State test scores released last week show Mayor de Blasio has made virtually no progress on two key goals: closing the racial gap in academic performance and turning around abysmal Renewal schools.
Meanwhile, he continues to reaffirm his opposition to the one category of public schools, charters, where scores are through the roof and the racial gap is nearly gone.
As The Post reported Saturday, black and Hispanic math scores in the regular public schools according to a Post analysis of exam data now lag those of whites by even more than they did in 2014. The white-black spread on English exams also grew.
Meanwhile, most of the schools in de Blasio’s costly three-year Renewal schools program (now in its fourth year) remain utter failures. At Fannie Lou Hamer MS in The Bronx, only 20.9 percent of the kids are proficient in English and a paltry 4.5 percent in math. At PS 111 in Queens, just 12.1 percent passed English; less than 8 percent passed math.
Meanwhile, at charters, as we noted last week, 57 percent of African Americans scored proficient in English, compared to just 34 percent in regular public schools. In math, it was 59 percent vs. 25 percent. Hispanic kids at charters similarly blew away their regular-school counterparts.
Yet de Blasio continues to resist charters: “I historically have not believed the answer is to increase the number of charter schools, and I still don’t,” he said last week. “The answer is to improve the schools we have.”
But he’s clearly not improving those schools. What will it take for him to give more kids — particularly minorities — a chance for a better education?