#Carl Heastie uses control of NY education policy for teachers unions

When we took the state Board of Regents to task last week for their needless refusal to allow four charters to open a joint high school, we should have been more clear in pointing at the true villain: Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie effectively controls the board and has shaped it to please the state’s teachers unions. And charters, which do a far better job than the regular public system of teaching mostly black and Hispanic kids, aren’t the only victim.

Technically, the Regents are chosen by both chambers of the Legislature sitting as a single committee of the whole. But for decades now that has left the Assembly speaker (who controls an absolute majority of the votes in such a committee) able to fill the board with his choices, who then name the head of the State Education Department as well. Thus, the state Constitution’s provision meant to de-politicize education policy actually puts it in the hands of a single politician — and so of the special interests he’s beholden to.

Heastie wouldn’t have become speaker in early 2015 without the assent of the New York State United Teachers and its city affiliate, the United Federation of Teachers, and ever since he has overwhelmingly hewed to the unions’ positions on adding more school funding, hiking taxes on high earners, opposing charters and fighting teacher-accountability measures.

Reading the political winds, Merryl Tisch — a champion of charter schools, teacher accountability and the Common Core curriculum standard — stepped down as chancellor of the Board of Regents in November 2015. Heastie replaced her and two other departing regents with educators certain to take the union line, including de facto support for the NYSUT-led “opt out” campaign against standardized testing to derail Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s drive to require serious teacher evaluations linked to those tests.

One year later, the Empire Center noted that Heastie’s $1 billion tax-hike proposal matched the agenda of advocacy groups allied with or financed by the teachers unions seeking a billion-dollar school-aid increase. Heastie and his Assembly Democrats also refused to join Senate Republicans in making more charter-school seats available by raising the cap.

In 2017, when Cuomo wanted to lift a freeze on charter-school funding, Heastie again sided with the teachers unions in opposition, calling it a $200 million “windfall” for charters — no matter that it would have benefited the mostly minority children attending those schools.

This June, after a Post poll showed that grassroots Democrats support school choice and favor lifting the charter cap, we called on Heastie and Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins to “stop appeasing the special interests” — the unions.

Before rising to the speakership, Heastie was a charter supporter; his reversal reminds us of a wise man’s observation, “An honest politician is one who stays bought” — in this case, at the expense of New York’s public-schoolchildren.