No kidding! A USA Today column on January 1, 2014 says New York City’s new mayor should wake up to the DRAMATIC performance in the city’s many charter schools.

What kinds of performance? Here are a few extracts from the column:

• Stanford’s Center for Research on Educational Outcomes (CREDO) revealed that in just one school year, the typical New York City charter school student gained about five additional months of learning in math and one additional month of learning in reading compared with students in traditional public schools.

Wait a minute! Isn’t that the same CREDO outfit that said in 2009 that charters were not doing so well? Yes, it is. That was then, this is now.

Furthermore, even if you look at Pages 31 and 32 that old CREDO report, it turns out that even back in 2009 kids that spent three years in charters did outperform traditional public school students (because even charter schools cannot perform miracles overnight). I sincerely hope we now have enough legislators who know this about the 2009 CREDO report that anyone who tries to bring up this old report as an excuse to avoid charter schools will quickly be discredited.

• What makes these results so impressive is that charter schools are not elite private schools. They are tuition-free public schools, funded by taxpayers and open to any student.

So, forget another excuse we hear that charters are somehow for elites. That is definitely not true in New York, and most other places that have charters, too.

• New York has roughly 70,000 students enrolled in public charter schools, and the numbers are on the rise. This school year alone, 14,000 new students in the city enrolled in charter schools ­ with the vast majority in low-income neighborhoods.

How can charters be bad when New York City parents flood them with applications? Whose agenda is served when Kentucky continues to deny Kentucky parents this public school choice?

• While just 30% of students citywide passed New York¹s new Common Core math exam, 97% of students passed the exam at Bronx Success Academy 2. The passage rate was 80% at Leadership Prep Ocean Hill in Brownsville, a community that has suffered academic failure for generations.

Wouldn’t that be a GREAT improvement for kids in Louisville’s chronically under-performing Academy at Shawnee high school, where only seven percent of the students – JUST SEVEN PERCENT – passed the new KPREP Algebra II End-of-Course exam?

It does not serve these Louisville students well to deny them the super advantages of charter schools that their counterparts in inner city New York now enjoy. Common, Kentucky, let’s get with this valuable program and do something for our kids, not adults, in our school system.