Bloomberg on charter schools etc.

At the Working Families Party Debate on July 2, a parent asks the Mayor:

“My children’s school is successful Harlem school, but they are downsizing it to make way for charter schools. But charter schools only educate 2% of public school students. Meanwhile many of the large schools that have thousands of students continue to fail. what is your plan to turn around big schools and failing schools?”

Bloomberg responds: "I went to public schools, I believe they are the future of the society.... Charter schools are useful, they’re open, they give us a bogie (?) to go after.

But look at what we’ve done with the big schools….Bushwick, Amanda Childs (!!!), we took the the same number of students but broke them up into smaller schools, better management. Graduation rates up. And Harlem is one of the great success stories…..

I am in favor of fair funding. We did not fund schools in poor minority neighborhoods anywhere near as we did in more affluent neighborhoods. We put all new money to give them schools underfunded. We’ve been able to upgrade teachers through training….If there’s anything I’m proud of is the progress we’ve made its whats happened to the public school system over the last seven years."

Actually, the so-called fair student funding formula the DOE devised would have cut the funding for 47% of failing schools in NYC, as we discussed here. And the additional state funding this year that was supposed to go to low-performing schools instead went to plug holes caused by the city's budget cuts to schools, as CFE recently revealed.