Eric Adams delivers one win for charters but Albany outlook bleak

Yay! The Adams administration and the Department of Education finally made good on their vows to provide space for three new Success Academy elementary schools to open in the fall.

That’s a huge win for the hundreds of Queens and Bronx families who’d been on hold ever since United Federation of Teachers fearmongering killed plans to co-locate the new schools in half-empty DOE buildings alongside regular public schools.

But it leaves open the question of whether the DOE can manage to co-locate future charters, now that the UFT has 1) used its muscle in Albany to weaken the mayor’s power in the Panel for Education Policy, 2) mastered the art of fooling the PEP into thinking charters pose some threat to existing schools who share a building.

This last is particularly absurd: No charter co-location has ever led to the problems the UFT (and its politician allies) point to.

Anyway, there’s ample room, since DOE schools now enroll roughly 200,000 fewer kids than at their recent peak — and enrollment is set to keep declining.

The DOE got space for the three new Success schools by finding an empty public school building in Queens for two, and a recently closed Catholic school in The Bronx for the other.

Along with an already-OK’d school in Sheepshead Bay, this means four new Success elementary schools will open in August (the charter network begins its school year weeks before the DOE), the most in a single year since virulently anti-charter Mayor Bill de Blasio took office.

Mayor Eric Adams and Chancellor David Banks, by contrast, appreciate the incredible job charters do, nearly eliminating the racial “achievement gap” and even boosting the performance of nearby DOE schools.

The question is whether (and how hard) they’ll fight as the UFT wages a full-court press to crush the “competition,” even seeking to abort approved charters.

Voters, including blacks and Latinos, want more charters.

But the power of the UFT and its allies is on display again in Albany, where Gov. Kathy Hochul’s push to allow 100 or so new charters for the city seems dead in the water.

The only sign of compromise is that lawmakers might allow a dozen “zombie” charters (used for schools that later closed) to be revived.

If Hochul can’t at least get that much, she might as well hold up the budget (and legislators’ paychecks) until further notice.