Clear, concise and to the point. Bob McManus takes the
measure of New York Mayor de Blasio’s approach to public education (via Maggie’sFarm). He does not merely find it lacking. He finds the mayor and his henchmen striving to destroy the last vestiges of educational opportunity in
New York City.
Then again, New York parents voted for de Blasio and for
other Democrats in very large numbers, so we will not feel too sorry for them.
Obviously, to anyone who is sensate, the goal of de Blasio
is diversity. Educational achievement does not concern them. Providing
educational opportunity to the brightest children does not worry them at all.
As long as the school system is more diverse.
Being imbeciles these educrats do not understand that the
drive to integrate the schools has sent nearly all white parents to the suburbs
or to the private school world. Apparently, a few holdouts have sent their
children to New York’s premier high schools… like Stuyvesant, Bronx Science and
Brooklyn Tech. Those schools are majority Asian… and we can’t have that.
McManus opens:
Mayor
Bill de Blasio’s school-integration task force just dropped its initial
report—a multilayer cake of mostly impenetrable social-justice jargon,
interspersed with a dangerous idea or two, and with a dismaying lack of
emphasis on the enduring value of teaching children to read, write, and do
numbers. In fact, the report represents a significant victory of show over
substance, establishing “diversity” as the principal goal of public education
in New York City while exiling accountability—teacher accountability, parent
accountability, student accountability—to the ash heap.
Strikingly, the task force has no interest in whether or not
children are being educated. By all indications-- see yesterday’s post Teaching
in New York City High Schools-- no one is being educated in these schools. And
yet, the task force is concerned about diversity. They simply do not care about
educating children. So they are taking aim at the better high schools, the ones
you enter by passing a rigorous examination:
Or, as
the report itself puts it at one point, “the use of exclusionary admissions
screens . . . which judge . . . kids on behavior, test scores, and other biased
metrics, is the biggest contributor to . . . segregation.” Get rid of “biased
metrics,” in other words, and— presto—the problem is solved. But good luck
educating children in an environment where behavior and other quantifiable
performance standards are deemed an objective impediment to progress.
To produce more diversity and to produce more people who
think that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is smart, the task force wants to dumb down
the best schools by eliminating objective performance standards:
With
some estimable exceptions, the city’s schools are at best mediocre, many are
abject failures, and most of the rest are teetering on the edge. But taking
direction from this report would move them in the wrong direction. To adopt as
official policy the elimination of objective performance standards, as
Gonzales counsels and the report ratifies, would bring an end to formal teacher
evaluations. It would eliminate all the other benchmarks that parents,
taxpayers, and the general public traditionally use to hold officials
accountable for schools that don’t educate.
So, the children lose out. Who wins? The usual suspects:
In this
sense, the report represents a significant victory for the United Federation of
Teachers, education bureaucrats in New York City and Albany, and the money-now,
results-later coalition that has been dictating public-education policy in the
Empire State for decades. At the same time, it’s a big win for the racialists and other social-justice disrupters intent
on dismantling the city’s internationally famous selective-admissions high
schools and the various programs meant to give high-performing pupils a leg up
in the lower grades.
If Amazon had built a headquarters in Long Island City, the
products of New York City’s public school system would never have been able to
compete for the good jobs on offer. As happens with many other cities in
America, New York is becoming divided between the rich and the rest.
There are so many "biased metrics"! Abortion rates (at least the eugenicists are happy, so that metric is memoryholed), achievement scores, graduation rates, incarceration rates, murder rates, literacy, numeracy, marriage rates, credit ratings, welfare, divorce rates, obesity, employment, bankruptcy ...
ReplyDeleteHarrison Bergeron, call your office. Your new chains are ready for final fitting.
Diversity: One more way to dumb-down education. NYC voters are "down with that".
ReplyDelete