Today's New York Post includes an op-ed article (here) by me discussing how quickly we are to reaching the statutory cap on the number of charter schools - one of them, anyway.

New York actually has two caps: one for the State University-approved charters, and the other for Regents-approved charters, which includes all those from school districts. So, the state limit of 200 charter schools (not counting district school conversions) consists of two caps of 100 each for SUNY and the Regents.

NYC Schools Chancellor, Joel Klein, has been approving about a dozen or more charter schools each year bringing us to the point of reaching the Regents cap by this January. SUNY still has 19 charters remaining to issue.

Thus, I write today in the Post that the new state Education Commissioner, Dr. David Steiner, spoke prematurely last week in saying there was plenty of room under the cap and therefore no need for the state legislature to rush toward lifting it.

Commissioner Steiner is a superb appointment to this position, as The Chalkboard has written. He has a genuinely reformist background, including extensive involvement with New York's charter schools as Dean of Hunter College's School of Education. With the enormous weight of statewide education policy now on his shoulders, the charter cap is esoteric enough to miss the actual count, especially when there is a myriad of ways to tabulate the number of charter schools. I felt it was important to clarify the charter cap issue today, and I hope that has been achieved.

New York is very fortunate to have this caliber of an education leader as commissioner, as both the charter and district public schools have an atypical leader rather than the conventional type that rises through the ranks. That will make things very interesting, indeed, which a good thing for New York's students.

Peter Murphy
for The Chalkboard