New York State Education Commissioner John King said on Thursday that there might be another way for New York City to open more charter schools, now that it's approaching the legal limit.
There are 197 charter schools in the city and 17 more were approved on Wednesday by the State University of New York. Under state law, New York City is entitled to about 240 charters while hundreds more can go to the rest of the state.
King said lawmakers might want to revisit that distribution, "because clearly the charters in New York City are being used more quickly than in rest of the state."
Charters can be authorized by SUNY and the Board of Regents. Wednesday's vote by the SUNY trustees means they can authorize only one more charter for New York City while 70 can be authorized in other school districts. The Regents have 27 more charters for New York City, 91 for the rest of the state.
King said it was up to the governor and legislature to find a solution. But he added, "We have work to do to continue to grow high-quality seats, whether it's in charter schools or district schools."
Lawmakers last lifted the cap on charters in 2010 and proponents of charter schools expect the issue to come up in 2015. But James Merriman, chief executive of the New York City Charter School Center, wants to go even further.
"It's not the time to raise the cap, or reconfigure charters under it," he said. "It's time to get rid of it altogether."
The issue is likely to be hotly contested, because charter school opponents believe the privately-run but publicly-funded schools take money away from regular district schools.
King made his remarks after visiting a Learning Partners program school, which pairs schools that are strong in one particular area with other schools that are less developed. He praised the initiative, which was instituted by Schools Chancellor Carmen Fariña to improve the quality of district schools.
Fariña and King joined principals and their staffers from three schools at the John F. Kennedy high school campus in the Bronx. The failing school was phased out and divided into seven different small schools over the last decade.
One of them is the Marble Hill High School for International Studies. It was chosen by the chancellor as a host school last winter, because of its strong performance with English Language Learners and students with special needs. Staffers from the school now visit classrooms and share ideas with teachers and principals from two other schools in the same building, Bronx Engineering and Technology Academy (BETA) and Bronx School of Law and Finance.
During Thursday's meeting, English teacher Dana Holness from BETA described a summer program inspired by Marble Hill that combined writing and science into one student project. Her students took a field trip to compare the garbage of different local neighborhoods. The trash outside a public housing complex contained diapers, condoms and engine oil while the trash outside more upscale private homes contained banana peels and parking tickets.
"It really hit home in a visceral way," she said, referring to the different income brackets.
Fariña praised this lesson sharing, and called it a model for co-located schools that share the same building.
"There are ways to deal with it and you have found a way," she said. "Now I have to figure out how do we invite more schools in the building to partake."
