If you need further proof that charter schools provide better educational outcomes for kids, the New York Post reports new stats that let us compare a New York charter that is much-maligned by teacher union officials with the city’s public schools:  

It’s a tale of two school systems: All 53 students at Success Academy Bronx 2 aced this year’s state Algebra 1 exam, with top scores of 5 on the 1-5 scale. Only about 2% of kids in the regular District 9 public schools who take the test manage 5s, and half don’t even score a passing 3.

Citywide, only a third of regular public school eighth-graders took the Algebra 1 Regents last year; 82% passed with a minimum level 3 score. Meanwhile 99% of the 467 eight-graders at Success Academy schools scored 3 or better, with a majority getting 5s.

The success of the SA kids is proof positive that more disadvantaged kids deserve the option of a charter school experience. But state lawmakers won’t amend the law to let more charters open.

City Department of Education data suggest that many regular schools in poor, minority nabes are doing fine, with more than 90% of students in grades 6-8 passing their math and English Language Arts classes. But, as Susan Edelman reported in Sunday’s Post, less than 10% of kids in the same schools pass state math and ELA exams.

Teacher union head Randi Weingarten has always been a harsh critic of Success Academy.

By contrast, Ms. Weingarten made sympathetic remarks about Senator Kamala Harris’s resurrection of the busing as an issue during the last Democratic debate.

In a moment of incredible insensitivity, Weingarten said that former vice president Joe Biden’s loss of his son to cancer should have made him more sympathetic to Harris’s “hurt” that Biden had not supported federally-mandated school busing, when she was a child in Berkeley, California.

I wonder if we’re beginning to see the formation of two 2020 agendas on education: one that supports school choice, which puts parents in charge of their children’s education, and another one that resurrects the historically unpopular busing, which seemed to have been consigned to the dustbin of history before last week’s debates, and which would deprive parents of say in where their kids go to school.