco RubioROBERT BELLAFIORE