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De Blasio's school fight: Column

Andrew Rotherham and Richard Whitmire
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio reads to a class of pre-kindergarten students at a public school on Tuesday.
  • He's waging a war over education issues that could spill into the 2016 Democratic presidential primary.
  • De Blasio has singled out a special foe%2C Eva Moskowitz%2C who runs 22 Success Academy charter schools.
  • At the heart of this confrontation is a fundamental philosophical divide over what constitutes a common school.

Most non-New Yorkers know only two things about Bill de Blasio, the city's new progressive mayor: He eats pizza with a knife and fork, and Al Roker attacked him for sending students to school in a snowstorm.

But parents should know a third: He's waging a Democrat vs. Democrat battle over education issues that could spill into the 2016 Democratic presidential primary and into your community.

The issues involved range from how to pay for preschool to how fast to pursue new Common Core standards. But the most revealing clash involves independently run public charter schools.

It would be comforting to tell parents that something positive could emerge from this fight, but that's not true. If the de Blasio faction of this battle among Democrats prevails, you can expect to witness a pullback from recent decades' major school reforms.

With charter schools, de Blasio has singled out a special foe, fellow Democrat Eva Moskowitz, who runs 22 Success Academy charter schools that educate 6,700 students. The mayor cites Moskowitz as the kind of charter operator who needs reining in. Classroom and office space that Success Academy receives from the city enrage the mayor: "There's no way in hell that Eva Moskowitz should get free rent."

Why Moskowitz? Apropos of Mark Twain's adage that nothing is more annoying than a good example, Moskowitz annoys de Blasio. When she was on the City Council, she led hearings into how the teachers union hurt students. It was considered heresy then and still is now.

After Moskowitz was driven from office by the unions, she put her ideas into action through her schools, whose students, nearly all low-income and minority, recently trounced other schools on standardized tests — a result her critics attribute to selecting the best students.

The de Blasio-Moskowitz confrontation neatly sums up the growing national Democrat vs. Democrat battle. The de Blasio wing of the party sees teachers unions as important institutions standing up for the average guy; the reform wing sees them as just another special interest. The de Blasio faction sees school testing as a scheme to discredit public schools; the reform wing sees testing as a tool needed to protect poor and minority students from slipping into education oblivion.

At the heart of this confrontation is a fundamental philosophical divide over what constitutes a common school. The goal championed by Horace Mann in 1838 envisioned students of all backgrounds mixing together to receive a common, community education. In our own warm fuzzy memories, that's the system many of us think we experienced.

But did we? In truth, the well-off kids went to far better "common" schools. The less well-off and minority students went to schools that didn't give them an equal shot in life. Those in the education reform world tend to see the common school as an ideal that can be realized through different approaches, like charters. Their critics believe in traditional school districts and unionized teachers.

In New York, this isn't a philosophical debate. Consider the third-graders at Success Academy Harlem 5. They share a public school building with P.S. 123. If Harlem 5 children lose their seats, they might have to enroll in P.S. 123.

Here's the dilemma:

The schools have similar students, but 88% of Harlem 5 third-graders passed New York's math test compared with 5% of P.S. 123's.

That's how the Democrat vs. Democrat battle gets real. And if it hasn't already come to your city, chances are it will.

Andrew Rotherham, a partner at Bellwether Education, and Richard Whitmire, author of On the Rocketship: How Top Charter Schools are Pushing the Envelope, are working on a book about education politics.
