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Now that the New York Assembly has voted for doubling the numbers of charter schools, it seems like there is hope for the state to receive its federal grant sum of $700 million. 214 is the number at which that charter schools are to be capped in New York City, and at the moment there are about a 100. This vote is supposed to have come out after elaborate discussions among the senates, the governors and the assembly.

In the state of New York, there would be up to 460 charter schools allowed, which is a good 260 above the current number, 200. This should happen within the next four years, which means 60 charter schools per year is the rate at which it is meant to occur.

These charter schools that are financed publicly and run privately have been frowned upon by many assembly members and the speaker himself. Although earlier this month, a bill was passed by the senate to increase the numbers of charter schools, it had a lot fewer restrictions as compared to the one passed by the assembly.

It is now stipulated that any new charter school would be prohibited if it operates for profit. However, the ones that already exist would stay open. A lot of people have been quite enthusiastic about charter schools. One of them is the Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

The school chancellor Joel Klien and he together have made a number of charter schools shift to the traditional public school space, which obviously doesn’t go down too well with the parents of the students of the traditional schools, or with their teachers.

There was a bill  drafted back in January that stated that any charter school could move into a public school only if consent was granted by the parents of the traditional schools. But this particular bill was never brought to vote. Now, according to this latest bill, it follows that the schools make a building council for surveillance and space allocation. And the councils won’t be entitled to veto power over the chancellor.

Every improvement made that exceeds an amount of $5,000 to a charter school; it would mean that the same would need to be done for the school it is sharing its space with.

Although there are a lot of claims floating around in the air about how such reforms would absolutely end differences shared by the schools, over space among other possible issues, nobody really knows how this will end up. Such measures, if nothing, will surely encourage starting more and more charter schools.

Although it is clear now that the State’s board of regents either, or the State University of New York’s trustees will be authorizing the charter schools, nobody quite knows if Mr Klein, who has been authorizing charter schools in New york for quite many years, will now be able to do so.

This bill is arguably a “big step backward” as Mr. Murphy describes, and considering the fact that charter schools haven’t been enrolling a lot of struggling students, the only part that looks hopeful at the moment is that they are being made to enrol them and retain them, by the legislation.