StudentsFirstNY decries Mayor Bill de Blasio and Chancellor Carmen Farina’s “happy talk,” “smiling press conferences,” and “flowery rhetoric” about the state of the New York City’s public school system, particularly 100 schools that are part of the Mayor’s Community and Renewal schools program:

[T]he shocking reality is that 9 out of 10 students at these schools are not being taught to read or do math at grade level — even lower than other failing schools. Among schools with grades 3–8, every one of the 63 Renewal Schools and 98 percent of Community Schools had more than 75 percent of students failing exams. These are the Mayor’s signature turnaround programs and they are performing even worse than the failing schools he’s not focused on.

Instead, the school equity organization writes, the Mayor should take his focus off “initiatives that don’t rock the boat with his friends in the teachers’ union” and examine the child-centered benefits of “radical change,” with “specific focus on evidence-based solutions, such as improving teacher quality and expanding school choice.”