De Blasio calls for spreading (some) charter school innovation

On the Brian Lehrer show this morning, Mayor Bill de Blasio repeated his call for charter schools to share the results of their experimentation with the rest of the system, while simultaneously cautioning that such sharing may be impossible.

De Blasio also called for greater charter-district school collaboration in a speech on Sunday. “The original notion of the charter movement was to innovate, to create laboratories for new and better ideas,” de Blasio said. “That’s a positive vision that we have to re-engage.”

Still, the mayor has said that he doesn’t believe that it’s possible to share many of the practices that come out of charter schools. In Monday’s interview, he called some experimentation “rarefied,” since charter schools can raise additional money through private fundraising. (Traditional public schools can also raise funds through parent associations, but their spending is more constrained.)

When pressed for an example of a policy that could be more widely adopted, de Blasio pointed to many charter schools’ extended learning time, which he called “one of the great positives of the charter movement.”