By Richard Whitmire
New York Daily News — Today’s embarrassing reversal by Chancellor Carmen Fariña reveals the key misstep made by Fariña and Mayor de Blasio as they drew up their promised assault on charter schools. Their four-point criteria for evaluating charter school expansion lacked a fifth: school quality.
In hindsight, the mayor could have gotten away with blocking several thousand charter expansion seats while winning applause from his many anti-charter supporters. Instead, he and his chancellor botched it by overlooking quality and triggering the expulsion of 194 low-income, high-poverty kids who were killing it on the new, rigorous state exams.